The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring

by Mary Balogh

  The Marquess of Staunton, meanwhile, although he talked with enthusiasm about horses and then the races, inwardly contemplated with some satisfaction his return to Enfield Park in Wiltshire and the effect of that return on the Duke of Withingsby. It would be the final thumbing of the nose to the man who had begotten him and made his life miserable for the twenty years following his birth. For eight years, ever since he had left home after that final dreadful scene, he had lived independently of his father, refusing any financial support. He had made his own fortune, at first by gambling, then by reckless investments, and finally by more prudent investments and business ventures.

  His father had clearly not got the point. But he would. He would understand that his eldest son was once and for all beyond his power and influence. Oh yes, marrying imprudently—and that would be an understatement for the marriage of the Duke of Withingsby’s heir to an impoverished gentlewoman who had earned her living as a governess—would be the best possible thing he could do. He longed to see his father’s face when he took his bride to Enfield.

  And so he waited for replies to his advertisement, replies that began coming the very day after its first appearance in the London papers and kept coming for several days after that in even larger numbers than he had expected. He rejected several applicants, sight unseen—all those below the age of twenty or above the age of thirty, those with particularly impressive recommendations, and one young lady who so wished to impress him with her knowledge of Latin that her letter was written in it.

  He interviewed five candidates before discovering his quiet mouse in the sixth. Miss Charity Duncan had been shown into a downstairs salon and had chosen to stand in the part of the room that was not bathed in sunlight. For one moment after he had opened the door and stepped inside the room, he thought she must have changed her mind and fled. But then he saw her, and it struck him that even her decision to stand just there was significant. In addition, she was dressed from head to toe in drab brown and looked totally self-effacing and quietly disciplined. She was the quintessential governess—the sort of employee even the most jealous of wives would not object to having in the same house with her husband.

  “Miss Duncan?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.” Her voice was quiet and low-pitched. She curtsied to him without once raising her eyes from the carpet before her feet. She was on the low side of medium height, very slender, perhaps even thin, though her cloak made it impossible to know for sure. Her face looked pale and ordinary in the shadows. The brown of her hair blended so totally with the brown of her bonnet that it was difficult to know where the one ended and the other began. Her garments were decent and drab. He was given the impression that they were not quite shabby but very soon would be. They were genteel-shabby.

  She was perfect. His father would be incensed.

  “Please be seated,” he said, indicating a chair close to where she stood.

  “Yes, sir,” she said and sat down, as he expected, with a straight spine that did not touch the back of her chair. She folded her gloved hands in her lap and directed her gaze modestly at her knees.

  She was the picture of prim gentility. She was quite perfect! He decided there and then that she would do, that his search was at an end. He was looking at his future wife.

  CHARITY DUNCAN SAT close to the window in order to make the best of the last of the daylight. It would not do to light the candle one moment before it became absolutely necessary to do so. Candles were expensive. She was mending an underarm seam of one of her brother’s shirts and noting with an inward sigh that the cotton fabric had worn thin. The seam would hold for a while, but there would be a hole more difficult to mend sooner than that.

  Her task was taking longer than it ought. Her eyes—and her mind—kept straying to the newspaper that was open on the table. Buying a paper each day was her one extravagance, though it could not exactly be called that. She knew that Philip liked to read it by candlelight after he got home from work, but in the main the purchase was for her own sake. She must find employment very soon. For almost a month she had been looking and applying and—all too rarely—attending interviews. She had even applied for a few situations more menial than a governess’s or a companion’s position.

  No one wanted her. She was either too young or too old, too plain or too pretty, too high-born or too well-educated, or … Or prospective employers became too pointed in their questions.

  But she would not give in and abandon the search. Her family—one sister three years younger than herself at home and three children considerably younger than that—was poor. Worse than poor. They were deeply in debt and had not even known it until the death of their father a little over a year ago. And so instead of being able to live a gentleman’s life, Philip was compelled to work just to support his family. And she had insisted on working too, though there was precious little money a woman could earn that was sufficient to share with others or to pay off debts.

  If only there were some way of making a huge fortune quickly. She had even considered some spectacular robbery—though not seriously, of course. She ought not to complain, she thought, her task at the shirt finished at last. At least they were not quite destitute. Not quite, but close enough. And there seemed to be no real light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

  But Philip was home, and she rose to smile her greeting, to kiss his cheek, to serve his supper, to ask about his day—and to draw his attention to the one advertisement in today’s paper that looked like a possibility.

  “It does not say how many children there are or what ages or genders they are,” she said with a frown when they had progressed to that topic. “It does not say whether they live here in London or in the Outer Hebrides or at the tip of Cornwall. But it does say that there is a position available.”

  “You do not have to take employment at all, Charity,” Philip Duncan said. It was his constant theme. Philip believed in taking full responsibility for his womenfolk.

