Governess Gone Rogue

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  She nodded. “Should we come in by the visitor’s entrance?”

  “Yes, by the Clock Tower. Go across Westminster Hall, and I’ll meet you on St. Stephen’s Porch at two o’clock.” He bowed. “Enjoy your day out.”

  With that, he departed the nursery and went down to where his carriage waited at the curb outside, breathing deeply of the cool air to get the soft, womanly scent of her out of his nostrils. He started to step into the vehicle, but suddenly changed his mind.

  “I’ll walk for a bit,” he told his driver, “then pick up a hansom. Take the carriage back around to the mews if you would. And don’t worry about fetching me tonight. I’ll be quite late, so I’ll take a hansom back from Westminster as well.”

  “It’s quite cold today, my lord. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. I’ve a bit of a headache,” he lied as his driver gave him a dubious glance. “The cold air will do me good.”

  He turned away. “I just hope it cools my damned imagination,” he muttered under his breath as he started down the sidewalk.

  Chapter 14

  The twins were so excited about their outing to Westminster that during the week that followed Jamie’s offer to give them a tour, both boys were absolute angels. They did their lessons, perpetrated no practical jokes on her or the other servants, and polished the remaining silver without a single complaint.

  Their new footman, William, arrived from Ravenwood as planned, and he was so impressed by the improvement in the boys’ behavior, he declared that Amanda must have the patience of a saint.

  Amanda, however, knew she was anything but saintly.

  Jamie’s kiss came back into her mind at least a dozen times a day, and whenever she thought of it, her spirits soared with an unreasoning joy. Sometimes at night, the taste of his mouth and the hot burn of his caress invaded her dreams and she would awaken with her body aching with desire, but she knew there was no future in longings of that sort.

  Most young women, she supposed, would assume a kiss as searing and intimate as the one she and Jamie had shared would mean that a marriage proposal was in the offing, but Amanda was too worldly for such expectations. Passion, as she well knew, wasn’t love, and it wasn’t necessarily a prelude to marriage.

  And though Jamie clearly desired her, she could not delude herself into believing that his kiss had been inspired by a deeper feeling. For him, there had been only one great love, and though the woman who had inspired it was dead, he’d made it quite clear there would never be another.

  For her own part, she wasn’t sure she wanted marriage anyway, from any man. She’d dreamed that dream already—marriage, children, a future shared with her one true love—but Kenneth had killed that dream, and she’d come to accept her spinster’s life. She was married to her vocation, her pupils were her children, and she vastly preferred taking care of herself by a profession she loved than relying on a man to do it for her.

  But though she didn’t dream of marriage anymore, in the wake of Jamie’s kiss, there were times, late at night in the darkness of her room, when she dreamed of him, of his mouth on hers and his arms around her, and when she woke, her body aching with desire, the loneliness of her celibate life seemed almost unbearable. His kiss had reminded her of the pleasures of physical love and the surcease of loneliness that could accompany it, and it was all Amanda could do not to sneak over to the other side of the house, slip into his room, and fling herself at him with shameless abandon. She already had the reputation of a strumpet, after all, and when she woke from these fevered, erotic dreams, she was tempted almost beyond restraint to live up to that reputation.

  The main reason she didn’t do it was the boys. She loved those boys, loved them with a depth of feeling that was so fierce, it sometimes shocked her. In the nearly two months she’d been here, Colin and Owen had stolen her heart, and she couldn’t bear the idea of risking her job and losing them. She’d have to leave them someday, of course, in a few years when they went off to school, but she wasn’t about to precipitate that heartbreak by igniting an affair with their father that could only offer her an even lonelier future than the one she already had.

  He stopped sleeping at his club, but by unspoken agreement, they took great pains to avoid being alone together. Each morning, she sent the boys down to have breakfast with him, and afterward, when he brought them back to the nursery, he was so politely stiff and formal that no one observing him would dream anything untoward had ever occurred. Amanda tried her best to mirror his demeanor, but she found it almost unbearably difficult. A woman just couldn’t be stiff and formal when notions of kissing a man kept invading her imagination every time she looked at him. She couldn’t speak in brisk, no-nonsense accents when her lips were tingling. She couldn’t pretend his presence was of no consequence when her skin flushed with heat and her pulses raced every time he was in the room.

