Page 34 of The Earl's Disguised Governess
“That is precisely what I think!” Lady Katherine argued. “For what other option do you have? You refuse to mingle withanybody at social events, and you spend all your other time either in the hospital or with your cousin’s governess.” She moaned in distress, pressing her hand to her head. “You are causing me alarm, Ernest. People are already gossiping.”
“Only because you invite them to watch me try to manage this earldom like a performing animal at a circus!”
“They pity you.”
“And I pity the young girl who lost her family only to watch relatives she did not know parade in here and take over her home!” Ernest shouted. “I will not accept this title with the seriousness you wish me to do so because I had my own life before tragedy struck the Bannerdowns. I will not give that life up.”
“But you must!” she raged. “And if you do not step up to be the guardian of Bannerdown and take your title seriously, then I will.”
Ernest’s mouth parted in surprise. Another side of his mother was rearing its head, and he could not believe her bold proclamation. Then again, was that not what she wanted? To be the centre of attention, to have decisions put down solely for her to make.
“Mother, what truly happened?” he asked quietly. She reared back, surprised by his question.
“What—what do you mean?”
“Why did my father remain in London? What happened between the two of you? Do not evade me this time.”
Lady Katherine paused. He rarely saw his mother nervous and to see it now was quite an image. But she was, and his mother was good at turning every inch of vulnerability into something with an edge, a sharpness that could be cruel. It was her way of enduring.
She lifted her chin, sniffling. “Your father,” she said, her voice dropping into a sneer that he did not understand, “did not wish to ascend into the Ton, even at the cost of our marriage. That is how much I mean to him.”
“And how much the Ton means to you,” Ernest murmured under his breath, shaking his head. For his father did not want the Ton, but his mother had so easily walked away from the marriage, too. “I hope this lavish house comforts your upset over that, Mother.”
“Ernest!” she admonished, but he did not care. He turned on his heel and was already walking out of the parlour by the time she called his name for the second time. He could only think of his father, a hard-working medic, a man who had inspired Ernest all his life, being alone back home in a London townhouse far less grand than anything anyone of the Ton owned. A man who had been gracious and giving—a man whowas comfortable earning his own way with something practical and helpful.
A man who did not seem very suited to Lady Katherine at all, now that Ernest thought about it. Perhaps their marriage truly had come to blows over the difference in satisfaction in society.
***
Sitting in his study, Ernest could not help shaking his head as he leafed through paperwork. Ledgers after ledgers, letters of promises and business proposals, deeds, and written affairs of the estate. Employment records, dowry reports for Lady Florence, and endless information swam before Ernest’s eyes.
The former earl and Matthew, Ernest’s cousin and Lady Florence’s father, had left him many remnants of Bannerdown to sort through. For a moment, Ernest had a terrible thought that, even in the time before their deaths, they could have had some organization. And then he chided himself for such a selfish thought.
Matthew had been his best friend and the former heir. Despite his father—Ernest’s uncle—disapproving of Ernest’s own parents, the two cousins had got along and became fast friends. They had been more like siblings than even the former earl and Lady Katherine. And they were true siblings, although it was clear they had both wished otherwise.
Now Ernest sat where his uncle should have been, and then Matthew, and he should have come and gone to Bannerdown as a guest, visiting, attending parties. Instead, he was the man of the house, the guardian, and the host of those parties.
He despised it, and the guilt ate away at him as time slipped away from him the more he read the figures and drowned himself in this work so he would not have to think of his mother’s threats. For he believed her. He knew that he had a duty to the title and house. He knew that the nobility came with certain requirements, and one of those was to produce an heir to pass everything onto.
“Lest it go to another commoner,” he muttered to himself, laughing humourlessly. Despite his mother growing up in the Ton, she had absconded it and left it to marry Ernest’s father, a commoner, and it was clear she regretted such a decision. It was only this luck that brought them back to her childhood home, taking the place that her brother and his wife should have had.
But Ernest had been a commoner with his father, and he had been happy with his life, really. He had been in awe of Matthew’s life as they grew up, but he had been comfortable, too, wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps of becoming a medic.
“Well, Matthew,” he muttered, thinking of his late cousin. “I do not understand what I am to do in such a situation. Itshould be you here. I wish we were boys again, climbing the apple tree in the orchard.”
The ghosts in Ernest’s life lingered long enough. He did not need to encourage them.
And he was prevented from doing so by a knock on the door. A footman opened the study door, and Ernest finally let himself look up from the ledgers.
“Mr Graham Courtenay, Lord Bannerdown,” he announced. Ernest nodded his acceptance to see his friend.
In strode Graham, his grey-streaked hair pushed back from his forehead, and Ernest swore he looked less fatigued than he had last month when they had stood before the memorial. He looked less … old. For Graham was not old in the slightest, but Ernest thought the battle had aged him.
“Good afternoon,” he said, inclining his head. “I hope you do not mind me intruding—”
“Graham, you are my best friend,” he said. “We have been through too much together for you to still think of yourself as an intruder.”
“Yes, well, we are not the same men who signed up for the king’s army together, are we?” Graham pointedly looked around at the study, polished and graceful.
