A Governess Should Never... Tempt a Prizefighter Page 2

  Some years past, he’d gutted this old-fashioned, three-storey townhouse to create both a boxing academy and home for himself and daughter, hence the old back door to the garden now functioned as the family’s main entrance – the colonnaded façade at the front of the house on Arlington Street serving as the Academy’s impressive threshold.

  She paused at the door, presumably awaiting his non-existent butler, which told him much of her current abode and circumstance, so he opened it himself.

  A blush lit her cheeks, eyes flitting and fingers fluttering.

  “You must think me naive, Mr Hawkins, a privileged lady seeking a new life with little knowledge or experience, but I have to take my future into my own hands, you see, before it is wrested from me.” She tightened the ribbons on her bonnet to continue her soliloquy. “Thus far, I have been shielded from life. Sheltered by the love of my parents or guarded by Cousin Astwood for my marriageability value. Curbed by my birth and gender. Now I shall endeavour to make my own choices, with all its forthcoming perils and blessings.”

  Miss Griffin appeared like a fledgling bird, so eager for freedom that she’d dare a boxing academy for her refuge.

  “On the contrary, Miss Griffin, I think you brave,” he murmured, sketching a bow.

  The blush heightened and she scurried down the three steps which led to the garden.

  An awaiting maid rose from the bench beneath his willow tree and together the females bustled down the path. As a cloud shifted and one single ray of sunlight beamed forth, the maid swiftly opened a pink parasol and hoisted it aloft to protect her mistress’s delicate skin.

  Seth pinched his forehead.

  What had he done?

  Chapter Two

  “One’s dress is more handsome than fine; more neat than showy; one’s clothes are made genteelly, but within extremes.”

  Private Education: A Practical Plan for the Studies of Young Ladies.

  Elizabeth Appleton. 1815.

  Could a governess wear buttercup yellow for her first day?

  Clad in chemise and stockings, Matilda studied her wardrobe, praying that a monotonous brown or overcast grey might spring from the froth of colour.

  All the sorrowful mourning gowns worn after her parents’ tragic deaths had been replaced with startling shades of yellow silk by her guardian cousin a year past. Some young ladies might have been only too pleased – but he’d informed Matilda that with her petite stature, obscuring spectacles and dull conversation, she required all the help she could muster.

  Charming.

  Presently, Cousin Astwood was at some dissolute house party in the countryside, but before his butler and minions could awaken this morning, she was stuffing all she could into a small carpet bag. Most had already been filled with life’s essentials:

  Three packets of filched tea leaves as, after all, she had no idea of a governess’s allowance – if any.

  Miss Appleton’s wholesome tome on education – she sensed she would need it.

  One bar of her favoured soap.

  The solicitor’s address for when she reached one and twenty.

  Undergarments and two gowns of a darker shade – a saffron and nankeen, which could almost be described as brownish…yellow, but crucially both could be buttoned up without the assistance of a maid.

  The gilt cherub mantel clock chimed the approaching dawn so she swiftly donned the buttercup gown, hoping a shawl might smother its vivacity. Then without further ado, a last frock was shoved into the bag, its silk billowing in puffs of golden beige.

  Besides that, she thought dismally, heaving the bag shut, she owned little to her name.

  Matilda peered around her beloved bedchamber at the well-thumbed books, elegant paintings and dainty writing desk.

  Yet none of these items were hers. Even the books, she now realised. They all belonged to Cousin Astwood, a crawly toad as a child who’d shattered her spectacles and ripped her diaries, but now as viscount and her guardian, strutted like a mangy peacock.

  Still, she’d considered him a harmless creature till of late, when he’d packed her great-aunt off to Wales and commenced introducing her to potential husbands – raddled old aristocrats who pinched her cheeks, leered at her bosom and requested to view her teeth. At first, she’d refused and acted the termagant, but in recent weeks…

  Her cousin was becoming impatient: his grip pinched and bruised, marriage demands spat in hate, plum face contorting with anger.

  She was…scared. Fearful of his rising temper.

  Tales of abduction, ravishment and forced marriage by pistol abounded, and she could not tell truth from fiction.

  Only that Cousin Astwood frightened her.

  That before he’d left for the countryside, he’d shaken her hard and yelled she was chattel, to be used at his will, to be sold at his will. Auctioned off like a goat for sacrifice in that marriage contract she’d discovered to the Earl of Sidlow, a gentleman who’d cornered her in a closed room and outlined her marital duties, pinching her with skeletal fingers and attempting to kiss her using his…

  She could scarcely bring herself to think upon it.

  But now she would do all within her power to avoid a sentence of marriage to such a revolting roué.

  Of course, a boxing academy was not her ideal choice of sanctuary, it being likely to contain pugilists, but after eight posted employment applications, Mr Hawkins had been the sole replier, and surely a governess remained secreted away in the schoolroom all day, teaching things, and should not have to stumble upon…muscles.

  A bird groggily cheeped the first signs of dawn, so she shrouded her slight frame in her father’s ancient cloak and snatched up the carpet bag along with a cloth smothered in pig fat.

  Opening the bedchamber door, she peered out – silence, yet a bated one.

