Page 9 of Duke of Eccess (Seven Dukes of Sin #4)

Temperance nodded. So, they paid attention to current events, at least. “Well done, Margaret. What is interesting, though, is that during the war, spies use codes to convey information in secret.”

“Oh,” Sophie said, surprised. “Yes, of course I knew that,” she added quickly.

“Well, would you like to solve them?”

Her eyes widened to the size of sovereigns. “Solve the codes?”

“Yes, indeed, solve the codes and tell me what the true message is.”

“Oh!”

“We’ll test your French and see if you could be a French spy.”

Sophie squared her shoulders. “Most certainly I could be a French spy!”

“Very well.” Temperance’s heart lifted a little as she sat down and began writing.

She had to become rather creative with these three—she could see that—but the challenge actually excited her.

They didn’t know that she recognized so much of herself in them.

She saw the boredom in Margaret’s eyes as she kept solving complex trigonometry problems quickly.

She saw the challenge in James’s face as he pretended to ignore her.

And poor dear darling Sophie; all she wanted was attention and recognition, and Temperance had plenty she could give her.

Temperance was careful not to make the codes too difficult, but she also didn’t explain how they worked so that the girl could feel proud to solve them.

James poured some water from a carafe into a glass that looked suspiciously like a whiskey glass and began accurately mimicking the duke. He held the glass with exaggerated ceremony, swirling the water as he’d clearly observed his guardian do countless times.

“Ah, an excellent vintage,” the boy declared in a deeper voice, imitating the duke’s clipped diction. “Nothing like a proper drink to forget one’s troubles.” He took a long sip, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand in a gesture far too worldly for a boy his age.

“How did you manage to catch the mice?” Temperance asked him, as though she had not heard him. “That was a clever thing to do.”

“Ever heard of mouse traps?” he responded without looking at her.

Temperance’s lips twitched with amusement. “I have. Do those mice have the same anatomy as we do?”

He threw her a scowl. “Of course they don’t. Everybody knows that.”

“But do you know how they’re different?”

James hesitated. “No, why would I know that?”

“Well, you seem to have pet mice. Wouldn’t you want to know how to make them more comfortable and how their bodies work? Do you know human anatomy at all?”

It was a tenuous push, but James immediately responded sharply. “I don’t need to know human or vermin anatomy. All I need to do is feed them and keep them. The best thing about them is the volume of the maids’ screaming.”

Margaret uttered a huge yawn, and when Temperance’s focus fell on her, she realized the girl had solved every single trigonometry problem.

Temperance smiled at her with appreciation.

“Well done, Margaret,” she said, writing out a new problem for her.

“I knew you were very bright. But can you solve this?”

And in one way or another, always pushing her limits but never quite testing them, Temperance managed to survive her first day as an official governess with a few mice, a great deal of silence and glaring, but just a little warmth.

Over the next few days Temperance tried to avoid the duke as much as she could, and luckily he seemed to be avoiding her as well.

But the house, though large, simply wasn’t big enough.

She would round a corner and stumble into him walking out of a room, his masculine scent of sandalwood and something distinctly him filling the corridor.

Their eyes would meet, and for a heartbeat, the memory of his mouth on hers would hang between them like a sparkling firework, illuminating emotions Temperance would rather not see.

Once, when she was coming down the stairs with an armload of books for the children, Temperance stumbled on the last step.

The duke’s reflexes were quick, and he caught her arm, pulling her steady against his chest. For a moment she was pressed against his solid warmth, feeling the rapid beat of his heart beneath her palm.

“Careful,” he murmured, his voice rough, and she wondered if he was talking about the stairs or something else entirely.

The casual extravagance of the house made Temperance increasingly uncomfortable.

Her father had always said that displaying wealth was less important than preserving it.

They had lived in elegant sufficiency, never wanting but never wasteful.

The duke seemed to revel in abundance: fresh flowers replaced daily throughout the house despite the winter season, meals elaborate enough for visiting royalty served on a mere Wednesday, rare books purchased but barely read.

Her and the children’s meals were much too extravagant and unnecessarily exquisite, and she could only imagine how the duke ate, even though the servants were inexplicably quite taken with the fact that the duke had forbidden any alcohol to be served or offered to him at all.

Two footmen had argued in whispers about their theories on what had caused the sudden change, and Temperance remembered the letter he’d received during the interview, which pleaded with him to become a changed man—a notion she most certainly approved for the children’s sake.

She’d been raised to appreciate the difference between necessary luxury and ostentation.

Papa had taught her to invest in things that lasted: their laboratory equipment was modest but precise, their library carefully curated rather than vast. Here Temperance watched James break a delicate brass compass without consequence, knowing her father would have made her understand how many servants’ wages it could buy and what she would have to go without in recompense.

