Chapter Thirty-Two

Was it only last night that utter peace had swamped her to the point of allowing her to sleep in her clothing? How had it gone so quickly? As Kit lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, she couldn’t even stand to close her eyes.

It was Nash sleeping on a pallet in the kitchen now. They were going to need to install a bed in their larder.

Of course, it wouldn’t be their larder much longer, would it?

Kit huffed out a groan and gave up on sleeping. She crawled out of the bed and threw on a dress and shoes before grabbing a lantern and letting herself out the back door. How long did they have before the heir arrived? Days? Months? Possibly even years, depending on how serious the man was about fixing up the place and making it his main residence.

The night air was cool, but not enough to make Kit shiver as she walked the path to her tree. Like the larder, it wouldn’t be hers much longer. They’d have to find somewhere to live. Something permanent this time, because she was never risking this feeling of utter loss ever again.

She set the lantern on the ground and nestled into the crook of the tree. The night was quiet, the only noise the water rushing below.

Everything she’d counted as blessings this morning was gone. Why would God pull her toward Him only to knock her down again? What purpose did He have letting loss after loss pile upon her this way? Was it punishment for waiting too late to come to Him?

She knew it wasn’t, but it felt a bit like that.

“Why?” she cried into the darkness. “Why would you let this happen? Why this way?”

She called into the night, pouring her heart out in sentences that repeated themselves over and over because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, couldn’t move past the single thought of why. There was something more behind her words, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She could only hope that Daphne was right and God listened to the heart and not the words. Because Kit’s words were a jumbled mess of accusations and pleadings, even though her heart desperately wanted to trust that God had some sort of plan in all of this.

Eventually the words ran out and that strange peace she’d felt earlier in the day returned. She climbed out of her tree, picked up her lantern, and trudged her way back to the house.

While she was finding the strength to trust God right now, she needed to make sure she helped everyone else find it, too. They’d looked to her for years, some of them more than a decade, and that wasn’t about to stop simply because Kit had a revelation. All that had changed was the direction she was leading them in.

This was the only home the children had ever known, and soon the women were going to have to tell them they were going to have to leave, that the home had, in truth, never really been theirs to start with.

Two figures were sitting on the steps to the porch as Kit approached.

Kit bit her lip. Would Jess stay? When everything happened, when they figured out where to go, would Jess stay with them? She’d become family, and the idea of her leaving made Kit’s heart hurt.

But she could only handle one thing at a time. Jess would make her own decision when the time came.

Kit walked up to her friends, waiting for them to say something, anything. But they didn’t. They simply came to her, one standing on each side with an arm around her shoulders. And together they walked back into the house.

But Kit was still too restless to sleep, so she took her lantern to the library. It was quiet and dark, but that didn’t make it any less beautiful to Kit. She stood in the middle, looking around at the one and only room in the house that hadn’t been touched, the only one that truly looked the way a room in an aristocrat’s country manor should look.

The owner, the heir, would expect the entire house to look like this when he arrived. They had to put an entire house back to rights, to replace all the furniture and paintings that had been stored in the caretaker’s cottage. To extract everything a decade of children had tucked away in corners and cabinets.

Kit moved to the desk and sat, her movements slow and measured. She would trust.

She would not panic, she would not give in to the need to frantically pull everything that mattered close to her. She would put one foot in front of the other, make the best decisions she could with the information she had, and trust that God had a plan, that He was in control.

After all, He cared more about these children than she ever could. Somewhere along the way, Kit had forgotten that.

She prepared a quill and took out a clean sheet of paper. After taking a deep breath, she dipped the quill in the ink and began to write. The longer the list got, the more inclined she was to panic, but she staved it off with deep breaths. Better to get the list down tonight so that tomorrow, when hopefully everything looked and felt a bit better, they could get on with the business of doing what needed to be done, of putting one foot in front of the other, of moving forward to see where God was going to take them.

Twelve years ago, when she and Daphne had moved in to this house, she’d refused to think about the fact that this day was coming, that one day the house would be sold or inherited and eventually someone was going to want to do something with it. She’d pushed it away then because to think about it would mean that she couldn’t have what she so desperately wanted.

She wasn’t going to do that this time; she couldn’t do that this time. Whatever solution they came up with needed to be permanent, needed to last. And that went for more than just the house.

