Page 8 of Brave New Earl (The Way to a Lord's Heart 1)

Her stomach growled, loudly, as it was all too likely to do when she was hungry. Jean suppressed a wince. Her mother had railed at her for this unladylike trait. As if she did it on purpose! She couldn’t help it if some quirk of her constitution punished her for skipping meals. She required regular, substantial fuel, and her body let her know when she didn’t get it. Mama had taken it as a personal insult that Jean never grew plump on this regimen, another transgression to add to her long list.

The gurgling came again. Time to go down to dinner and press on, even if none of this journey was going as she’d intended.

Dinner was not a comfortable meal, but Benjamin didn’t care. He hadn’t invited his two companions, and he didn’t feel obliged to act the cordial host. His uncle made some remarks about the countryside and his journey. Miss Saunders responded, and Benjamin left them to it as he brooded about his disrupted life. All he asked was to be left alone. Was that so unreasonable? Apparently these two intruders thought so.

They didn’t linger at table. Benjamin led them to the library afterward, eager to get this disruption over with and be rid of his guests. They could be off first thing in the morning. Before he left his bed, preferably. As his uncle and Miss Saunders found seats, he rang the bell. His housekeeper and the nursery staff were awaiting the summons. Geoffrey would be in bed by now. Or ought to be, certainly. Had better be.

A timorous nursery maid arrived first, with Mrs. McGinnis close behind her. Benjamin stood to receive them. “Where’s Nanny?” he asked.

“She retired and went to live with her sister in Devon,” answered the housekeeper.

“What? When did that happen?”

“Two years ago.” Mrs. McGinnis’s expression was bland. “I did discuss it with you, my lord. There was the matter of her pension.”

“Oh, right.” Actually, Benjamin didn’t remember. Two years ago had been a bad time for him. “Why didn’t we hire a new nurse?”

“We did. Two. The first didn’t care for the…conditions here. And you dismissed the second.”

“I?” What could Mrs. McGinnis be talking about?

“The third time she tried to consult you about Master Geoffrey, you told her to get out and never come back. She did.”

Was his own housekeeper trying to make him look bad, Benjamin wondered, conscious of Miss Saunders’s disapproving gaze. He’d thought they got along well enough, but Mrs. McGinnis was sounding remarkably dry. He plumbed his memory. “She carped and whined, didn’t she? And sniveled. She told me Geoffrey ought to be locked up.” In his peripheral vision, Miss Saunders moved. Some kind of involuntary twitch, it seemed to Benjamin. “Perhaps Nanny could come back temporarily,” he suggested.

“She’s eighty this year,” his housekeeper replied. “And not too well, I understand.”

“Ah, I’m sorry to hear that.” Nanny had been his mother’s nurse and then his. But he hadn’t realized she was quite that old. He turned to the nursery maid. “So you care for Geoffrey now?”

The girl gave a nervous nod.

“Lily took over after Christmas, when our last nursery maid left us,” the housekeeper supplied.

“Said she’d rather scrub floors,” the nursery maid added. “But I thought I could manage. Which I nearly didn’t. And then Tom came along to help.”

“Tom?” There was a charged silence. Benjamin grew even more conscious of his audience. But there was nothing for it; he couldn’t hide the fact that he knew of no Tom on his household staff. “Is that the young man with the blanket from this morning?”

The housekeeper nodded. “Yes, my lord. That was Tom.”

“Tom who? What is his last name?”

Mrs. McGinnis straightened like a soldier facing enemy interrogation. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“He doesn’t have any knowledge of his family or their name.”

Benjamin wondered if his uncle was judging him. Miss Saunders undoubtedly was. He could practically feel her disapproval oozing over him. He wanted this finished in short order. “Explain Tom to me,” he demanded. “At once.”

His housekeeper nodded. She looked resolute but not particularly guilty. “Two months ago, Master Geoffrey ran away. We all turned out to search, of course, but we couldn’t find him.”

“Why was I not—”

“It was that time you were in Bath, my lord. We were just about to send for you when Tom turned up with him. He—Tom, that is—had been wandering the countryside, and he came across Geoffrey. He convinced him to return home.”

From the look on the nursery maid’s face, this was a significant feat.

“We found that Geoffrey would listen to young Tom as he would to no one else,” Mrs. McGinnis continued. “They get along a treat. And when I saw that Tom was a cheerful, respectful lad, taking no liberties and offering no back talk, I allowed him to stay on.”

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