  As a result, by the time the day came for their outing to Westminster, Amanda was every bit as excited as the boys, so excited, in fact, that they arrived early, passing the Clock Tower and crossing New Palace Yard with seven minutes to spare.

  Despite their precipitate arrival, Jamie was already waiting for them, and when they turned the corner at the end of Westminster Hall and she saw him on the steps leading to St. Stephen’s Corridor, her heart leaped in her chest with such pleasure that it hurt.

  The boys saw him, too, and it was only because she was holding each of them by the hand that they couldn’t break into a run as their father came down the steps to greet them.

  “No running,” she ordered, but though she’d intended her order to be the firm one of a proper nanny, Jamie’s approach and her own pounding heart made her voice nothing but a breathless rush of air, and she had to grip the boys’ hands hard and haul them back to ensure they minded her. “We talked about this before we came today, remember?” she added, forcing a firm note into her voice by sheer willpower. “No running inside Westminster.”

  Jamie descended the last step, and as he halted in front of them, removed his tall, black opera hat, and gave her a bow, Amanda felt as jumpy as a cat on hot bricks.

  “We’re here,” she said, and almost groaned aloud at the inanity of that remark.

  It wasn’t lost on him, either, much to her chagrin, for his mouth twitched at one corner as he settled his hat back on his head. “Yes,” he agreed, his voice suspiciously grave. “So I see.”

  “Can we see the Commons first, Papa?” Colin asked. “And can we see where we’ll sit? And what about the Royal Gallery? Can we see that?”

  “Slow down, slow down,” Jamie said, laughing. “No, you can’t see the Royal Gallery, I’m afraid. The Queen isn’t here, and even if she were, I’m not important enough to warrant an invitation into her presence, sadly. But as for the rest, yes, we’ll go to the Commons first.”

  He turned to Owen, and his smile changed to a quizzical expression. “You’re very quiet, Owen?” he remarked. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Papa. It’s just that I didn’t expect to see you wearing a hat.”

  “You’ve seen me in a hat before. Every day, in fact.”

  “I know, but don’t you have to wear a wig in Parliament?”

  “No, only the Speaker and the clerks are required to wear wigs, thank heaven. Most of us do retain our hats, though we don’t always wear them. A hat’s important, because if any member needs to raise a point of order during a division, he must have his hat on before doing so.”

  “Why?” Colin wanted to know.

  “Oh, it’s tradition. But any time a Member stands up, he must remove his hat—to speak, for example, or to leave the Chamber. That’s tradition, too.”

  “But you used to wear a wig, didn’t you?” Owen asked. “When you were a barrister?”

  “I did. Which is why I gave up the bar and became an MP. A hat’s much more comfortable than a wig.”

  “You’re having us on, Papa,” Colin accused, clearly skeptical. “That seems a silly reason to run for elec
tion.”

  “You only say that because you’ve never had to wear a wig,” Jamie countered. “I have, and they itch like mad, especially in summer when it’s hot. Now, then,” he added, gesturing to the immense arched doors behind him. “We’ll go through St. Stephen’s Hall and head for the Commons, then see the gallery, the Lords, and all the rest.”

  He turned, holding out his hands, and when Amanda relinquished her hold, he took each of his sons by the hand and led them up the stone steps, through a pair of wood and glass doors overhung by an arched Gothic window, and into St. Stephen’s Corridor. Amanda fell in step behind them, content to recede into the background as Jamie took his sons through the Members’ Lobby, let them peek through the windows beside the door to the House of Commons, where things were already well underway, and took them up to the gallery where they would sit later to watch debates.

  “Why do we have to sit in the Ladies’ Gallery?” Owen wanted to know as they descended the stairs again. “We’re not ladies.”

