she suspected, of too little food and too much travelling. If her dog should be sick on the expensive Aubusson rug beneath her feet, they would both be tossed out. The thought made her swallow as the duke watched her intently.
He was beautiful, though the scar across his cheek gave the comeliness an edge of menace and threat. No small wound that, no easy recuperation either. His wife had died three years before at Christmas, the woman at the agency had impressed upon her, so this time of year would hold hard memories.
Yet he had not bade her gone, even with her dog, and had also promised them both some supper. She swallowed again and felt some small hope return. He did not travel to London at all, and this place was as isolated as they came. Perhaps she would be safe for a little while until she could devise a better plan and escape England altogether.
No. She could think of none of it until she ate something for the dizziness was back, whirling around her head in a cloud.
The door had opened, too, three small children peering through behind it, their eyes as dark as their father’s.
Reaching for the back of the sofa to steady herself, Seraphina’s fingers felt too strange to grip and then she was falling down and down and down, the room spinning as she went.
Trey caught her, scowling at the knowledge that she was hardly even the weight of his oldest son. The threadbare velvet in her cloak enveloped him and her animal had made a last-moment leap for safety and sat panting in one corner of the library, the whites in her eyes brushed with fear. Her tail had a strange bend to it.
‘A dog?’ Gareth, his youngest son, rushed over to sit before it, his hand reaching out with care whilst his brother David tossed a variety of cushions from the old sofa, leaving a bed on which to place this unexpected visitor. Terence, his middle child, did nothing but stand and stare and Trey’s heart tumbled in recognition of the familiar lack of response.
Already Miss Moorland was coming around, the colour in her cheeks pale. A thin beading of sweat covered the skin above her top lip and plastered her fringe to her forehead. She looked younger and more vulnerable than she had done awake, the darkness of her lashes a contrast to her hair. When Trey untied the fastening on her cloak to try to give her more air, he saw that the white dress she wore was at least two sizes too big. The pieces of the puzzle of Miss Moorland were not adding up somehow, for the leather in her boots was fine and skilfully fashioned—as fine as her voice and the one pearl she had on a silver chain hanging around her neck.
‘I fainted?’ Her query was laced with horror as she tried to sit up.
‘I would stay lying down for a moment if I was you.’
She ignored him. ‘Melusine?’
‘Is in the corner looking about as alarmed as you are. My son is tending to her.’
‘Thank you.’ The pulse at her wrist raced and Trey thought she might very well faint again. Placing her hand down, he stood.
‘Gareth, bring the hound to Miss Moorland, please. Pick her up. I am assured by this lady that she is the kindest of dogs.’
His youngest son pulled the small animal towards him by the collar, making his best attempt at lifting it, but just as he was about to secure it in his arms, the thing bounded straight out of them and on to the circular table next to the sofa, tipping both it and the ancient urn of Great-Uncle Tobias, with the ornate porcelain-twisted handles and painted woodland scenes, and sending them headlong to the floor.
A thousand pieces shattered around the room in a single loud explosion, causing the hound to simply draw into itself and urinate all over the rug, her whines of apprehension becoming more insistent as a hush fell in the library.
Then Terence began to laugh, a sound Trey had not heard him make in three long years and so foreign that he could not believe he was hearing it. The dog, understanding that one member of the human population in the room was not about to kill it, sidled immediately up to his middle son and waited patiently to be lifted into a careful embrace.
A miracle.
A wonder.
The answer to his prayers.
Though Miss Sarah Moorland, newly arrived from London and now sitting open mouthed on his burgundy-velour chaise-longue, looked very much as if she was going to be violently sick.
Chapter Two
‘Is she a Christmas fairy, Papa? Is that how she mended Terry’s voice?’
The smallest boy stood in front of her, dark eyes watching warily. The oldest child joined him.
‘Did she bring us the dog as a present?’ His voice was imbued with the hope that only children knew how to engender. Even the one who held Melusine looked interested in her answer, though the spell was broken as the Duke of Blackhaven shepherded them away to a further distance.
‘This is your new governess, Miss Moorland, and her dog, Melusine.’
‘How old is she?’ The finger pointed at her puppy looked decidedly grubby, a large and untended cut across the skin above the thumb and Seraphina sat forwards, her mind clearer and the dizziness in her head lessened now, though nausea still roiled in her stomach.
‘A year old. She was born in late November and I found her on my bed on Christmas Day.’
‘Who put her there?’
She had never quite understood how Melusine had come to be asleep in her chamber with a spotted ribbon tied beneath her chin as the sun had come up. Certainly it would not have been her father’s or her brother’s doing and her mama had been a long time dead.
‘Someone who knew I needed her, I think,’ she replied, and left it at that. She suspected it to be the cook at Moreton Manor, for the woman had always been a faithful servant.
Blackhaven was watching her carefully, measuring her person, weighing her up. After such a start, Seraphina was afraid that she would be thrown out on her head before the night fell properly, the darkened freezing landscape of Essex completely foreign. If this was to be the case, then it had all been for nothing, this flight, this subterfuge, this foolish dash into the countryside with terror on her heels and freedom on the horizon. The wet patch on the rug seemed to be growing before her eyes.
She had failed. Miserably.
‘Did you come down the chimney, then?’ The oldest child observed her person as though she might disappear, and looking at her smudged white gown Seraphina could see how such a thought could occur. The part of her personality that found a story in everything resurfaced, surprising her, for it had been a long while since the joy of fantasy had taken her in its grip, and she could not understand how, in the middle of one of her darkest hours, such a trait might flourish.
‘No, for I would have been much dirtier if I had, of course. Real fairies would make themselves so tiny so that not a single spot of grime might spoil their dresses because everyone knows that fairy wings are very accurate in the art of flying.’ Trey Stanford looked away, though not before she saw the waning hopes of her teaching the exact sciences to his sons written on his face in a heavy frown. But she could not care. Imagination had a place, too, in the minds of small boys such as these ones.
