“That afternoon I took Anna in the carriage, Gray driving, to town to have her feet measured for a new pair of evening shoes and a pair of serviceable boots for everyday use. Bartholomew had left me reeling within the confines of the schoolroom, but his own thoughts had been, it seemed, entirely unclouded, since he had left instruction with Gray to bring the carriage to the front of the house and to call on me when it was ready. The man did, offering me that sideways smirk I loathed as he told me he was ready to “take” me into town, managing to make it appear that he was to sling me over his shoulder, like a ravisher in a bad romance epic.
“Thank you, Gray,” I said in a tone sharp as vinegar, then turned away from him. I shivered as I felt his eyes on my back before he left the room. Why would my cousins employ this man? I wondered as I heard the door close. Brown was bad enough but at least he was only surly, and I knew he had reason to be so now, but Gray? They hardly needed two grooms, and Gray was a man who could make the most secure flesh creep with disgust. I felt always as if he was undressing me in his mind when we were in a room together, and it would not have been a gentle undressing, or one performed with my consent. I did not like, either, the way he looked at Anna. Much as I wanted my cousins to notice her, I did not want a man like Vincent Gray de Silva, as I had found his full name was, to do so. The way he noticed her was the way he noticed me. Anna was still too much a child to find ways to defend herself against a man like him.
It was hard enough as a woman.
I had Anna change into a good dress, one of the few she had which did not strain too hard on her shoulders and sides, and changed myself into another gown, in my habitual black. The time it took to dress Anna and myself gave me a little time to try to put my thoughts in order. What did Bartholomew want of me? His sudden kiss this time had been as different as it was possible to be from the last encounter between us in the schoolroom. Did he have gentle thoughts for me, or were his motives seeded only by the desire I knew now that he did harbour for me? And just where did I expect this to lead? Whilst it was not unheard of for men to forget their standing in society and marry a woman beneath themselves, it was never looked upon with approval and it was hardly a common occurrence. And did he really want to marry me, as an honest man might, or were his intentions still, as I feared before, simply to take what he wanted of me by fair means or foul? Perhaps he had decided to try to convince me to be his plaything by pretending rather than simply forcing himself on me?
Each thought, either of dark designs or of good, gave me cause for fear, and rightly so. I had no one in this world to protect me other than my own self and my employers, and one of those employers was the man I was wary of. My father was too far from these lands to be of use to me in such matters and had barely shown an interest in me for the majority of my life in any case. As for my other employer, I could not believe that Beatrice would choose to support me and my moral reputation over that of her brother. As for the last person left to me, myself, it was clear that I could not entirely trust her either, for whilst I had the best of intentions when left alone, it seemed that it took only a touch of a man I desired to turn good intentions to dust.
I felt more alone, more scared than I had ever done before, and yet, even within that fear and loneliness, there was too a sense of excitement that I could not put down, nor leave outside of myself. My own heart was a traitor, willing me on to imagine that these events could have some kind of happy ending only found in sensational novels and the fantasies of the desperate mind. Yet, what if something of this kind, something of happiness and happy endings could come to pass for me? To find myself no longer alone and rootless in this world, but to have a family, a home… a husband? Was it indeed so foolish to believe that I might be loved and desired as others were in this world? That a man might put aside the considerations of society and approval of his peers, and stoop to make a mere governess his wife?
I chastised myself for my dreams, yet I clung to them. I tried to banish them, and I held them within my heart as though I cradled the last light of a dying star.
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