  “Mrs. Seton is, though,” Jamie reminded. “And you’re not old enough to sit alone in the men’s galleries, so you have to sit with her.”

  “But all that brass grillwork is in the way.” Owen sounded quite aggrieved. “We won’t be able to see very well.”

  “That’s rather the point,” Amanda muttered, but though the boys didn’t hear that tart remark, Jamie did, and he gave her a rueful look.

  “I daresay you’re right,” he told her as they left the Commons and started across the Central Hall to the House of Lords, weaving their way amid the crowd. “The grillwork is ridiculous.”

  “It’s more than ridiculous. It’s unfair. It’s wrong. And what’s the purpose? To make it so hard to see what they’re doing down below that we won’t come at all.”

  “You can stand at the windows by the door to the Chamber if you prefer,” he said, though he supposed that wasn’t much of a consolation. “Ladies are allowed to do so, and the view is better.”

  “Yes, but there’s nowhere to sit. And we don’t know if or when you’ll be called, so we could be standing for hours. A fact which rather proves my point.”

  “Believe me, you’re not telling me anything I haven’t already heard,” he assured her. “Every female in my family hates the Ladies’ Gallery.”

  Owen spoke before Amanda could suggest he do something about that problem. “Why are the benches green in the Commons, Papa?” he asked over his shoulder as they started down the Peers’ Corridor to the House of Lords.

  “Because that’s the Queen’s favorite color,” Jamie answered at once.

  “Really?” Owen asked.

  Colin gave a snort. “Papa’s joking,” he told his younger brother. “The seats were green long before Victoria.”

  “But why are they green?”

  “No one knows, really,” Jamie confessed. “It’s another tradition.”

  “But the ones in the Lords are red, aren’t they, Papa?”

  “Really, Owen,” Colin cut in impatiently. “Who cares what color the seats are? What I want to know is when you’ll show us the cellar where Guy Fawkes hid with the gunpowder.”

  “I say, that’s a ripping idea,” Owen endorsed, seat colors apparently forgotten. “Let’s go down there.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t,” Jamie told them. “That cellar was destroyed in the fire of 1834.”

  Both boys groaned in disappointment at that piece of news, but they weren’t deterred from asking more questions.

  “Do you have an office, Papa?” Colin asked. “Can we see that?”

  “No office, I’m afraid. MPs are only allowed a locker and a coat peg.”

  “Can we see the Robing Room?”

  “And what about the Prince’s Chamber?”

  The boys continued firing questions at their parent as they crossed to the House of Lords, and as Amanda listened, she was overcome by feelings both poignant and bittersweet. She was glad, so very glad, that he was spending more time with them, and it was gratifying to know her influence had brought about that happy circumstance. But watching them like this also brought a sense of melancholy, because she knew that for her, it was only temporary. In two years or so, Colin and Owen would be off to Harrow, and she would have to say good-bye to them and to their father.

  That was the nature of her occupation, a perpetual cycle of hullo and good-bye. To come into children’s lives, influence them in all the positive ways she could, then to part from them as they journeyed without her into their future was a cycle she was well accustomed to by now, but as she watched Jamie with his sons, as she listened to them talk and laugh together, she felt both the pleasure and the pain of her teacher’s life more keenly than she ever had before.

  Jamie took them up to the galleries overlooking the House of Lords so the boys could see the red seats for themselves, then they went back down to explore the libraries and stroll along the terrace beside the Thames. At last, they circled back to retrace their steps along St. Stephen’s Corridor.

  “That pretty well does it,” Jamie said as they halted where they had begun, at St. Stephen’s Porch. “You’ve seen everything visitors are allowed to see, and since it’s now a quarter to three, might I suggest refreshments? The tearooms for visitors inside Westminster are always stuffy and crowded, but there’s quite a nice tearoom around the corner.” He gestured toward Westminster Hall and the exit beyond. “Shall we?”

  Owen and Amanda happily endorsed this plan. Colin, however, wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic. “But Papa, our tour can’t be over yet,” he protested, pulling his hand from Jamie’s, a move that compelled his father, his brother, and Amanda to stop as well. “You haven’t shown us Auntie Irene’s cupboard.”

