instant.” She raised her ruler.
“I didn’t do it!” Nicholas repeated as he rose to his feet and faced their teacher pugnaciously.
“How dare you defy me?” Miss Emerson cried, looking a little frightened. “Go to your room.”
“But he’s telling the truth,” Juliana protested. “It was Crandall who did it. I saw him.”
Nicholas’s cold dark gaze turned to Juliana. The governess whirled to look at her, too, her face alight with anger.
“Don’t lie to me, young lady,” she told Juliana sternly.
“I’m not lying!” Juliana exclaimed, incensed. “I don’t lie. It was Crandall. Nicholas didn’t do anything.”
Her words seemed only to infuriate the woman even more. “Has he corrupted you already? Or are you simply of the same sort of seed? No doubt that is why you, too, have been cast upon the world. Having to depend on others’ generosity…”
Tears sprang into Juliana’s eyes, and she was filled with a desire to fling herself at the woman, kicking and hitting.
“It’s a good thing we don’t have to depend on your generosity,” Nicholas told the governess, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. “It’s clear you haven’t any.”
“Go to your room. Right now. Let’s see how defiant you are tomorrow after no supper tonight.”
“That’s not fair!” Juliana cried.
“And you, miss, will go stand in the corner until I tell you otherwise. I suggest you think over your actions just now and ask yourself whether a proper lady would say and do the things you just did.”
Nicholas strode out of the schoolroom and into a small room adjoining it, slamming the door behind him.
Juliana took up her place in the corner, and later, when Miss Emerson allowed her to return to her lessons, she kept her mouth shut and ignored Crandall’s smug looks. During luncheon, she sneaked a few bits of food into her pocket. Later, when the children were supposed to be reading but Miss Emerson had nodded off in her chair and the others had taken the opportunity to lay their own heads down on their desks to nap, Juliana crept over to Nicholas’s door and eased it open.
Nicholas was standing on a chair, gazing out the high window, and he whipped around at her quiet entrance. Frowning, he hopped lightly down from the chair and came over to her.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in a none-too-friendly whisper. “The Dragon’ll punish you if she catches you.”
“She’s asleep,” Juliana whispered back, reaching into her pocket, then pulling out the napkin and passing it across to Nicholas.
He looked down at the roll and ham that Juliana had secreted there. He looked up at her questioningly. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I thought you would be hungry,” she replied simply.
He looked at her for another moment, then began to eat.
“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” he told her.
“Give you food?”
He shrugged. “And contradict the Dragon. Crandall is always right, you see. And I am always wrong. That is the way to get along at Lychwood Hall.”
“I don’t understand. That’s not fair.”
Again he shrugged, the look in his eyes far older than his years. “Doesn’t matter. That’s how it is.” He jerked his head toward the door. “You’d better go now.”
Juliana nodded and crossed the room quietly. As she reached for the doorknob, Nicholas said quietly, “Thanks.”
Juliana turned and smiled at him. He had smiled back at her, that rare, sweet smile that transformed his face. In that moment, the bond between them was formed.
The lessons Juliana learned on the first day were confirmed in the days that followed. Crandall and Seraphina Barre were never wrong and never punished. Nicholas was invariably held to blame for whatever misdeed occurred.
Juliana complained to her mother about the governess’s unfairness, but her mother shook her head, the anxious frown that was becoming more and more familiar to Juliana forming on her forehead.
“Don’t argue with your governess,” Diana warned Juliana. “Obey her and be a good girl. Do you really think she would act that way on her own? She is hired by Mr. Barre. She would never do anything to cross him. No one here would.”
Juliana had not understood at first exactly what her mother meant, but the very mention of Trenton Barre’s name was enough to still her protests. Juliana found him to be a frightening man—quiet and calm, not a man who raged, but with a cold, flat look in his eyes that could quell anyone. Even Crandall’s whining and tricks would stop short when his father turned that gaze on him.
Nicholas was the only person who would face his uncle’s gaze, his back straight and his head raised, even when he knew that his “impertinence” would inevitably lead to a caning in Trenton Barre’s study.
Juliana had never understood where Nicholas found the courage. However able she was to fight back with Crandall or to stand up to Miss Emerson’s strictures, her spirit always quailed in front of Trenton. Though she called Mrs. Barre “Aunt Lilith,” as Nicholas did, she found herself unable to address Trenton as anything but “sir.” He dropped by their cottage periodically on a courtesy call, and Juliana dreaded the times when he came. Her mother would call her in to greet Mr. Barre, and she would have to join them in the parlor and give him a polite curtsey. Juliana was rarely able to lift her head and look him in the eye, which he seemed to find amusing, and as soon as he waved her away dismissively, she fled to her room and shut herself in for the remainder of his visit.
She knew her mother worried about these visits; she could see the tension in her mother’s face when she heard his voice at the front door. Diana would look Juliana over anxiously, tugging at her braids and retying their bows, smoothing down her skirts, and Juliana was certain that her mother was afraid she would embarrass her or offend Mr. Barre somehow.
When Juliana complained about having to make her polite appearance, her mother would rebuke her. “Don’t say that. The Barres have been very generous to us. We have nowhere to go if they don’t let us stay here. You cannot offend Mr. Barre. And, please, do not say anything to him about that wicked boy.”
“Nicholas is not wicked! It is Crandall who’s the wicked one.”
But the sight of her mother’s pale face, stamped with anxiety, would make her stop. She schooled herself to be polite and endured her hours with Seraphina and Crandall.
At the time, Juliana had not thought about why the Barres had been so generous as to take her in. She had simply accepted it as a part of her life. As she grew older, though, she had wondered at Trenton and Lilith’s generosity. They were not kind-hearted people, by any means, and while it was little enough expense for them to allow Juliana and her mother to live in the empty cottage on the estate, even such a small act of kindness seemed out of character for them. She had once asked her mother about it, but her mother had looked pained and a little frightened, as she