Despite being surrounded by opulence, her life as a governess wasn’t easy at all.

The children hid her glass prisms, the delicate balance scales she’d discovered in the duke’s extensive library, and other instruments, replacing them with kitchen implements: a soup ladle, egg whisk, and pewter serving spoons.

But instead of getting angry, Temperance laughed with them and encouraged them to pretend to use them for science as “experimental tools.”

But they were not entirely tamed. The children exchanged Temperance’s volumes of natural philosophy for chapbooks, claiming they were studying “contemporary literature.” One time, James hid Newton’s Principia behind Thomas Archer’s The Bloody Hand .

Another issue Temperance had not anticipated arose every second night or so.

The first time, Margaret had knocked on her bedchamber door begging for her help.

Apparently James was walking in his sleep, mumbling something about his father.

It was impossible to get him to wake up, and the only thing Temperance could do was to follow him, making sure he didn’t fall or hurt himself.

The next morning, neither Margaret nor James gave any indication that she had tried to help them.

But Margaret had come to her door again the next time… and the next.

Even though she knew she wasn’t yet winning them over and the children weren’t cooperating as much as she wanted, she remained composed.

She was Temperance, after all, disciplined by nature and upbringing.

She knew what was important; her future depended on remaining hidden until Christmas Day.

Unlike the previous governesses who’d tried rigid discipline and moral lectures, she decided on a different path.

Where they had demanded immediate obedience, she offered patience and remained polite and positive.

Where they had punished curiosity and questioning accepted norms, she encouraged exploration.

And the children remained ungovernable.

The afternoon before St. Nicholas Day was what changed everything, with Margaret and Sophie, at least, and it made even James curious. Temperance showed them what she’d always been passionate about—electric fluid. It was the whole reason why she was called the “Mad Heiress” in the first place.

Temperance collected a bowl of water, a glass tube, and a glass ball, letting the latter float in the former.

She rubbed the glass tube with rabbit fur to generate electric fluid and charge the tube with it, then moved the tube towards the ball—and it moved away without her ever touching it.

She began playing with this, the children’s eyes lighting up as though she’d just shown them a magic trick.

The three of them took turns moving the ball around, rubbing the tube with rabbit fur each time the charge dissipated.

When Margaret looked at her with wide sparkling eyes and asked, “What else can you teach us?” Temperance knew their busy minds had finally become more interested in the joy of learning than the joy of rebelling.

Of course, James was a little more difficult to get on her side, even though his eyes lit up when she talked about mechanisms and how things work. The following morning, St. Nicholas Day, he revealed where his true interest lay.

When Temperance entered the schoolroom, the boy was looking with boredom at the clock standing on the mantelpiece and asked if he could disassemble it and look inside. Without a thought, she refused. It was working and much too valuable.

James jumped to his feet with his eyebrows drawn together and his mouth twisted in a bitter expression. “I’ll show you.”

Later that afternoon, Temperance noticed James had grown unusually quiet.

Even in just one short week, she’d learned this was actually a warning sign.

She decided not to provoke him further and returned her attention to Sophie’s lesson.

But when she looked up moments later, James had vanished from the schoolroom.

“Where did James disappear to?” she asked Margaret.

Margaret, absorbed in her calculations, said distractedly, “He went to look for more mechanical things to study, since you wouldn’t let him take apart the clock.”

Temperance felt an immediate jolt of alarm, but before she could go and search for him, the housekeeper came into the schoolroom and asked them to join the Duke of Eccess and his friends in the sitting room to share gifts.

Her heart lifted as she remembered yet another wonderful Christmas tradition her father had cherished.

She could almost feel his warm hand on her shoulder as she’d unwrapped the collection he’d acquired from Bologna—the complete works of Professor Laura Bassi on physics and hydraulics.

His eyes had sparkled with delight at her gasp of wonder when she’d found Bassi’s groundbreaking papers on electrical properties inside.

“The first woman to hold a university chair in natural philosophy,” he’d said with such pride, “and her research on electrical phenomena rivals Newton’s own work. To inspire you, my dearest clever girl. With your brilliant mind, you can do anything.”

Together they read aloud from Bassi’s experiments, and such warmth and happiness as she had never known before filled Temperance.

She hoped to see that same joy light the children’s faces when they received their gifts, wishing it would cheer them the way those precious moments of attention and care had always warmed her heart.

This was a test, Temperance knew. Eccess wanted to see how the children had progressed under her care in the presence of polite company.

Her stomach twisted as she shepherded the girls out of the schoolroom. Unfortunately for her, it wouldn’t be a good testimonial of her work if James was missing from such an important evening—but her greater fear was that among Octavius’s guests tonight might be someone who had known her father.

Or worse, someone who could connect her face to the Mad Heiress.