The Governess (Ladies of Miss Bell's Finishing School Book 1) Read online

  The Governess

  Elizabeth Johns

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Preview The Heiress

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth Johns

  The Governess

  Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Johns

  Cover Design by La Voisin Art

  Edited by Heather King

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, copied, or transmitted without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Prologue

  Bath, England 1814

  Adelaide stood in the entrance hall of Miss Bell’s Finishing School for Young Ladies, feeling a similar trepidation as she had four years ago when she had first set foot inside. Then, she had worried about being accepted as an orphaned poor relation who had been sent to school to be out of the way. Now, her friends were off to partake in the London Season and she was to take her first post as a governess.

  She pulled on her faded blue merino pelisse and turned slowly in the round, domed room, trying to take in everything about this place that had come to feel like home. Inhaling the scent of the lilies which sat in a vase near the door, she took her bonnet down from its hook.

  “Where are you going?”

  Adelaide turned towards the voice of Caroline, one of her four closest friends and room-mates.

  “I thought to take one more walk,” she answered softly, trying to hide the emotion building inside her as she tied the ribbons of her old poke bonnet under her chin.

  “Alone?” Caroline questioned.

  Adelaide lifted one shoulder. “It no longer matters. Tomorrow my reputation will be of little consequence.”

  “Why will you not accept my sponsor’s offer and come to London with me?” Caroline took Adelaide’s hand as she pleaded.

  “Caro, we have discussed this. It is a most gracious offer, but I see no point in prolonging the inevitable. I would—could—be nothing more than your shadow.”

  “You would not!” she protested. “There is a gentleman out there who will care nothing for your reduced circumstances.”

  “You are a dear for saying so, but you know I speak the truth.” Adelaide shook her head as footsteps sounded on the stairs.

  “What is going on?” Jo asked as she and Penelope joined them in the entrance hall.

  “Adelaide is going for a walk alone,” Caroline announced with disapproval.

  “No she is not. We will all go,” Jo said decisively.

  “Are you still trying to convince her to go to London?” Penelope asked.

  Adelaide sighed. This conversation had been repeated every day for the past month, since she had announced she had taken a position in Yorkshire. She waited while her friends donned their cloaks and bonnets and they walked out onto Great Pulteney Street. Automatically, they headed along the street towards Sydney Gardens, where, for the past four years, they had walked every day it had not rained.

  “I think it is time we accept the inevitable, girls.”

  “Perhaps your employer will be handsome and want to marry you,” Penelope said in her typically pragmatic way.

  “Do not be ridiculous, Pen. He no doubt has a wife who would object.”

  “It could happen.” She defended her suggestion as the other girls shook their heads.

  “I will keep an eye out for a rich gentleman who will care not if you have no dowry,” Jo said practically.

  “And I will try to find a husband who has a home in Yorkshire,” Caro insisted earnestly.

  “I cannot think of a husband.” Adelaide interrupted their fantasies as they reached their favourite spot within the labyrinth. She stopped and turned to face her dearest friends. “And if I did happen to receive an offer, I could not marry for mercenary reasons.”

  “You would rather be a governess?” Caroline asked with astonishment.

  “I am no Charlotte Lucas.” All the girls shuddered at the thought of the hideous Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, one of the books they had read over and over together through their years at school. “It is universally acknowledged amongst us that anything is better than marrying out of desperation.”

  “Of course it is!” they insisted.

  “Yet Mr. Darcy is fictional.”

  “Adelaide!” Caro exclaimed as though she had spoken heresy.

  “I do not begrudge you for going to London,” Adelaide continued. “I am mostly sad because everything will change. You will all marry and move to various parts of England.”

  Caroline burst into tears as Adelaide struggled to contain her own desire to sob uncontrollably. It felt as though everyone else was moving on with their futures and she would be stuck in a never-ending cycle of being an upstairs servant.

  “This was not supposed to happen, Addy,” Jo said, dabbing her nose with a handkerchief.

  “We were all supposed to go to London together and marry for love!” Caroline insisted.

  Jo nudged Caroline with her elbow. “Those were silly promises we made to each other when we were children.”

  “I want you to keep those promises...for me. There is no reason you should all suffer.”

  “It does not seem fair,” Caroline protested.

  “If I know you have found happiness, it will make my circumstances more bearable. Then I may come to be governess to your children,” she added dryly.

  “Oh, Addy!” Caro exclaimed. “You must not say such things!”

  “Whyever not? I am counting on it. Now, let us not be sad. It is the last night we will all be together.”

  “For now,” Jo corrected, though Adelaide knew better than to hope.

