An Unexpected Pleasure

by Candace Camp

  “Don’t be absurd,” Reed responded. “I am certain that neither of our parents has ever urged you to marry and produce heirs.”

  “No, of course not. I suspect that Father completely forgets about being a duke for months at a time. And Mother is somewhat embarrassed about it. But it seems that every other outlying relative reminds me of my ‘duty’ to my name every time I see them. Especially Great-aunt Hermione.” Theo grimaced. Society generally regarded it as the eldest son’s duty to ensure the succession of the family title and estate. It would at least reduce some of the expectation if he could point out that his brother had produced a son.

  “No doubt.” His brother chuckled. “Our great-aunt, Lady Rochester,” he explained in an aside to his wife, “is the terror of the family. I can only hope that you will not have to meet her.”

  “Ha! No one could get that lucky twice in a lifetime,” Theo stuck in. “You used up your share of luck when she was snowed in in Yorkshire and couldn’t attend your wedding.”

  “One of the primary reasons for getting married in the winter,” Reed replied.

  Theo just smiled, well aware that it had not been concern for marrying without relatives that had prompted their wedding in December, but simply the couple’s eagerness to be together after the years that they had been separated.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the smaller, more intimate dining room where the family generally took their breakfasts.

  “Theo…” Anna began, and there was something about the tone of her voice that made both Theo and Reed turn to look at her. “There was one other thing that I felt about Miss Henderson…”

  “What?” Theo’s gaze sharpened. “About danger?”

  “No. About you. I had the impression that whatever the turmoil or danger around her is—that she will bring it to you.” Anna’s eyes fixed on his gravely. “Theo, I felt, I sensed…that she wants to harm you.”

  CHAPTER 6

  It did not take the twins long to lay out their schedule. Like Megan, they wanted to get through first with their least-liked subjects, so the reviled Latin and Greek led off their day, followed by something enjoyable—history—some easier but boring subjects such as grammar and spelling, then literature and math, and they ended the day with their favorite, science.

  Megan looked over the proposed schedule. “You’ve left no time for lunch or a snack,” she pointed out.

  “Snack?” the boys repeated.

  “Yes, you know—some milk and cookies or something. To take a little rest and get some energy. And outside time. You will need some time to go outside and play. Else you’ll get restless.”

  “Outside? Play?” Now the twins were goggling at her. They glanced at each other, grins slowly spreading across their faces.

  “Wizard!” Con exclaimed, and Megan began to think she could quickly tire of that expression.

  “Do you mean it?” Alex added.

  “Of course.”

  Megan felt on fairly firm ground here. She had done an article a few years back about an experimental educational program that had been started by a group in Massachusetts. The founders of the group had emphasized the value of allowing youngsters a break during the day in which they could burn off their youthful energy; it had been their contention that healthful exercise would also recharge the students’ mental faculties. It had sounded wonderful to Megan, who had always suffered through the last part of the school day, longing to get outside and run, and she suspected that the duchess, with her unusual and forward-thinking views, would be willing to try an experimental program in education, as well.

  Plus, she did not want to be stuck in the nursery for the entire day. She needed to move through the house, to become familiar with the layout of it and determine what areas she should explore further. She would be able to walk around a bit while the twins were out playing.

  “You are the best tutor we ever had,” Alex assured her solemnly.

  She smiled. “I hope that means you won’t put frogs in my bed or anything of that sort.”

  “We wouldn’t do that,” Con protested, adding tellingly, “not to you, miss.”

  Megan could not keep from chuckling. “But you have done it to others, I’ll warrant.”

  Another look passed between the twins.

  “That’s all right,” Megan told them. “You needn’t reveal your secrets. Probably better if I don’t know, actually. Now, let’s put in thirty minutes for luncheon here, after spelling and grammar. And play—shall we call it exercise time? That sounds better, doesn’t it?”

