Three Little Secrets Read Free

antiques, buttery jacquard wall covering, and yellow shantung draperies which brushed the lush Aubusson carpet. Despite her state of anxiety, Lady Bessett found the room pleasant and made a mental note of the colors. Tomorrow, if she survived this meeting, she was to buy a house. Her very first house—not her husband’s house or her father’s house or her stepson’s house. Hers . And then she, too, would have a yellow parlor. It was to be her choice, was it not? She would tell the builder so tomorrow.
    A few moments later, a tall, dark-haired woman came into the room. She looked decidedly French, but she was dressed perhaps a little more elegantly than one might expect of a governess. Her bearing was not especially servile, and her expression was one of good-humored curiosity. Before she could think better of it, Lady Bessett leapt from the sofa and hastened across the room.
    “You are Mademoiselle de Severs?” she whispered, seizing the woman’s hand.
    The woman’s mouth twitched. “Well, yes, but—”
    “I wish to employ you,” Lady Bessett interjected. “At once. You must but name your price.”
    Mademoiselle de Severs drew back. “Oh, I am afraid you mistake—”
    “No, I am desperate.” Lady Bessett tightened her grip on the woman’s hand. “I have a letter of introduction. From the Gräfin von Hodenberg in Passau. She has told me everything. About your work. Your training in Vienna. My son…I fear he is quite ill. I must hire you, Mademoiselle de Severs. I must. I cannot think where else to turn.”
    The woman gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “I am so sorry,” she said in her faint French accent. “The gräfin is misinformed. Indeed, I have not spoken to her in a decade or better.”
    “She said as much,” agreed Lady Bessett.
    “How, pray, do you know her?”
    Lady Bessett dropped her gaze to the floor. “I lived much of my marriage abroad,” she explained. “Our husbands shared an interest in ancient history. We met first in Athens, I think.”
    “How kind of her to remember me.”
    Lady Bessett smiled faintly. “She knew only that you had gone to London to work for a family called Rutledge, who had a poor little girl who was dreadfully ill. It was quite difficult to track the family down. And London—well, it is such a large place, is it not? I have visited here but once in the whole of my life.”
    Miss de Severs motioned toward a pair of armchairs by the hearth, which was unlit on such a late-spring afternoon. “Please, Lady Bessett, do sit down,” she invited. “I shall endeavor to explain my situation here.”
    Hope wilted in Lady Bessett’s heart. “You…you cannot help us?”
    “I cannot yet say,” the governess replied. “Certainly I shall try. Now, the child—what is his age, please, and the nature of his illness?”
    Lady Bessett choked back a sob. “Geoffrey is twelve,” she answered. “And he—he has—well, he imagines things, mademoiselle. Odd, frightening things. And he blurts out things which make no sense, and he cannot explain why. Sometimes he suffers from melancholia. He is a deeply troubled child.”
    Miss de Severs was nodding slowly. “These imaginings take the form of what? Dreams? Hallucinations? Does the child hear voices?”
    “Dreams, I think,” she whispered. “But dreams whilst he is awake, if that makes any sense? I—I am not perfectly sure, you see. Geoffrey will no longer discuss them with me. Indeed, he has become quite secretive.”
    “Does he still suffer them?” asked the governess. “Children often outgrow such things, you know.”
    Lady Bessett shook her head. “They are getting worse,” she insisted. “I can tell that he is worried. I have consulted both a physician and a phrenologist in Harley Street. They say—oh, God!—they say he might have a mental disorder. That eventually, he might lose touch with reality altogether, and need to be restrained. Or—or confined. ”
    “Oh, what balderdash!” said the