Earl's Invention Read online

  In view of her execrable taste, it was scarcely surprising that Mrs. Powell had failed to achieve her fondest ambition: that of being granted entry into the London ton. Bonnie could tell when the Season or Little Season was under way, for during these months, Mrs. Powell was from home the better part of each day. Bonnie had collected from the remarks of the servants that her employer spent the absent hours driving up one street and down the next, doggedly presenting her calling card to the butler of every lord, lady, and honorable in her path. Insofar as Bonnie knew, Mrs. Powell had never been received by any of these exalted personages, and none of them had ever returned her calls.

  When the ton quit London, Mrs. Powell—undaunted—began to plot her campaign for the next Season; and from time tc time, Bonnie would feel a stab of pity for the wretchee woman. But her heart would harden again the instant she entered the schoolroom because she firmly believed that maternal neglect lay at the root of her endless problems with the children.

  The children. Bonnie instinctively shuddered, then cast another baleful glare at her ruined dress. She had encountered no difficulties in the early months of her employment, when—as

  Mr. Powell had stated—her only pupils were his two daughters. In addition to their mother’s homeliness. Maria and Anne had inherited Mrs. Powell's rather obtuse mind, and neither could be described as an apt student. But the girls were malleable and. for the most part, well-behaved—generally content to sit quietly at the table they shared and at least pretend an interest in the day’s instruction.

  Six or eight months had passed, placidly if not really pleasantly, before Bonnie learned of the grave—and, she suspected, deliberate—oversight Mr. Powell had committed when he engaged her services. She was well aware by then, of course, that Maria and Anne were but the eldest of the Powells' six children and had four little brothers—aged five, four, three, and two. In fact, she felt sure that all the neighbors for miles around were aware of the Powell boys because it was a rare day indeed when an irate homeowner or servant did not drag one of them to the front door and report some dastardly depredation. In the course of Bonnie’s brief employment, two nannies had fled in terror, and the current nursemaid betrayed every indication of following in their wake

  Thus it was that Bonnie heard with alarm—nay, horror—Mr Powell’s casual pronouncement that as each boy reached the age of six, he would be joining his sisters in the schoolroom. Nor did she derive significant comfort from Mr. Powell's addendum that his sons would remain in her charge only until they could be sent away to school. That would be several years per boy at the least, she reckoned, and probably far more, for she strongly doubted that any boarding school in England would tolerate Mr. Powell's unruly offspring above a day or two.

  But she could not decline the responsibility, not without resigning her post, and she figuratively squared her shoulders and resolved to make the best of the situation. A governess worthy of the name could control even the most obstreperous six-year-old, she reasoned; and during the week prior to the scheduled amval of Teddy—the eldest boy—in the schoolroom, she composed and rehearsed a firm little speech on the subject of gentlemanly conduct. Teddy listened to her address with rapt attention and, upon its conclusion, loosed a mouse from a box beneath his desk, sending his sisters and Bonnie herself shrieking into the corridor.

  The mouse was but the first specimen in a vast zoological array. Over the course of the ensuing years—or so Bonnie was persuaded—the Powell boys enlivened the schoolroom with every species of rodent native to Britain and a number of the indigenous reptiles, amphibians, and insects as well. When inclement weather inhibited their search for loathsome creatures, they were inclined to turn their hands to devilish feats of engineering. For example, on the rainy day of Lucas’ debut in the schoolroom, he and Teddy nailed shut the drawer of Bonnie’s desk, and she broke all her fingernails before she glimpsed the metal heads in the wood. This trick so delighted its perpetrators that the following year, when Oliver came to join his brothers, the three boys nailed the schoolroom door closed. Having recently decided that the boys might cease their pranks if she ignored them, Bonnie refused to acknowledge their pounding until it was too late, and she and the girls were trapped inside the schoolroom for upwards of two hours.

  However, most of the boys’ escapades were not so complicated. They often tied strings between adjacent pieces of furniture, and twice Bonnie had been sufficiently incautious to trip over one of these obstacles. No, she amended, she had tripped on innumerable occasions; twice she had actually fallen. A favorite variation on this theme was to tie the items on Bonnie’s desk together—cleverly hiding the string, of course—so that when she picked up the text of the topic under discussion, all her books, papers, pencils, et cetera, tumbled to the floor. She had long since lost track of the number and variety of unsavory articles that had dropped on her head when she opened the schoolroom door, crashed into her back when she dared to tum it; been planted on. in, or under her desk.

  All of which might have been bearable, she sometimes thought, if her life outside the schoolroom had offered any

  compensation for her trials within. But it did not. for her roseate dreams of London had failed most abysmally to materialize. She had seen enough of the city to own that it boasted a myriad of charms and entertainments, but her duties left her too little time, too little energy, to enjoy them. And—the primary obstacle—she had far too little money to finance the shopping excursions and theater outings she’d planned. She did not know the “prevailing” wages of a governess, for she was not acquainted with any other women in her profession. She only knew that the tiny salary Mr. Powell provided barely covered her expenditures for underclothing and the occasional book or box of candy. Her “new” dress—the one which now lay in ruins on the counterpane—had cost every farthing she had saved in nearly four years of employment, and in the year since its purchase, she had accumulated but five pounds more.

