Page 11 of The Lady’s Deception

When an hour and a half had gone by according to the distant clock, whose hands seemed to move not at all for stretches, then lurched forward alarmingly, she dismissed the girls to their luncheon. One floor below, she found the room where she had slept and slipped inside to wash her face and hands and to comb her hair. She longed to change into a fresh dress, but she hesitated to make free with the contents of the wardrobe without permission from someone other than Daphne and Bell. She could not help having to borrow one dress. Her own was filthy, perhaps beyond repair. But a change of clothes at midday would surely be considered lavish for a governess.

With light, uncertain steps she descended to the first floor. The girls had shown her the drawing room that morning and explained how they often studied their lessons there while their father read, their mother sewed, or their eldest sister wrote. Sometimes all together. Rosamund had looked around the room—the largest in the house, surely, but not overlarge nonetheless—and had foreseen how quickly all would come to grief if she were expected to teach while their brother sat in judgment just a few feet away. So she had wondered aloud whether some other space mightn’t serve better as a schoolroom.

In hindsight, perhaps, she had been rather foolish to leap on the girls’ suggestion of using the attic. She had an instinct for good hiding places, as it turned out. But she had a great deal to learn about being a governess.

The door to the drawing room was ajar now, but not enough that she might peer inside. No footman waited to announce her. In fact, she’d seen no servants other than Molly and the cook. Rosamund raised one hand to knock, hesitated, and then heard the sound of a longcase clock in the room chiming the half hour. She could not, would not be late. Raising one arm, she rapped her knuckles twice on the door and waited.

No one opened the door. No one called out, “Come in.” When she had counted to twenty, she knocked again, this time hard enough that the door swung inward a few inches more, giving her a view of the front half of the room: a pair of tall windows facing the street, groupings of comfortable furniture, a spinet. Cautiously, she pushed the door further and stepped across the threshold.

“I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Paris Burke’s voice, soft yet forceful, came from her left. She turned to face him, but he remained bent over some papers spread across a large desk, his pen moving swiftly while the fingers of his other hand traced down and across the spread pages of a book. This work occupied him fully for several moments more, and she had no choice but to wait. Punishment, she supposed, for her pert reply in the attic.

Her gaze roamed over the rest of the room’s furnishings, the overstuffed bookcases, the amateur artwork adorning the walls. The Burkes seemed to be reasonably well-off; the room was neat and tastefully fitted up. Still, it looked quite as one might expect a room regularly occupied by a half-dozen members of the family might look. Here and there she spied a scuff mark in the wallpaper, a worn spot in the upholstery. Blemishes that would never have been permitted in the house where she had grown up.

Well, no, that wasn’t entirely true. She had the vaguest sense that things might have been different when Papa was alive. Less strict. Happier.

Doubt scuttled the memory. If it was a memory. Charles would have told her it was a figment of her imagination. Would have explained that things were now as they had always been, that he had ordered everything just as their father would have wanted it done.

The walls and chairs and carpet of the drawing room were insufficient to hold her attention for long. Her gaze persisted in wandering back to Mr. Burke, though she would not allow herself to stare. She had called him a highwayman in her thoughts, and given what his sisters had revealed, perhaps she hadn’t been far off the mark. A United Irishman. A dangerous rebel against the Crown.

Well, she’d hoped to find someone ruthless, hadn’t she?

When he had visited the schoolroom, he had been fully dressed, but now he sat, most shockingly, in his shirtsleeves; his cravat had worked loose and he had cast his coat over the back of another chair. Though he had not looked up from his work, she could see enough of his face in profile to realize he still had not shaved. The strange intimacy of that scruff of beard, ink black like his hair, startled her almost more than his state of undress. As if she were peeping at a man just roused from his bed.

The gentlemen of her acquaintance did not appear so in front of ladies. Charles would have insisted that Mr. Burke was no gentleman. But recent events had not exactly increased her faith in her brother’s opinion.

With a rough noise in his throat, a sort of exasperated-sounding laugh, Mr. Burke shoved the book away and tossed his pen onto a tray, then ran one hand through his already disordered hair. Unruly waves fell over his brow and brushed his collar, and her first prim thought was that he ought to visit a barber and have it tamed.

So why did her fingertips tingle with the unexpected desire to smooth one silky blue-black wave from his dark eyes?

Pushing back from the desk, he came to his feet and fixed her with an assessing look. “Do sit down, Miss Gorse.” With one hand he snatched his coat from the nearby chair, while motioning her toward it with the other.

She wanted to decline. It would mean giving up some of the aloof dignity that a standing posture conveyed. It would mean moving nearer to him. But something about his voice made him difficult to refuse. She suspected he lost very few cases.

As he shrugged into his coat, she seated herself facing him, her spine rigid, not touching the back of the chair. Though he was of average height and slender build, Mr. Burke had the presence of a much larger man. He reminded her of an actor who had once brought his traveling troupe to perform at Tavisham Manor when she was fourteen. Charles, who had happened to be visiting at the time, had sent him away and tried to persuade her she wanted nothing to do with such amateur spectacles. But even a glimpse of the man through the drawing room windows had been riveting.

She could not exactly blame the women of Dublin for haunting courtrooms to catch a glimpse of the handsome barrister.

Tugging a sleeve into place, he seated himself at the desk again. “Have you a great deal of experience with children, Miss Gorse?”

No pleasantries. No pretense at conversation. And how was she to answer such a direct attack? For a moment, she could only watch as he idly straightened the papers on the desk with the fingers of one hand. She could not meet his eye. But the longer she hesitated, the more damning the truth would be. “No, sir.”

“Any experience?” He spoke with the assurance of a man who was accustomed to asking questions and having them answered.

She swallowed. “In my—in my last, ah, situation, there were two children. A boy and a girl. Of an age with your sisters.” Shading the truth, people called it. God forgive her.

“And why did you leave that post?”

“I, ah—”

“Were you dismissed?”

“I was not.” She jerked her chin up and met his gaze at last. His eyes were indeed black—or such dark brown as to make no difference. But not cold, as she had imagined them from a distance. Sharp. Lively. And every bit as compelling as the rest of him. “I left. The children’s father seemed to imagine that I—” Heat rose in her cheeks and she let her eyes drift from his face again. “That he was entitled to certain liberties.”

For a moment, Mr. Burke sat perfectly still, perfectly silent. Then—

“His name, Miss Gorse?”