Yet a quiet intimacy had begun to form in the air around them as they walked. She couldn’t deny that she longed for more of it.
“It is…not the tidiest of tales, my lord,” she warned.
“Nor is mine,” he murmured. “Ye have nothing to fear from me, Miss Harlow. Ye more than proved yer abilities this afternoon. I would be a fool to remove ye as governess, no matter what ye tell me.”
Decided, she drew in a cold breath. “I am not a gentleman’s daughter.”
He glanced at her, one ebony brow lifted. “That is rather unusual for one in yer position, is it not?”
“Indeed. Some would say it is improper for a woman of common birth to provide instruction for a future Countess. Fortunately for me, Lord Glenrose wasn’t one of them.”
Lord Brenmore chewed on that for a moment. “Go on then,” he urged quietly.
“My father was a bookkeeper for a successful cloth merchant in the town where I grew up—Drayton, in Shropshire. He was not so elevated that he could afford to send me to school, however.”
Her mind drifted back to those early years—happy years. When she wasn’t helping her mother with the running of their small, orderly household, she’d learned her numbers at her father’s knee.
But then the idyllic dream had shattered.
“When I was eight, my mother was struck low with a fever. She was with child at the time. Neither she nor the babe survived.” Amelia swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “It…it broke my father.”
The only sound was the swish of their feet in the grass and the soft breath of Lord Brenmore’s horse as she struggled for a moment to continue. Though it had all happened years ago, Amelia could count the number of times she’d spoken about it on one hand. She reached for control, for the detachment to continue as if she spoke of someone else’s life.
“Theirs was a love match, you see, so the loss of my mother left him in ruins. He sank into such a deep oblivion that his employer was forced to release him. With no source of income, he sought the gambling hells, believing he could use his understanding of numbers to earn what we needed to carry on.”
Lord Brenmore clucked his tongue softly in displeasure, but did not speak.
“Of course, chance and luck do not work that way,” Amelia said, willing her voice to be matter-of-fact. “He risked all—and lost. After that, he turned to drink.”
“And then?” he urged after a long pause.
“And then men came to take him to debtors’ prison.”
Lord Brenmore muttered a soft curse. Everyone knew such a place was little more than a death sentence. Prisoners were put to hard labor under the auspices of repaying their debts, but no one ever seemed to come out free and clear. No, eventually the work broke even the strongest men.
“And what of ye?” Lord Brenmore asked.
Amelia drew in a wobbling breath. “I was lucky. I might have been sent to an orphanage, for although my father still lived, I was for all intents and purposes an orphan. But some kind soul took pity on me—or perhaps my knowledge of numbers had been noted. Either way, I was sent to a charity school for impoverished youth instead.”
At only nine years of age, she’d been terrified that first night at the school. The rows of cots had seemed endless, and the darkness had been smothering once the candles were snuffed.
But a girl in a nearby cot had whispered her name—Joan—and told Amelia that all would be well. She’d fallen asleep with tears dampening her pillow, but come morning, she found she had her first friend in Joan.
“Some of the girls there had been orphaned. Others were sent by parents who couldn’t afford to put food in their bellies. The idea was to give us a basic education—reading, writing, and rudimentary arithmetic—along with additional skills training so that we might find respectable employment as domestics or in factories. It was a far cry from the boarding schools of the upper classes, but that school must have saved hundreds of girls from the slums—and the work they would have been forced into there.”
Amelia felt Lord Brenmore’s gaze on her. She found him staring at her with an unreadable light in his pale eyes. “Remarkable,” he murmured. Slowly, he tugged his gaze away and fixed it on the landscape once more. “But how did ye manage to leverage a charity school education into a position as a governess?”
“I threw myself into my lessons,” she replied, smiling faintly. “It was an escape from the harsher aspects of life at the school. Reading in particular seemed pure magic to me. The idea that a few splotches of ink could transport me from the school into a whole new world—well, I couldn’t get enough.”
Many a time had Amelia been subjected to the stern chastisement of the head mistress for dallying over a book. She’d even been made to scrub the floors more than once as punishment for burning through dozens of precious candles in order to finish a beloved novel or travel narrative.
“As I grew older, instead of finding work outside the school, I was asked to stay and help instruct the younger children. In addition to making myself useful, I found I had a knack for teaching.”
“From what I saw at the Timms’s cottage, ye have more than just a knack.” Lord Brenmore’s comment was spoken evenly, yet it caused proud heat to rise in Amelia’s chest. “I wonder where such passion comes from,” he added, watching her out of the corner of his eye.
“I learned a few years after my arrival at the school that my father had died of a lung ailment in debtors’ prison,”