  The strains of a piano wafted up from the music room below Bonnie’s bedchamber, and she could not repress a wry smile at this reminder of the last and greatest of her disappointments. Endowed with the bitter wisdom of hindsight, she wondered how she could possibly have believed Mr. Powell’s assurance that she would have “suitors in droves” once she came to London. How she herself could have entertained visions of “thousands” of young men thronging the streets, all wildly eager to court a greenheaded governess from Stafford. The truth was that after four years and ten months in the Powell household, she had met but one prospective parti, and him only six months since, when Mrs. Powell had engaged Mr. Percy Crawford to instruct the girls in music.

  There was no denying that Mr. Crawford was “suitable”: Bonnie estimated him to be about thirty years of age, and he had once mentioned that his father was a clergyman as well. Nor was there much doubt that he was, in fact, eager to initiate a courtship. They had first met at Mrs. Powell s insistence to discuss the practice sessions Bonnie was to conduct between the girls’ weekly lessons, and Mr. Crawford had subsequently seized upon this excuse to have Bonnie summoned to the music room nearly every week. Here— randomly, maddeningly striking the keys of the piano all the while—he managed to extend what should have been a five- minute conversation to half an hour or more. Mr. Crawford's discourse was normally as pointless as his idle plunking on the piano, but on the occasion of their last encounter, he had broadly hinted that Bonnie might wish to accompany him to Vauxhall Gardens some evening.

  Bonnie had affected not to comprehend his invitation because she did not find Mr. Crawford in the least attractive. From her childhood, when Mama and Papa had told her tales of bold knights and handsome princes. Bonnie had carried a mental portrait of the quintessential man—tall and lean, with coal-black hair and eyes of sapphire blue—and she was hard put to imagine a human male who resembled this image less than Mr. Crawford. She had long since recognized, of course, that the man of her dreams—like the London of her dreams— probably did not exist; and she was
prepared to overlook one or two deficiencies. She might have forgiven Mr. Crawford his diminutive stature or his stooped shoulders, his dun- colored hair or his small gray eyes; but she couldn't accept them all in combination.

  Which was a rather high-handed attitude, Bonnie conceded, for she was no longer the "pretty young woman" Mr. Powell had professed to admire in Stafford. Her hair was still an arresting shade of pale red (though it hadn’t been properly cut in months), and she did have Mama's lovely brown-gold eyes. But she had lost almost a stone since her arrival in the city, and by the end of an exhausting day in the schoolroom, she feared she looked positively gaunt. She would study her reflection with dismay, noting how very sharp her cheekbones seemed, how hollow her cheeks, how pointed her chin. She was only four-and-twenty, but when she was in a particularly pessimistic frame of mind, she would fancy she appeared nearly as old as Mrs. Powell.

  The mantel clock struck half past three, and Bonnie started.

  The girls’ lesson ended at four, and if she was to leave, she must escape the house before then, before Mr. Crawford could desire a servant to call her to the music room. And there was no ‘‘if’ about it, she chided herself. However painful the prospect of slinking back to Aunt Grace, it was an inevitable fact of nature that her aunt could not survive much longer. The Powell boys, on the other hand, would still be alive, thriving, and no doubt wreaking havoc in the schoolroom a dozen years hence, by which time Bonnie would have grown so old and haggard that even Mr. Crawford would no longer wish to court her.

  There remained only to inform Mr. Powell of her decision, and Bonnie had concluded as she packed that a personal conversation might well lead to an argument about her failure to grant him proper notice. She had consequently left a sheet of stationery, an envelope, and a pencil on the desk; and she now rose from the bed and traversed the few steps to the writing table. She perched on the chair in front of the desk, nervously aware of the minutes ticking away on the mantel clock, and abandoned her effort when it chimed a quarter till four. What was she to say? That his beloved sons were such bestial monsters that she couldn’t bear another day of their torment? No, Mr. Powell would simply have to infer from her empty bedchamber that she had left his employ forever.

  Bonnie jumped up from the chair and returned to the bed, closed her portmanteau and set it on the floor. She had previously laid her threadbare pelisse and battered French bonnet on the counterpane, and she hastily donned them, hung the chain of her reticule over one arm, and picked up her bag. It was so light that she frowned around the room again, but with the exception of the ink-stained dress and the items on the desk, it was, indeed, empty. She crept to the door, cracked it open, and—hearing the reassuring trill of scales from the music room—stole along the corridor, down the stairs, and out the front door.

  Eager to distance herself from the house as speedily as she could, Bonnie hurried down Orchard Street toward Oxford, which, at any rate, she judged the best place to hail a hackney coach. It was an unusually warm day for early spring, and by the time she reached the intersection, she was perspiring most uncomfortably. She set her bag down, removed her cloak and draped it over her arm, then retrieved her portmanteau and began to search the approaching traffic for an empty hackney.