  Chapter 1

  Adelaide vowed she would not cry over what she could not change, so she tried not to think of what she was leaving behind as the horses’ hooves clopped against the stones. Waving a last farewell to her friends from the school, she settled in to the plush blue velvet squabs, feeling strangely alone. It would be several long days in the carriage, peaceful time she would cherish.

  “Probably the last hours of peace I shall ever have,” she mused as she watched the town of Bath and its familiar golden stone pass by until the buildings faded into hedges and countryside. Spring was finally emerging, trees were budding, and daffodils and wild flowers could be seen in patches dotting the meadows as they drove by.

  Once the scenery became monotonous, she pulled out Edgeworth’s Belinda to pass the hours, but felt nauseous from trying to read while moving. A book on courtship and marriage was hardly appealing to one whom was walking away from any such opportunity in the future. As though she had a choice, she reflected with a sigh. Could she have made a match, had she gone with Caroline to London? Doubts assailed her as the carriage took her farther away from Bath. Laying the book aside, she was determined to be positive about her future life, even though realism would not cease.

>   “I shall not be a crotchety old governess,” she vowed. “There will be joy in my life and that of my charges.”

  In reality, she knew very little about her employers. She had given her requirements to the agency and they had found her this post. For one, they were being most generous towards her. She had expected to travel by the stage, and yet, they had sent their own carriage for her. It had been some time since she had been in a carriage, and never one this well appointed, not even her aunt Hogg’s.

  Several images of what her future home would be like had played through her mind—much though she tried to avoid predisposing her judgements upon people she had never met. Even she had to admit to herself that she was fearful of a disgusting old pig of a master who would try to take advantage of her lowered status. One did not live amongst silly young girls without hearing rumours of every sort.

  Most would dream of a handsome young duke who happened to be pining away at his country house until his beautiful governess arrived to show him the error of his single ways.

  Laughing aloud at the idiocy of the idea, she muttered to herself, “Clearly he will be neither young nor single since he has children. Well, I suppose he could be a widower and his wife died very young. No, they would have a nurse not a governess, so that is not a possibility.”

  “The most likely situation is an average country house, with a insipidly normal husband and wife, with plain, boring children. Therefore, I am destined to have a very plain life…but a joyful one,” she reminded herself with every bit of the sarcasm she felt. She could only pray that the man and woman would be congenial and leave her to her own devices.

  “Start as you mean to go on,” Miss Bell had advised. Unfortunately for that maxim, she was crossing into an unknown divide from which she could not return.

  “Enough of that,” she chided, and again determined to think of something else. Besides her future and thinking of what her friends were going to be doing in London without her, her thoughts could only go straight to her brother, away on the Peninsula fighting Napoleon. Having written her new direction to him, she could only hope that he received some of her letters. Faithfully, she wrote to him each week but she had yet to receive a letter from him that year. There had been no news of his death and she refused to give up hope. It had been so long since she had seen Philip—not since their parent’s deaths, in fact. He had been little more than a boy when he left to join the army, and she had been sent to Miss Bell’s school. What would Philip be like when he returned? If only she knew he was unharmed! She shook her head. There was no safe place for her thoughts at the moment. It was going to be a very long, lonely week in the carriage, despite travelling with every comfort.

  When the carriage at last pulled through the gates of her new residence—she could not bring herself to think of it as home—she was relieved by the beauty surrounding her. She watched out of the window, waiting for her first glimpse of the house. They climbed up and down through some green, pasture-covered hills, then through a wooded park, so it was half an hour before the house came into view. The grounds were extensive, indicating great wealth on the part of her new patrons. Having been in a boarding house in Bath, she longed to explore every inch of this estate.

  “Please let my charges not be lazy sloths,” she prayed. “Well, if they are, we will have to change that. It should be simple enough,” she said decidedly. If she did not find herself free of this conveyance soon, she knew she would lose her mind. Every inch of her ached to move about and she was uncertain whether or not her joints would be locked in place.

  At last, the house came into sight. It was a large Elizabethan manor, its orange brick bright with the sun’s afternoon rays upon it. It was almost eerie, but she refused to be intimidated. Fanciful towers seemed to watch their approach. The outline of the roof was elaborate, decorating a large, square house with matching oriel windows flanking either side of the entrance.

  No one greeted them as the carriage pulled to a halt in front of the grand edifice. She wondered if they might be expecting her at the servant’s entrance. No, her circumstances might be reduced, but she was still a lady. Start as you mean to go on. The footman opened the door for her and she gratefully alighted and tried not to stretch her limbs ungracefully. She did stretch her neck heavenward, and took note of her surroundings, but no one else appeared. It was too quiet.