  “Oh, yes, I do,” she said firmly. “It is the only suitable position offered in today’s paper, Phil. And there was nothing at all at the agency yesterday or this morning. I must try for it at least.”

  “You can go back home,” Philip said, “and allow me to support you as I should. You can go back home where you are wanted and needed.”

  “You know I will not do that,” she said, smiling at him. “You cannot possibly support us all, Phil, and you ought not. You ought to be able to live your own life. Agnes—”

  “Agnes will wait,” he said firmly. “Or she will tire of waiting and marry someone else. But it is unseemly for my sister to have to take employment.”

  “I need to feel that I am doing something too,” she said. “It is not fair that I should sit at home working on my embroidery and cultivating a pretty garden just because I am a woman. And I am the eldest.

  “I’ll try for this one position,” she said. “If I am unsuccessful, then perhaps I will go back to the country. It is beginning to look as though I am unemployable, does it not?”

  “Go back home, Charity,” Philip urged. “I am a mere clerk now, but I will rise to a better position and earn more money. Perhaps I will even be wealthy someday. And indeed you are not cut out to be in service. You do not have the necessary spirit of subservience. You lost the last position because you could not keep your opinions to yourself.”

  “No,” she said, grimacing. “I was of the opinion that the children’s father ought not to be molesting the prettiest chambermaid against her express wishes and I said so—to both him and the children’s mother. He really was horrid, Phil. If you had known him, you would have disliked him excessively.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” he said. “But his behavior to another servant was not your concern, Charity. The girl had a tongue of her own, I daresay.”

  “But she was afraid to use it,” she said, “lest she lose her position.”

  Philip merely looked at his sister. He did not need to say anything.

  Cha
rity laughed. “I had no wish to remain there anyway,” she said. “But I do wish positions were more easily come by. Six interviews in the past month and nothing to show for them. Perhaps I had better hope that Mrs. Earheart and her children do live in the Outer Hebrides and that no one but me will be intrepid enough to join them there.” She sighed. “Perhaps I should include in my letter of application my willingness to go to the ends of the earth. Perhaps they will pay more to compensate me for the remote situation.”

  “Charity,” Philip said, “I wish you would go home. The children miss you. Penny says so in all her letters. You have been like a mother to them ever since Mama died.”

  “I shall not mention my willingness,” she said as if she had not heard him. “I might sound overeager or groveling. And I shall try for this one last position. I shall probably not even receive a reply and all your wishes will be granted. But I shall feel such a helpless woman, Phil.”

  He sighed again.

  But Charity was proved wrong in one thing. Five days after she sent her letter of application to Mr. Earheart, she received a reply, inviting her to attend an interview the following morning. She felt her heart begin to palpitate at the very thought. It was so difficult to endure being questioned, more as if one were a commodity than a person. But it was the only way to employment. How cruel it was, though, to actually have an interview, to be this close, only perhaps to have one’s hopes dashed yet again.

  “This will be the seventh,” she said to Philip when he came home from work late in the evening. “Will this be the lucky one, do you suppose?”

  “If you really want the position, Charity,” he said with a sigh, “you must behave the part. Governesses, like other servants, you know, are to be seen and not heard.”

  She grimaced. Not that she was ever loud or vulgar. But she was a lady. She was accustomed to considering herself the equal of other ladies. It was hard to accustom herself to the knowledge that there was a despised class of shabby-genteel people—of whom she was one, at least as long as she sought employment. It was something that had to be ignored or endured. “I must be demure, then?” she said. “I may not offer my opinions or observations?”

  “No,” he said bluntly—and she realized with a sudden wave of pain that Philip must have had to learn the same lesson for himself. “You must convince the man, and his wife if she is present, that if they employ you, you will blend very nicely into the furniture of their home.”

  “How demeaning,” she said and then bit her lip, wishing she had not said the words aloud.

  “And, Charity”—he leaned across the table that separated them and took her hand in both his own—“do not accept the position even if it is offered if he—well, if he is a young man. Not that youth has anything to say in the matter. If he is—”

  “Lecherous?” she suggested.

  Her brother blushed. “If you suspect he might be,” he said.

  “I can look after myself, Phil,” she said. “When my former employer glanced at me with that certain look in his eye during the early days of my employment, I looked right back and chilled my eyes and thinned my lips.” She repeated the look so that her brother grinned despite himself.

  “Be careful, Charity,” he said.

  “I shall be,” she promised. “And demure. I shall be a veritable mouse. A quiet, drab, brown little mouse. I shall be so self-effacing that he will not even realize I am in the room with him. I shall be …”

  But her brother was laughing out loud. She went around the table to stand behind his chair and wrap both arms about his shoulders. “Oh, you do that all too rarely these days, Phil,” she said. “All will work out, you will see. We will be rich somehow and you will marry Agnes and live happily ever after.”