While Yatesbury didn’t have a whole lot of transportation options, Calne was a different matter entirely. The stagecoach schedule was a bit sparse, but there were plenty of options Priscilla could have taken, depending on where she’d decided to go.

Porter, Nash’s man from London, had apparently decided she was going south, though Graham had no idea how the man had come to that conclusion. He only knew that a very helpful innkeeper had told them he’d sold a ticket to the man.

No one remembered seeing Priscilla, however, which was odd because normally Priscilla was so memorable.

It wasn’t her appearance, which was admittedly rather nondescript and average. It had much more to do with what happened when she opened her mouth. Regular social discourse wasn’t Priscilla’s finest gift. It wasn’t unusual for her to start a conversation with an observation about how sound travels through water differently than it does the air.

Which meant that if Priscilla had gone through Calne, she’d done so quietly.

That, more than anything, worried Graham. He was so tired of people feeling like they had to hide themselves away from the world. A voice in the back of his mind tried to remind him that he’d never really known what it felt like to be ashamed. Deeply ashamed. With the sort of guilt that rode a person for the rest of their life. But he couldn’t accept that any shame was worth cutting the ones you loved out of your life with a knife of secrets.

“What are we going to do?” Oliver said, tapping his fingers against his thigh.

“Get some tea,” Aaron said, pointing to a local teahouse across the street from the inn they’d just exited after another unsuccessful round of questions.

“How is that going to help find Priscilla?” Oliver asked.

“It won’t.” Graham clapped a hand on Oliver’s shoulder and directed him across the street. “But we might as well have something to drink while we mull over our next options.”

They sat in silence at a table in the back corner of the teahouse. Graham didn’t know what anyone else was thinking, but he was struggling with the fact that his resolve to become helpful hadn’t seemed to last very long. So far he hadn’t been able to make a whit of difference anywhere.

Why had God put such a desire in him only to let him falter so miserably?

A body in dark green muslin dropped into the chair in front of him, banging against the table so that his tea sloshed in its cup.

“Please tell me you came in a carriage.”

All three men looked up and blinked. “Priscilla?” Oliver choked out.

“I’m glad I found you, because I’m not quite sure how to get back to Yatesbury. I know you three usually travel on horseback, but is it possible you brought a carriage this time?”

She was here. In a teahouse. Mere miles away from where she’d started days ago. Her brown hair was pulled back and curled, but the coiffure looked the slightest bit crooked. Otherwise, she looked like she could have stepped out of her room in London. Graham blinked again. “Priscilla?”

“I suppose I could hire a conveyance, but I haven’t that much more money on me. I could have stretched it further if I’d ridden on the top or held on to the side, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that. I’m not sure anyone has studied the numbers, but I have to think that the chances of getting injured or killed increase considerably if one is clinging to the outside of the vehicle rather than sitting on the inside.” She frowned. “I find my current condition makes me uncomfortable enough without adding injury to the mix. Of course, if I died I wouldn’t be uncomfortable at all, but injury occurs far more often than death so I wasn’t going to risk it.”

Yes, it was definitely Priscilla.

Aaron chuckled. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell us where you’ve been?”

“Traveling the stage halfway to Sussex and back.” She pointed to Oliver’s tea. “Are you going to drink that?”

Slowly Oliver pushed his tea across the table. “What . . . why . . .”

“I also spent a great deal of money on meat pies. More than I should have. My appetite simply hasn’t been controllable with the baby and all. You did know I was with child, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here?” Priscilla cupped both hands around Oliver’s teacup and lifted it to her lips. She set it back down with a frown. “It needs more cream.”

Graham watched, bemused, as she poured more white liquid into the tea. He loved Priscilla. She was his strange, adorable pseudo-sister, but as a man he really couldn’t fathom how in the world she’d managed to get in this condition. Who had braved the verbal onslaught to even try?

“Yes,” Oliver said, gently brushing a curl back from her face. “I know.”

Priscilla’s thin eyebrows scrunched together as her lips pushed out. Graham had seen this look many times before. Priscilla was thinking. It might take minutes or it might take days, but she’d let them know when she was finished.

While they were waiting, he ordered Oliver another cup of tea.

Finally, Priscilla sighed. “I’d rather you didn’t know, but since you’re here now, I don’t suppose there’s any way of convincing you to forget it.”