  Jamie, it was clear, knew at once what the boy meant, for he threw back his head and laughed. “I don’t believe Auntie Irene had a particular cupboard in mind,” he told his son.

  Colin seemed satisfied by that answer, but Amanda was baffled. “What is Auntie Irene’s cupboard?” she asked as they stopped by the cloakroom and she handed over the claim ticket to retrieve their wraps and coats. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Because it doesn’t exist—not yet anyway. The boys’ aunt Irene, the Duchess of Torquil, has often declared that when the Government conducts the next census, she intends to come to the House of Commons, duck into one of the broom cupboards here, and spend the night.”

  For the life of her, Amanda could see no reason a duchess, or anyone else, for that matter, would want to do such an uncomfortable, seemingly pointless thing. “For what purpose?”

  “I’m not sure I should tell you.” He gave her a rueful look. “Knowing you, Amanda, you’d be likely to join her.”

  The clerk interrupted before Amanda could reply, handing over an armful of garments, and it was only after she and Jamie had helped the boys into their mackintoshes, gloves, and mufflers, Amanda had buttoned up her cloak, and they had emerged into the cold autumn air that she could return to the subject they’d been discussing.

  “I can’t imagine any reason to spend the night in a cupboard at Westminster,” she told Jamie as they started across New Palace Yard side by side, each of them holding one of the boys by the hand. “What would be the point?”

  “My sister-in-law is a staunch suffragist. Her main ambition in life is to gain women the right to vote. If she could manage to spend the night inside Westminster while they are conducting the government census, she could legitimately declare the House of Commons as her valid address, her contention being that she could then claim the same political rights as men, including the right to vote.”

  It was Amanda’s turn to laugh. “I see. But would that work?”

  “Well, it is a loophole in the law, rather, but if you want my opinion as a member of the bar, it wouldn’t have a prayer of succeeding.”

  “You’re probably right,” Amanda said, making a face. “You men are very stubborn about hanging on to your power.”

  He grinned at her
. “Understandably.”

  “I’ll be in the Commons someday,” Owen said before Amanda could rebuke Jamie for his teasing remark. “And I’ll give women the vote, if they don’t have it already.”

  “Hear, hear,” Amanda said as Jamie groaned.

  “Don’t you start,” he admonished her. “I’m already in the suds with many of my colleagues because of Irene’s suffragist work. My electorate, too, for I barely won my seat. The margin was less than a hundred votes.” He leaned around Amanda to look at his younger son, who was walking on her other side. “So, you’d agree to give women the vote, would you, Owen? Why?”

  “Mama wanted the vote,” he said simply. “I’d do it for her.”

  At once, she glanced at Jamie, but though his profile gave nothing away, it hurt somehow to look at him.

  They had one mother. One. And she died. Any stepmother would be nothing but a second-rate substitute, and they don’t need that.

  As his words from that first day in the newspaper office echoed through her mind, they were a stark reminder of reality. Jamie would never love another woman as he had loved his wife. She’d known that all along, so why should it matter now? Why should it hurt now?

  Because she was falling in love with him.

  Oh no, she thought, looking away, trying desperately to deny it. No, no, no. She was not going to make the same mistake twice. She was not going to let herself fall in love with a man who was incapable of loving her in return.

  But even as she made that vow, she had the sick feeling it was already too late.

  Because Jamie had to be in the Chamber before Question Time ended, tea was a hurried affair. He then escorted Amanda and the boys to the Ladies’ Gallery and raced down the stairs to take his place in the Chamber.

  Asquith was being grilled about inefficiencies in the British railways as Jamie took his seat, giving him time to review his speech. He already knew the blasted thing by heart, but he wasn’t the least bit confident about it, and when he pulled the speech out of his jacket pocket to peruse it, his dismal opinion was only reinforced, for his words seemed duller and more tedious than ever, and he wondered if he ought to have taken Amanda up on her offer to help him with it.