Nell felt sorry for Lavinia when even little Penny glared at her for upsetting the most vulnerable of the cousins and all three looked as if they’d be glad if Lavinia disappeared in a puff of smoke.
‘Georgiana, that’s an inexcusable thing to say. You will stand in the corner until I say you can come out. Lavinia; apologise to your cousin, then copy out the One Hundredth Psalm twice in a fair hand. Maybe that will make you humbler about your own shortcomings and a little kinder to others, but your guardian will be displeased to hear you refuse to make any effort at your lessons and fall out with your cousins.’
‘He doesn’t give a snap of his fingers for any of us and I hate this place and all of you as well. You’re always such good little girls for your darling Miss Court and she’s only a servant when all’s said and done. You make me sick. I hate you all, but I hate Cousin Barberry most. Why should I care what he thinks? I doubt he remembers we exist,’ Lavinia railed at the top of her voice, stamped her feet as if words couldn’t express her anger, then ran out of the room on a furious sob. Nell listened to the sound of her charge thundering downstairs and the garden door slamming with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that her day was about to get even worse.
‘I hope she took a shawl,’ Caroline said with a sympathetic shiver.
‘And I hope she didn’t,’ nine-year-old Penny argued vengefully.
Georgiana flounced to the corner she’d been ordered into with a sniff and a contemptuous glower and Nell tried to do what came next instead of feeling defeated.
‘Georgiana, stay there for ten minutes without saying a word or pulling faces at Caroline and Penelope. I shall ask Crombie to sit with you. Caroline and Penelope, you can read quietly, but you will not tease Georgiana or speculate about Lavinia. As soon as the ten minutes are up you may read as well, Georgiana,’ she told her charges as calmly as she could.
Seeing how impatient Penny’s one-time nurse was about being fetched away from her comfortable coze with the housekeeper, Nell knew they wouldn’t be allowed to riot in her absence. Now she only had to worry about organising a search for Lavinia with the daylight already fading. She gave orders for all the available staff to comb the gardens and parkland, then went outside to search her own section of the shadowy gardens.
* * *
Fergus Selford, Earl of Barberry, rode into the stableyard of Berry Brampton House for the first time in his life and found it strangely deserted. He hadn’t expected a fanfare on the arrival of an errant earl nobody knew was coming. Or much of a welcome even if they did, but it felt a bit of come down to stable his own horse. He owned the dratted place from cellar to rafters, yet he’d settled the tired animal in a convenient stall and retrieved his unfashionable boat cloak from the tack room before he met a single soul.
‘We’re not expecting visitors, so if you’re the new land agent you couldn’t have arrived at a better time, although you’re three weeks late and we had almost given up on you,’ a rather pleasant contralto voice told him from the shadowy doorway. ‘I saw the lamp and heard someone moving about in here as if he had a right to be here. All the stable boys are supposed to be out looking for one of my charges so I came to see if one of them was shirking. Now you’re here we need all the help we can get before Lavinia hurts herself or one of us falls into the ha-ha. You can help me search, since you’ll get lost if you wander about on your own and we’ll have to find you as well.’
‘If you’ve managed to mislay one of the Selford girls that’s your problem,’ Fergus told her gruffly, blaming his shabby cloak for her mistake. He was almost inclined to tell her who he was and that he employed her to take care of his wards, so why should he bother himself with a search for one of them when he was weary and uncomfortable and didn’t want to be here in the first place?
‘It’ll be yours if the Earl finds out we couldn’t keep one of his wards safe because you refused to help.’
‘Is she mad or just simple? It has to be one or the other since you believe she’ll do herself a mischief in his lordship’s private grounds.’
‘Miss Selford is a bright and spirited young girl who has trouble keeping her temper in check. A trait I sympathise with at this very moment,’ the governess said through what sounded like clenched teeth.
Now why was arguing with her in the semi-darkness more stimulating than flirting with sophisticated beauties? He heard her take a deep breath and she seemed to call on the reserves of patience his wards hadn’t already tested to the limit. Reminding himself he was here to do his duty, not amuse himself at the governess’s expense, he ordered himself to stop provoking her and get on with it.
‘Never mind, we’ll find her without your help and I suppose you wouldn’t be much use anyway,’ she said haughtily. ‘If you can exert yourself long enough to cross the yard and find Cook, I expect she will feed you, then direct you to your quarters. I wish you joy of the land steward’s house, by the way. You should have told us you were coming—since you are so tardy we had given up on you and abandoned the attempt to make it more welcoming.’ Even in the gloom he could see the glare the Amazon shot him before she turned to march back the way she came.
‘Stop,’ he ordered and she turned as slowly as an offended queen. He wanted to kiss the temper off her lips for a shocking moment. She would slap him and quite right, too, and he hadn’t come here to prove that every hard word his late grandfather had said about him had turned out to be true.
‘No, I’m busy,’ she said and strode towards a path he could only just see in the fast fading light.
‘Two pairs of eyes and ears will be better than one in this gloom,’ he said as he caught up with her, bowed ironically and indicated she carry on leading the way. ‘You know where you’re going,’ he explained, beginning to enjoy himself now he had such a prickly lady to annoy and this new disguise to settle into.
He told himself he wouldn’t have thought of such an impersonation until she thrust it on him, but not announcing who he was to a household he never wanted to inherit in the first place was too tempting to turn his back on. As a ruse for finding out what was going on without putting the entire neighbourhood on alert that the new Earl was home at last it could hardly be bettered. Pretending to be the land steward would save him the huge effort of being the sixth Earl of Barberry and he could spy out the land, then decide if he could endure being here. Perhaps it was as well the Moss boy, who he’d lined up to act as land steward, had backed out of this post for an easier one since his lack of backbone had forced Fergus to come here, but taking up his inheritance in the teeth of the late Earl’s bitter opposition still rasped his pride somehow.
Everything the Selfords had worked so hard to keep from a whore’s son, as they so charmingly called him, was his, but it felt like a hollow victory. After living on his own terms in Canada for almost a decade the rules of a polite little English society felt petty. As a heedless and rather angry young man he had been determined to defy his grandfather and all those who made his time at Eton and Oxford a mixed blessing. There was always some aristocratic sprig ready to deride him as grandson of Lord Barberry on one side and an Irish gypsy on the other. None of them would believe he never really wanted the titles and lands hanging around his neck like a millstone, so he’d left the country when the old Earl was barely cold in his grave. There were so many things he could do elsewhere, so many adventures to have, but he’d been doing his best to ignore the voice of his conscience and his mother’s pleas to come home ever since he’d fallen in love with the vastness and promise of the so-called New World. Another thing he could blame being Earl of Barberry for, having to leave a place he could have made his home if not for all the responsibilities he’d been so intent on running away from ten years ago.
Still, as Moss he could learn what he wanted to know, then go away again if he chose to and nobody here would even know he’d been. He ought to thank the woman striding along the path ahead of him as he stumbled in her wake like a rowing boat chasing a stately galleon.