  She quickly inserted the additions into the schedule. “There we go. So…” Megan’s stomach tightened at the thought of facing the actual teaching. “I suppose I should see where you are in Latin and Greek. Um, where are your books?”

  The twins pulled out their texts and composition books, and opened them. “Here is where we stopped with Mr. Fullmer,” Con pointed out with a sigh.

  “Good. Well…” Megan looked at the pages of Greek. She understood not a word of it. “The best thing, no doubt, would be to start reading where you left off. And are there exercises to do?”

  “Yes. At the end of the reading.”

  “Very well. Read these pages, and then do the questions at the end.” She had no idea how she would check their answers, she reflected, but she would deal with that problem when she came to it. “Why don’t you do that after we do the Latin?”

  She picked up the Latin text and flipped through it. At least she recognized some of the words, but since it had been almost ten years since she had studied it, her grasp of the language was severely lacking.

  “Fullmer had us write out translations of what we read.”

  “How dreadfully dull,” Megan commented before she thought. She caught herself at Alex’s laugh. “That is—I mean—well, why don’t you try reading it aloud?”

  She realized her mistake as soon as she said it. If one of the boys didn’t know a word, she would probably not be able to provide the answer. She could not take it back now, however. The twins obviously found this a less onerous burden than copying out the translation, and they grabbed their texts and started in on a letter from Pliny the Elder, Alex beginning.

  Megan propped her head on her hand and listened. His reading brought back memories of afternoons in the convent school, listening to one of the other girls stumble through some translation while Megan had tried not to doze off, motivated to stay awake by sight of the ruler in Sister Mary Teresa’s hands. She had, Megan realized now, forgotten how boring Pliny the Elder was.

  Twenty minutes later, as she found herself nodding off, she stood up, stifling a yawn, and told the twins that it was time to move on to their Greek exercises.

  The rest of the day was gotten through in much the same manner—asking the twins where they had left off in their studies, then setting them to work onward from there. She was on safe enough ground in spelling, grammar and literature, as those had always been her best fields, and she knew enough to get by in history, she thought, by reading ahead of her students a little. Math might be almost as severe a trial as Greek, she feared, but fortunately the twins both seemed to excel at the subject and asked no questions as they went about their exercises.

  Her greatest good fortune was Thisbe’s offer to teach the twins in science, for she quickly found out the first afternoon that the twins knew far more than she about plants, animals, the stars, chemical reactions and such. They were filled with glee when Megan told them that she was going to hand over their tutoring in the area to their eldest sister.

  What made it even nicer was the fact that it would free up another hour and a half that she could use to search the house. Megan spent that time, as well as the twins’ outdoor period, in wandering about the mansion, poking into nooks and crannies. She reasoned that if anyone questioned her about being somewhere, she could always claim that she had gotten lost in the huge house.

  She started with the third floor and moved downward.
There were several empty rooms just down from the nursery, but the next room she opened had an occupant.

  A small, stoop-shouldered man with a shock of disordered white hair was bending over a large table, and he turned in surprise to look at her. A pair of spectacles rested on the end of his nose, and he pushed them up into his hair as he gazed at her.

  “Oh!” Megan exclaimed. “I’m so sorry. Forgive me. I did not realize the room was occupied.”

  “No harm, my dear,” the elderly man said with a shy smile. “You merely startled me. I was laying out my Welsh longbowmen.”

  With a closer look, Megan now saw that what she had thought was a large table was in fact a large piece of thin wood propped up on two wooden sawhorses. On the piece of wood was a topographical layout of land, painted green. There were a myriad of little iron figures, some arranged in careful rows, but the majority still lying in a heap.

  This was not the only such “table” in the room. Several flat pieces of plywood stood on sawhorses. All the others were finished products, with rolling land and flat land, and even small bodies of water. The landscapes were dotted with trees and hedges and brown roads. Miniature armies and navies were spread across the various tables, all laid out in precise order. It was all Megan could do to keep her jaw from dropping in astonishment.

