‘Miss Lavinia hasn’t stirred all evening, miss. I’ve never known her so quiet or so little trouble,’ the maid admitted sheepishly.
‘You might as well go to bed now, Mary. If Miss Lavinia was going to take a chill, we would know by now and no doubt you’ll hear if she wakes up and needs you in the night,’ Nell told the maid with a nod at the truckle bed already set up in the narrow little room for her to sleep in and still be close if Lavinia needed her.
‘Thank you, miss,’ the young maid said dutifully.
Nell wondered why nobody found it odd Mary was Lavinia’s age and yet a maid had to be far more sensible and self-disciplined than the girl she was employed to wait on. ‘This isn’t a fair world,’ she murmured when she shut the door on her responsibilities for the night. ‘You ought to know that by now.’
She was only three and twenty herself and had taken responsibility for four young girls when she was barely of age. Looking back, she wondered why Mr Poulson picked her from the list of mature and experienced applicants for this job and decided it could only be because she wasn’t either of those things. Add Miss Thibett’s hard-won praise for Nell’s five years spent as a pupil teacher at her school and she supposed Mr Poulson thought she would understand her charges better and perhaps grow up with them. She recalled her giddy, schoolgirlish rush of excitement when she’d met Mr Moss’s deceptive blue eyes for the first time tonight and wondered if it might not be better if she knew a little more about men and their odd quirks and unlikely preoccupations.
Nell had grown up apart from her brother and she wondered why aristocratic gentlemen were so harsh with dependent children as she recalled the servants’ gossip about how little time the last Earl of Barberry had for his female grandchildren. Her uncle certainly didn’t have any for her. Parting her and Colm when her brother was old enough to be sent to school at eight years old was cruel. The more she pleaded with her uncle for one holiday a year or even Christmas together, the less he was inclined to grant them even a day. The memory of being desperately lonely in her late uncle’s house made her shudder even now. She’d cried herself to sleep for months after Colm had gone away and memories of how it felt to be alone and unwanted in an echoing house was one reason she’d agreed to apply for this job when Miss Thibett suggested she should. The thought of four lonely and abandoned girls got her here when Mr Poulson chose her for the post of their governess and memories of being unwanted by her own family made her grit her teeth and stay, although she wanted to run as far and as fast as her legs would carry her as soon as she met Lavinia’s hostile glare and realised the younger Selford cousins took their cue from her and had very good glares of their own.
Was she sorry she had stayed now? It had taken months of patience to wear their hostility down, but she truly wanted the best for them. She recalled the feel of poor Lavinia sobbing in her arms and letting out so much pent-up unhappiness and at least she understood her a little better now. If she didn’t have responsibility for these lonely girls she might have agreed to join Colm and Eve for the coming Season in London, though. Maybe there she would have found a gentleman quiet and steady enough to marry and make the family she’d always longed for with. Oddly enough an image of Moss interrupted her daydream and mocked her with a cynical smile. He might be right, if he was actually here and knew what went on in her head, because by the side of him her paragon did sound dreadfully dull.
With thoughts like that jostling about in her head wasn’t it just as well she wasn’t about to join the polite world as Miss Hancourt, heiress and elderly debutante? She stared into a mirror softly lit by the candle in the nightstick. Imagining what the so-called polite world would say about her behind her back made her shiver. They would laugh and call her a quiz, she decided, and glared into her looking glass as if they were already on the other side being airily amused by her.
Her father was wild Lord Chris Hancourt, lover of the most notorious woman of her generation and her partner in reckless death when they’d raced to a party in a land at war with Britain. What would Moss make of her shady history if the truth came out? Never mind him, the Earl of Barberry would dismiss her, heiress or not. The mud that stuck to her father’s name would finish his daughter’s career as guide and mentor to young girls. She hated the thought of all the snide whispers that would do the rounds wherever she went if she did as her family wanted her to and tried to ignore them for a Season.
In a decade or so, when Penny was old enough to be presented as the last of the beautiful Selford orphans, it might be time to consider what she would do with the rest of her life, but until then she had a job to do. Nell unpinned her flimsy cap, managed to unlace her dull blue gown without the aid of a maid and sat at the dressing table to unpin her hair and brush it the vast number of times Miss Thibett had always insisted on to transform it into a shining, silken mass that fell heavily about her shoulders and reached as far as her waist.
Was this the true Nell at the heart of Miss Court’s dreary plumage? The girl looking back at her seemed far too young to be the guide and protector of four vulnerable young ladies. She looked too uncertain to resist the charm and experience of a gentleman who wasn’t anywhere near as humble as the third son of a country squire ought to be. Her brown eyes were soft and dreamy as she stopped brushing and felt the silky thickness of those tawny waves tumbling around her like a shining cape. Her workaday locks felt sensuous and heavy and a little bit wicked against her shift, as if a lover might loom out of the soft shadows of this familiar room and run his hand over the silken ripple of it at any moment, then whisper impossible things in her eagerly listening ears.
Nell shivered, but it wasn’t from cold; the hand she pictured adoring and weaving a sensuous path through her thick pelt of shining hair to find the woman underneath was firm and muscular, but gentle and a little bit reverent. The owner of that hand was intent on her, his blue eyes hot as he watched the way her creamy skin looked through fine lawn and a veil of glossy golden-brown hair that didn’t feel ordinary any more. As she went breathless with anticipation his touch would get firmer and his gaze even more intent and wickedly sure she was ready for more.
No, here she sat, shivering with hot nerves and anticipation—like the caricature of a frustrated, dried-up spinster governess, longing for a lover in every personable man she met and never finding one to watch her with heat-hazed eyes as he stepped into her dreams and took them over. Nell snapped her eyes shut, squeezing her eyelids so tight it almost hurt. Then she took up her comb to part her heavy locks, ready to make plaits for the night ahead and forget imaginary lovers of any sort. She swiftly wound it into two thick tails of hair without looking at herself in the mirror, her fingers deft and driven to tighten the silky mass as her thoughts raced. Argh, but that hurt. She couldn’t sleep with hair that pulled at her scalp like a harsh saint’s scourge for sinful thoughts. She must begin again and pay attention to what her fingers were up to this time. That was it, her hair was tied easily enough for sleep and just tight enough to remind her to sin no more, even in her dreams.
Now for her formidably proper nightgown. Plain and buttoned sternly to the neck, made up from warm and practical flannel, it was a garment without a hint of sensuality. Let anyone find a hint of seductress in such a respectable get-up and she’d shout her true identity from the rooftops. She gave herself a severe nod, knelt to say her prayers and begged to be delivered from such silly fantasies, then got into bed. Staring into the night, she ordered herself not to dream of dark-haired, piratical gentlemen who could raise such silly fantasies in a spinster’s heart without even trying as she snuffed her candle and hoped for quiet sleep against the odds.
* * *
In a faded corner of the great city of London another member of the nobility was finding it impossible to sleep. ‘Thought I’d never get away from the jackals, Lexie,’ Lord Derneley told his wife as he settled into a grim corner of a wine cellar in this rotten old house on the Strand with a sigh of relief. It might not be much for a man born to splendour and great wealth, but at least it wasn’t the Fleet Prison.
‘So did I, my love,’ she whispered back, as if their creditors might manage to hear them even down here if she wasn’t very careful. ‘Lucky for us that my Aunt Horseforth is such a misery nobody will believe you’re here. I think she expects me to