  “And you?” He raised a hand to pat her arm.

  “And I shall live happily ever after too,” she said. “Penny will be able to marry and I shall stay with the children until they are all grown and happily wed, and then I shall settle into a contented and eccentric spinsterhood.”

  He chuckled again as she lightly kissed the top of his head.

  But for all that she was nervous the next morning when she arrived at the house on Upper Grosvenor Street to which she had been summoned for an interview. The hall was unostentatious but elegant. So was the servant who answered her knock on the door. So was the empty salon into which she was shown. She instinctively sought out the part of the room that was out of the light from the windows. She tried to master the beating of her heart. If she did not secure this position, she would begin to lose confidence in herself. She had already half promised Phil that she would go home without trying further. She would … But her thoughts were interrupted by the opening of the door.

  He was young—no more than thirty at the outside. He was also handsome in a harsh sort of way, she thought to herself. He was of somewhat above medium height, with a slender, well-proportioned figure, very dark hair and eyes, and a thin, angular, aristocratic face. The sunlight shining through the windows was full on him as he came through the door. In its harsh glare the cold cynicism of his expression made him look somehow satanic. He was expensively and elegantly dressed. Indeed, he looked very much as if he might have been poured into his well-tailored coat and pantaloons—a sure sign that he was a gentleman of high fashion.

  He did not look like a kind man. He looked like the sort of man who would devour chambermaids more than he would seduce them. But she must not judge the man before he had uttered even a single word. She felt demeaned again, alone in a gentleman’s house without servant or chaperon, because she herself was now a servant—an unemployed one. Her eyes dipped to focus on the carpet before his own found her in the shadows. She concentrated hard on cultivating the manner of a typical governess.

  “Miss Duncan?” he said. His voice was as haughty and as bored as she had expected it to be, though it was a pleasant tenor voice. There was no pretense of charm in it. But why should there be? He was conducting an interview for a governess for his children.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, trying to look dignified but not over-proud. She kept her back straight. She was, after all, a lady.

  “Please be seated.” He indicated a chair that was close by and out of the glare of the sunlight, for which fact she was grateful. Interviews did not get easier with experience.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, seating herself, keeping her eyes lowered. She would answer the questions concisely and honestly. She would hope there would be no awkward questions.

  Mr. Earheart seated himself on a chair opposite hers. He crossed one booted leg over the other. His hessian boots were of shining, expensive leather. His valet must have labored hard to produce such a shine. There was an air of wealth and confidence and power about the man. Charity felt distinctly uncomfortable in the pause before he spoke again.

  2

  HOW DID ONE CONDUCT AN INTERVIEW FOR A future wife? the Marquess of Staunton wondered.

  “The letter of recommendation from the rector of your former parish is impressive, Miss Duncan,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “However,” he said, “it was written all of one year ago. Have you had employment since then?”

  She stared at her knees and appeared to consider her reply. “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “And what was it, Miss Duncan?”

  “I was governess for eight months to three children, sir,” she said.

  “For eight months.” He paused, but she did not pick up the cue. “And why was the position terminated?”

  “I was dismissed,” she said after hesitating for a few moments.

  “Indeed?” he said. “Why, Miss Duncan?” Had she been unable to control the children? He could well imagine it. She seemed totally without character.

  “My—my employer accused me of lying,” she said.

  Well. She was frank at least. He was surprised by her reply and by the fact that she did not immediately proceed to justify herself. A meek mouse indeed.
/>   “And did you?” he asked. “Lie, I mean.”

  “No, sir,” she said.

  He knew how it felt to be accused falsely. He well knew the feeling.

  “Is this your first attempt to find employment since then?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” she said. “It is the seventh. The seventh interview, that is.”

  He was not surprised that she had failed to get past any of those interviews. Who would wish to employ such a drab, spiritless creature to educate his children?

  “Why have you been unsuccessful?” he asked.

  “I believe, sir,” she said, “because everyone else has asked what you just asked.”

  Ah, yes. Her confession doubtless brought any normal interview to an abrupt halt. “And you have never thought to lie?” he asked her. “To pretend that you left your employment of your own free will?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “I have thought about it, sir. But I have not done so.”

  She was also a very moral little mouse. Someone once upon a time had told her that it is wicked to lie, and so she never lied even in the service of her own interests. Even if it meant she would never again be employed. She clung to a puritanical morality. His father would be appalled.

  “For which proof of your honesty you are to be commended, Miss Duncan,” he said. “I may be able to offer you something.”

  She looked up into his face for the first time then, very briefly. Long dark lashes swept upward to reveal large, clear eyes that were as blue as the proverbial summer sky. Not the sort of gray that sometimes passes for blue, but pure, unmistakable blue itself. And then the eyes disappeared beneath the lashes and lowered eyelids again. For one disturbing moment he felt that he was about to make a ghastly mistake.