  This man, she realized, must be the great-uncle about whom Theo and Mrs. Bee had spoken. But the man’s use of lead soldiers went far beyond anything Megan had imagined.

  “It’s Agincourt,” Lord Bellard was saying now, looking at her hopefully.

  “Ah, yes.” Megan remembered that the housekeeper had said something about Agincourt. “‘Cry God for Harry, England and St. George!’”

  History might not be her specialty, but she did know Shakespeare.

  The small man’s face brightened, and he quoted back, “‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’”

  Her bit of knowledge, apparently, was all it took to win over the twins’ great-uncle, for he took her on a guided tour around his workroom, identifying all the battles and explaining the layouts to her. It was unfortunate, he told her with regret, that his favorite piece, the pièce de résistance of his collection, the Battle of Waterloo, was at home at Broughton Park, with the other more modern battles.

  The old man did not seem to question her presence in his family’s house—or, indeed, even ask her name. When at last she took her leave of him, she made a point of telling him that she was the twins’ new tutor, just in case he might wonder later to whom he had been showing his collection.

  He seemed only faintly interested in her words, saying merely, “Ah. How interesting. A woman. I see Emmeline’s hand in that.” He smiled at her. “Welcome to the house, Miss Anderson. If you need any help…”

  Megan smiled, not bothering to correct her name. The old gentleman was a bit odd, but she could not help but like him. It was clear that questions of propriety or rank—or even identity—did not signify to him in the least. Scholarship, she suspected, was the only thing that mattered to the sweet old man.

  She made her way through more of the house, peering into empty rooms and cautiously opening closed doors. Bedchambers predominated, although there were also various drawing rooms, sitting rooms, studies and a library, as well as a large and ornate ballroom. She encountered a few servants, and a time or two she saw a member of the family in the distance, but each time she quickly ducked back around a corner or into an empty room to avoid being seen.

  She was most intrigued by the locked room that she found on the second floor next to the library. The door from it into the hallway was locked, and when she entered the library, she found a door in the middle of one wood-paneled wall that she felt must surely lead into the room next door, as well. When she tried it, she found that it was locked, too. Her curiosity was well up by then. A locked room in this open, friendly household was an unusual thing. It must contain something valuable, she reasoned, and it would therefore be the place where she was likeliest to find whatever rare and/or expensive item Theo Moreland might have taken from her brother.

  Megan strolled back up to the nursery, where she took high tea with Con and Alex. The boys had returned from their science class with smudges of various sorts on their hands and faces, and smelling faintly of sulfur. They chattered animatedly about the chemical experiment, which had gone, according to them, “almost perfectly.” Megan decided it was best not to inquire as to exactly what had not been perfect about it.

  “Once you clean up a bit,” she said, “I thought we might go down to the library and look for some books you might like to read.”

  When they were in the library, she thought, she could easily work around to trying the locked door, and then no doubt the voluble twins would tell her what lay behind it. However, her plans were dashed when Con and Alex shook their heads.

  “Oh, no, miss, we have to clean up and go down to dinner. That’s why our high tea is so small. We eat early, usually,” Alex explained.

  “You mean you take your evening meal with the family?” Megan asked, amazed. She had always understood that in wealthy families children ate early and alone with their governess or tutor, while the adults dined late, without the distraction of children.

  “Unless there are guests and it’s going to be boring. But with Reed and Anna home, I imagine the whole family will be here tonight,” Con explained.

  Alex swallowed the bite of cake he had just taken and added, “You will be there, too, miss.”

  “I will?”

  Con and Alex nodded, and Con added, “Our tutors are always invited to eat with the family when we do. It wouldn’t be polite otherwise, would it?”

  “No. I—I suppose not.” Megan thought about the wardrobe she had brought. She had nothing elegant enough for supper at a duke’s table. Of course, no one would expect a tutor to look elegant. But still…she hated the thought of looking dowdy tonight in front of the entire Moreland clan. In front of Theo Moreland.