Oliver turned sideways in his chair and gripped Priscilla by the shoulders. “Why would you have me forget such a thing? I want to help you, Priscilla. I’d never make you hide in some cottage while you dealt with this on your own.”

“I know. I just didn’t want to be the reason that you and Father finally stopped speaking entirely.”

Graham rather thought her disappearance had the opposite effect. Oliver had talked to his father more in the past month than he had in years.

Her gaze dropped to the tea as if she wanted to drown herself in the cup. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

Aaron coughed. “Have you met your brother? What made you think he’d be perfectly happy not seeing or hearing from you for seven months?”

Oliver’s face scrunched up as he snuck a glance toward Priscilla’s middle. “Is that how long it takes?”

“No,” Priscilla groaned. “It takes longer. Mrs. Corbet says she thinks I have another four months or so. She should know. She acts as the village midwife sometimes. Not officially or anything, but sometimes it takes a while for the one in Avesbury to arrive.”

Graham’s head spun with the extra information. It didn’t matter if there were three of them and one of Prissy. If they didn’t get a handle on this conversation she’d soon have them making all sorts of promises they had no intention of keeping. So he cut through the chatter and got to the heart of the matter. “Who’s the father, Prissy?”

“I know I’m not the best at dealing with people, Wharton, but I do know better than to tell you that. It’s taken care of.” She frowned. “At least I think it is. She said it would be when she dropped me off with those charming people in Yatesbury. The Corbets. Have you met them? They’re lovely.”

“Yes, I have and they are, but Prissy, the man—”

“Mrs. Corbet is going to take care of the baby for the first year or so. She’s having one of her own, so she’ll be producing milk. I think that’s fascinating how the body only makes milk when it’s had a baby. That’s probably why men don’t produce milk even though they’re similarly built in the torso. Well, not completely, but enough that it’s curious. I wish I knew how that worked. Mrs. Corbet assures me her body will adjust to feed both the babies, which I find remarkable. I considered staying around just to see it happen, but that would defeat the purpose.”

“Is there a magic word to make you stop talking?” Aaron asked as he dropped his head forward until it rested on the table.

“If there is I don’t know it,” Priscilla said with a shrug. But she didn’t immediately start talking again either. Instead, she spun the teacup around in circles, watching the swirls of liquid inside.

“I don’t like the idea of leaving the baby behind, but I don’t know that I’d be a very good mother.”

Oliver wrapped his hand over hers. “You could be a wonderful mother. I have that little estate, you know, the one from Mother. It doesn’t produce much income, but it’s small and out of the way. I can take you there. You don’t have to do this.”

“He won’t marry me, you know.”

Oliver swallowed and glanced at Graham and Aaron as if they would be able to help him out of this situation.

Given the fact that Graham was considering running from the teahouse, he wasn’t going to be much help.

Aaron, on the other hand, didn’t seem uncomfortable, now that the rattling stream of words had slowed to a normal speed. He leaned his elbows on the table. “The father?”

She nodded. “I think he kissed me that first time just to make me stop talking. Then I kept him there because I’d never felt that way before. I wanted to . . .” She sighed again. “Well, I suppose I wanted to experiment, and I didn’t think it through completely.”

Graham ran a finger around his neck under his cravat. He did not want to have this conversation, wasn’t even sure he should be here for it. Wasn’t this something she and Oliver should discuss elsewhere?

But Priscilla wasn’t done talking. “It was interesting at first, observing people and learning the easiest ways to slip off alone.” She glanced around at the three men. “In case you were wondering, the second drawing room in Mrs. Blanchard’s house has a strange little nook to the right of the second set of windows. Two people can fit in there quite easily and, er, converse without being seen.”

“I don’t—” Graham started to speak and then thought better of it, particularly since Priscilla hadn’t actually stopped.

“But I don’t want to ever hear of any of you using it. Even if you find a curious idiot like me.” Her gaze dropped back to her teacup. “I know I shouldn’t have done it, but . . . I, well, I’m not very good at social interactions but Ch—er, he didn’t seem to mind my awkwardness, and I suppose I wanted to not feel so alone. And then all I felt like was a fool.”

“You’re not a fool,” Aaron said gruffly.