  Walking forward with a sense of impending doom, her footsteps crunched loudly on the gravel in the silent forecourt. She dropped the knocker on the massive wooden door. There was no answer, so she rapped again with a bit more force. A few minutes passed, and by this time, the footman and driver were standing immobile, watching her.

  Adelaide turned to face them. “Are you quite certain we are at the right place?”

  “Yes, miss. This is my master’s country estate,” the driver reassured her.

  “Should we try the servant’s entrance?”

  “I suppose no harm could come from it,” the driver said, though the footman looked wary. Adelaide refused to climb back into the landau, and chose the footpath around the house. When they arrived and climbed the steps to the door, it was open but there was no one inside.

  There was a delicious-smelling soup in a kettle over a fire, and Adelaide stopped fretting. “Someone shall turn up soon. They would not have left a fire going if they had abandoned the house,” she pronounced.

  “True enough, miss. We will bring your trunks in and Mrs. Allen should be able to tell us which room is yours.”

  “Very good. Where is she to be found?”

  Someone must have seen them arrive, for at that moment a groom burst into the kitchen, announcing breathlessly, “Master Freddy and Master Harry have gone missing! They were nowhere to be found in the house, so everyone has set out scouring the grounds trying ter find them afore nightfall. The moors are a dangerous place to be in the daylight and if they fall into the quicksand…” He let his words trail off. Even Adelaide had heard of how dangerous the moors could be.

  “Can I help?” she asked, unsure of what to do next.

  “No, miss. I think you should stay here in case the boys return. They are always kicking up a lark, and this may be their idea of one. Nurse is too old to be chasing after two unruly lads.”

  Boys? Yes, she supposed he had said Master Freddy and Master Harry. Why in Heaven’s name was she here? Boys needed tutors, not governesses. Adelaide sighed deeply. This would not be a suitable post for her after all.

  Untying her bonnet and pelisse, she began to wander through the halls of the house. It was well cared for with modern furnishings, yet it felt hollow and uninviting—much like her aunt’s house had felt.

  She walked through the great hall, the heels of her sturdy, practical half-boots echoing with each step on the parquet floor. There were two large fireplaces, one at either end, and giant animal heads flanked the adjacent walls which were lined with spears and swords. It felt medieval. Not wanting to stay in a room where she was being watched, she moved on to a door and peeked inside to discover the dining room. Her stomach gave a small rumble, reminding her that she had not yet had her supper, but she was not inclined to help herself from the larder either. She could envision the sight—plum jelly dripping down her chin as all the residents of Harlton Park returned. What an introduction that would be! She giggled a little nervously as she closed the door to the dining room and went on to the next.

  A whiff of leather and books greeted her as she entered the library and, even though the room seemed as large as Miss Bell’s school, this was the most likely place for her to feel comfortable. She knew where she would take her respite if she ever found any—and were she permitted. There had to be thousands of books lining each wall. She fingered the spines lovingly as she made her way around the room, staring upwards at a balcony which contained even more leather-bound volumes.

  It was here she found a small door, probably for the servants, yet she could not help but investigate. Immediately, her nose was met by the scents of
tobacco and musk. This must be the master’s domain, she thought. Adelaide knew she should turn and walk back out, but it was the first sign of inhabitance and she felt drawn to know more about who owned this unwelcoming fortress.

  It was a masculine room, she could see, though the light was beginning to fade. It was cosy with dark mahogany panelling, an imposing wooden desk, and some comfortable chairs flanking the fireplace. Her gaze went past a portrait over the mantel and immediately was drawn back.

  “Is this the master?” she questioned aloud as she stared. There was a presence about this man she could not quite explain. Her heart began to speed up as though she had never seen a handsome man before. Perhaps the artist had taken liberties, but even so she did not think the subject could be ugly. Tawny hazel eyes stared down at her from a face possessed of a fine jaw and framed with honey locks. The longer she stared the more his eyes seemed to cast an arrogant, knowing look at her. Her gaze swept downward, knowing the figure would be equally fine to match the face. He wore riding dress with Hessian boots displaying an elegant, yet athletic form. A beautiful bay horse stood to his side—a perfect specimen to match his master.

  Adelaide was startled by a noise and her heart thumped inside her chest as though she had been caught trespassing like a naughty schoolgirl. She hurried from the room and out into the entrance hall, where an angry servant was holding two young, mud-drenched urchins up by their collars. Soon, what Adelaide surmised were the rest of the household servants came pouring in behind. Adelaide at once shut her jaw, which she was certain was gaping.