  With a grimace, she suppressed the thought. What did it matter what she looked like to Theo Moreland? It was sheer vanity, and vanity was not going to help her discover what he had done to her brother.

  Still, when she made her way down to supper with the twins later, Megan was wearing the least severe of her dresses, and she had added a softening bit of lace at the throat and cuffs, as well as putting on her best gold ear bobs. After all, she reasoned, not looking her best wasn’t going to help her catch her brother’s killer.

  Supper at the Moreland household, she found, was a large and noisy affair. The long table was filled with people, and everyone seemed to talk at once, cutting across people and conversations. It reminded her, Megan realized with some surprise, of the evening meal in her own household growing up—lots of people and lively conversation ranging on all sorts of topics. It was enjoyable, and Megan could not help but join in, but it was not the sort of thing she had expected to find in an aristocratic British home.

  Two more Moreland siblings were present this evening—a tall redheaded beauty named Kyria and a small, much quieter woman, Olivia, with soft brown hair and large, lambent brown eyes. They were accompanied by their husbands. Olivia was married to the handsome, dark-haired Lord St. Leger, who greeted Megan politely and with a sympathetic look. The other man, Kyria’s spouse, was wickedly good-looking, possessed of compelling blue eyes, sunstreaked light brown hair and a flashing grin that Megan was sure could charm the birds out of the trees. His name was Rafe McIntyre, she was told, and, the duchess added with a pleased smile, as if she were handing Megan a real treat, he was an American.

  Megan froze, her eyes flying to the man’s piercing blue gaze, and her heart set up a galloping beat. She had not counted on meeting another American.

  “Where are you from, Mr. McIntyre?” she asked, hoping that her trepidation did not show. It wasn’t likely, she told herself, that he would know anything about the schools or made-up people whom she had given in her credentials to the duchess. But she could not
help feeling that an American was more likely to trip her up in her lies.

  “The West, Miss Henderson,” McIntyre said, the warmth of his smile not quite reaching his cool blue eyes. “Before that, Virginia.”

  “But Rafe and I more recently resided in New York,” Kyria put in, smiling at Megan.

  Megan’s heart sank, though she managed to keep a smile on her face. New York was a huge city, she reminded herself, and Lady Kyria would not have moved in the same circles as a lowly newspaper reporter. Even if, by some stretch of the imagination, the couple had read articles written by Megan Mulcahey in the newspaper, there was no reason to connect that woman with Megan Henderson, the tutor sitting in their dining room in England.

  “It’s a lovely city, New York,” Lady Kyria went on.

  “Yes, my lady, I have always thought so myself,” Megan replied somewhat stiffly.

  Megan wished she had thought to pretend that she was from some city other than New York. It had seemed best at the time, one less thing she would have to lie about, but in retrospect, it struck her as foolish. What if by some strange chance one of the McIntyres had read her articles? What if the mere fact that they were talking about the city reminded Theo that it was where the man he had killed came from? What if Dennis had at some time mentioned his sister Megan?

  She glanced over at Theo, who was sitting almost directly across the table from her. His eyes were on her already, their bright green color dark in the candlelight. She was aware, as she was every time their eyes met, of a sizzle along her nerves. Megan flushed and looked quickly back toward Kyria.

  Kyria’s gaze went from Megan to Theo speculatively, but she said nothing.

  Beside Kyria, Rafe asked casually, “How did you happen to apply for the position of tutor for the Terrible Two?”

  “Rafe! We aren’t!” Con and Alex chorused in mock indignation, and Rafe grinned, sending the boys a wink.

  “Well, I did not consider it at first, of course,” Megan replied, aware of McIntyre’s cool blue eyes studying her as she talked. “I assumed that no one would hire a woman as a tutor for two boys. But I had heard that the Duchess of Broughton was different, that she believed in the equality of the sexes, so I thought I would apply to her. I wanted to prove that I could handle the job as well as a man.”