She shrugged. “I suppose not. If I were a man, I’d probably be considered a genius, but as a woman I’m simply odd. But I wasn’t smart this time, and I got myself into rather a lot of trouble.”

“You didn’t do this to yourself, Prissy. I want to know who the father is.” Oliver’s hand curled into a fist.

“Why?” Priscilla said with a roll of her eyes. “So you can get yourself shot at dawn? No, this was my fault. I was hardly the first woman he, er, experimented with, but I am the one with child. As the variable in the situation, it’s my fault.”

There was so much wrong with Prissy’s statement Graham didn’t know where to start. He did know they really needed to make this a bit more private. “Let’s go back to the inn, shall we? Perhaps have this conversation elsewhere?” Preferably without Graham being a part of it. Priscilla might be the closest thing to a sister he would ever have, but this was all a bit much for him.

Then again, it was probably a bit much for Priscilla, and she didn’t have the choice to walk away.

They escorted Priscilla into a private dining room at the inn they’d chosen earlier. Then Oliver went to see about securing her a room for the night while Aaron went to arrange for dinner.

Priscilla twiddled her fingers together as she leaned against the table. “How did you find me anyway? How did you even know to come looking?”

Graham wasn’t sure how to explain it so he kept his answer simple. “The woman told me you were missing.”

Priscilla’s eyes widened. “You know The Governess?”

Everything on her face narrowed until she seemed to be piercing Graham with her eyes.

Was she angry? Why was she angry?

One of her long, thin fingers poked him hard in the middle of the chest, and she stepped as close as her rounded front allowed, which was fairly close since she wasn’t really all that large yet. “Everyone has told me that curiosity was going to get me in trouble. I’ve been stuck in bed with a cold for weeks, broken my arm, and suffered enough bee stings to make me look like a spotted laurel plant. All of those were temporary and rather minor and entirely my own fault because I can’t seem to stop until a question is answered.

“This time the fact that another party was involved, one who knew more than I did, knew the answers, knew the risks, and participated in my experiment anyway without any intention of being around for the possible ramifications, well, let’s just say I have decided I don’t like him very much. I’ve enough obstacles stacked against my chances of marriage. Throwing an illegitimate child in makes it fairly impossible. But he didn’t care.”

She jabbed her finger repeatedly into Graham’s chest. “I don’t like him, Graham. He is not a nice man. The Governess doesn’t deal with nice men. She’s the last hope for people like me. So to find out that you are one of those men makes me very sad indeed. So whoever she was, you find her and you marry her right now, or I will follow you around telling you the most disgusting facts I’ve ever learned until your ears bleed.”

Graham’s mouth dropped open. She thought . . . Now it was Graham’s turn to be angry. “I am not one of ‘those men.’ I can’t believe you would think that of me. And I didn’t know she was The Governess—really ridiculous name, by the way—until a few days ago. I knew her simply as Kit.”

Priscilla’s expression cleared instantly into her vague, simple smile, and she stepped back. “Oh. Well, that’s good, then, isn’t it?”

Graham was still standing there with his mouth slightly agape when Aaron and Oliver returned.

“I’m taking you home,” Oliver announced as he guided Priscilla to a chair at the dining table.

“That’s not going to solve the problem,” Priscilla said with a sigh.

No, it wouldn’t. Graham dropped into a chair himself, quietly contemplating. It was becoming easier to understand why there were women who desperately needed Kit’s sort of assistance. But Priscilla had Oliver, and she had Aaron and Graham. Which meant there had to be another way, had to be some means to keep Priscilla’s baby with the family.

There was one option, of course, one thing that would make all of the problems go away. He could marry Priscilla himself. The fact that he wasn’t the least bit attracted to her and really didn’t want to marry her was part of the reason he didn’t voice such an idea. The other part was because he hadn’t quite gotten rid of the fantasy of sharing his life with a certain woman who had dark blond hair and bright blue eyes.

He’d never follow through on that dream. It had been a little too damaged by reality. But as long as it still lingered, he couldn’t imagine marrying anyone else.

He would protect Priscilla, support her, make sure she and the baby never wanted for anything, but he couldn’t marry her. He wasn’t noble enough to sacrifice himself to a life like that.

Priscilla probably wouldn’t accept him anyway, but he wasn’t sure enough of that to ease his conscience and risk the offer.