  It was a busy time of day in Oxford Street, the time when many of Bonnie's betters repaired to Hyde Park for an afternoon drive, and she soon grew quite entranced by the passing parade of barouches and curricles and phaetons and the elegant passengers they bore. The experience was rather akin to pressing one's nose to a shop window, she reflected—admiring merchandise one couldn’t possibly afford—and she was so very intrigued that she momentarily failed to register the identity of an oncoming landau. When she did. her knees weakened with dread, for there was no mistaking Mr. Powell’s distinctive carriage. He normally did not return from his office in the City till half past four, half an hour before dinner, but Bonnie lacked the leisure to wonder why his schedule had been disrupted. She would not confront him at this late juncture, she thought frantically, and as she gazed desperately about for some avenue of escape, she glimpsed a hackney coach on the opposite side of the street.

  One vehicle now lay between her and Mr. Powell’s landau, but it was still some yards away, and Bonnie dashed in front of it and halted in the middle of the road. The hackney was also at a considerable distance, but it was proceeding toward her at a rapid pace, as was the curricle just ahead of it. However, Bonnie calculated that she could outrace the latter carriage, and she jerked up her portmanteau, rested it against her hip. and darted forward.

  She remembered her pelisse only when it was too late, only when it slipped off her arm and tangled round her pounding feet. She began to stumble, and she instinctively dropped her bag, but it was, again, too late; she was hopelessly off- balance. She heard the shout of the curricle driver, the pro

  testing squeal of his horses as he sought to rein them in, but she could only lurch ahead, closer and closer to the flying hooves and clattering metal wheels. Until, at last, she collided with a hard obstacle and everything went black.

  2

  "Come now, try to look at me. That’s right; I want to see your eyes."

  Bonnie had had this experience before: that of being aware, within a dream, that she was dreaming. Specifically, she was dreaming of her eighth birthday, when—against Papa’s express instructions—she had climbed the oak tree in the rear garden of the rectory and fallen almost ten feet to the ground. Her first memory following the fall had been of Dr. Harding prying her eyes open one at a time, peering into them, asking her to look at him. Though, as so often occurred in dreams. Dr. Harding’s appearance was wrong. His eyes were warm and kind and brown, and the eyes staring intently into hers were a frosty gray.

  "She does not seem to have been concussed.” The physician’s words to Papa were precisely those Bonnie recollected, but his dream-voice was as distorted as his dream-eyes: a high-pitched voice entirely unlike Dr. Harding's pleasant baritone.

  "And you’re certain she has no broken bones?”

  Papa didn’t sound like Papa either, Bonnie reflected. In fact. Papa sounded rather like Dr. Harding should sound; dreams were so peculiar.

  "I said I am certain none of her major bones is broken,”

  Dr. Harding snapped. “When she begins to move about, she may well discover a small fracture or a cracked rib. Indeed, I shall own myself astonished if she does not. I should not expect a slight young woman to crash full tilt into a moving carriage without suffering some ill effect."

  The dream was altogether ceasing to make sense now, Bonnie thought groggily. Which was just as well because she did not care to relive the well-deserved paddling she had received the day after her eighth birthday. Papa and Dr. Harding continued to talk for a time, their words a mere buzz in her ears, and at length, she drifted into dreamless oblivion.

  Bonnie opened her eyes and lay still a moment, frowning in puzzlement. As nearly as she could gauge from the shadows in her bedchamber, it was early evening, and she never slept in the afternoon. Well, she amended, she did occasionally nap on a Sunday, after church and midday dinner, but she was quite certain this was Monday. Which meant that if she had, in fact, fallen asleep and dozed till six or seven o’clock, she had missed dinner; and she wondered why no servant had been sent to wake her. Thin as she was, she could ill afford to skip a meal, and she judged it best to go to the kitchen at once, before Mrs. Parr—the enormous cook—could wolf down all the leftovers herself. She sat quickly up and gasped as an unexpected bolt of pain shot through her right shoulder.

  “Ah, you are awake."

  It was a male voice, and even as Bonnie bristled with fury at the notion that Mr. Powell had invaded the sanctity of her bedchamber, she began to remember the events of the day. Someone had poured ink in her chair, she recalled, and she had packed her portmanteau and left the house in Portman Square. And then . . .

  A dim figure materialized from the shadows, bent and lighted the lamp on t
he bedside table, and when he straightened, Bonnie gazed up at him. And then she had been struck by a carriage, she recollected. And apparently she had died

  and ascended to Mama’s “better place,” for the man who stood beside the bed looked exactly like the one she had envisioned. No, not exactly, she corrected: this man’s nose was a trifle longer than that of the man she’d pictured, and his black hair was threaded here and there with gray. But the tall, spare frame was the same, and the dark, lean face; and his eyes truly were the color of sapphires.

  She continued to stare at him until he perched on the edge of the bed, at which point she decided that he probably wasn’t an angel after all. She was under the impression that the “better place” was inhabited by incorporeal spirits, and the mattress definitely gave under the weight of her companion. Furthermore, upon consideration, she strongly doubted that an angel would be clad in snugly fitted white pantaloons, a white waistcoat edged with crimson, and a splendid tailcoat of azure Bath.

  “Where . . . where am I?” she stammered.

  “Let us address first things first,” he said soothingly. “Do you remember that you were involved in an accident?”