  Astwood had replaced all her parents’ staff with his own and they’d clearly been told to keep an eye on her. Purely her lady’s maid had remained in her service, but at Matilda’s behest yesterday, and with one of her gold bangles to sell and a promise to write, her maid had taken the stagecoach to family in Wiltshire, far away from questions as to her mistress’s forthcoming disappearance.

  Now, with a lone candle to light the stairs in one hand and the carpet bag gripped firmly in the other, Matilda crept as though a stealthy thief. Nevertheless, her starched petticoats dragged on the wooden treads like leaves rustling beneath a broom, her light steps as those of a hulking gollumpus in the attentive dark.

  Each night, Matilda had watched from the landing outside her chambers as the butler had locked up, and now, standing before the solemn front door, she rubbed the foul-smelling cloth upon the shrill second bolt.

  Tossing the cloth aside, she gripped the barrel.

  The mechanism slid, a scant whisper of metal as it glided back.

  Even the silence sighed.

  She gathered her bag, clasped the handle and pulled open the hefty door. The wood groaned and she stilled.

  Naught roused but for a brush of warm air which caressed her cheek, strange and vivid.

  Matilda knew not its cause, only that it felt as though her childhood home was declaring its farewell, that it wished her Godspeed for an unknown future.

  A solitary thick tear streaked her cheek, but after thrusting the door wide, she sped into the sombre dawn.

  And did not look back.

  Sitting beneath a sprouting willow tree with the faint glow of daybreak shimmering above the rooftops of Piccadilly ought to be quite the romantic scene.

  But Matilda’s buttocks had numbed, and she was quite sure her feet had succumbed to frostbite.

  At least she was safe though.

  She had scurried along the deserted streets, head down and pace frantic. Never before had she been out of the house alone, especially at dawn, and her heart had knocked in her chest like a nest-building cuckoo in spring.

  A few jug-bitten bucks had staggered along the way and a keen night watchman had watched – which she sup
posed was his job – but he’d eyed her with a lascivious gleam and licked his lips.

  The door to Mr Hawkins’ home was located upon the rear of the property at the end of this tidy garden, with a spectral Green Park opposite, a nebulous fog drifting. Once a swampy burial ground for lepers, an air of sad expectancy gloated from within the park’s lush green lawns, and eerie tales of the ill-famed haunted tree at its heart, avoided by birds and people alike, had compelled her to hum to herself as she’d passed by.

  As a rule, she was perfectly clear-minded in relation to such matters – ghosts and whatnot – yet she’d sworn a sinister figure in scarlet had stridden through the mist this dawn and so she’d darted through the gates of No. 25 as though the devil himself had been tugging at her skirts.

  The high-up chimneys had eventually spluttered a pitch smoke, and a dim glow had flickered at the rim of the closed shutters; yet surely to hammer upon the door at such an hour would have been the height of rudeness.

  Cousin Astwood’s butler refused to admit callers between the hours of midnight and nine, unless they were scantily dressed.

  Needless to say, Matilda did not fit into that category, hence she remained in the cold upon this incommodious garden bench.

  At what hour could a governess call upon her employer?

  Matilda knew the exact hour for a lady to call upon friends in London, had read of when the Batok tribe took supper in East Africa and at what hour the Russians considered early enough for vodka. Yet conduct for this vocation was all so unknown.

  What she did realise was that if she waited out here in the cold much longer, Mr Hawkins would not have a governess to house but a body to bury.

  Surely he arose early to open his Boxing Academy? Or did he have staff for that?

  With no small amount of prejudice before the interview, Matilda had thought he’d be an unpleasant character with hammy fists and lumbering steps, barely able to understand the King’s English – if indeed anyone could, since their liege had gone mad.

  For research purposes only of course, she’d scrutinised drawings of prizefighters and mulled over match reports, barely grasping the detail – fancy coves, mufflers, plumpers and whiffles…

  Incomprehensible.

  Mr Hawkins, however, had been most well-spoken and mannerly. And last night, for no apparent reason that she could fathom, she had dreamed of those sizeable calloused knuckles…

  She rubbed arms that had lost all feeling and contemplated what her first-ever student might be like.

  The pithy Miss Appleton, she of the governess tome, had compared her charges to opening blossoms of morality, to be shielded from the scorch of error until they burst into maturity.

  Matilda wondered whether she herself had yet to burst forth.

  A faint glow slanted through the May greyness, the downstairs shutters parting to reveal a buxom female with apron and lantern, hazy light spilling upon the plants still struggling to leaf.

  Thank the heavens, and Matilda stiffly rose from the stone bench, gathered her carpet bag, strode for the steps and confronted the door, praying the housekeeper would allow her entry. Frequently such women guarded the household with hostile contempt for both employer and fellow employees alike.

  After a timid knock…then a strident blow, it opened a sliver.

  The buxom female scowled with suspicious brow and thinned lips, a rolling pin held aloft.

  “What yer want?”

  “Er… I am the new governess. I realise the hour is a little discourteous but…”

  Matilda trailed off as she was gathered into that buxom bosom perfumed with flour and sugar.

  “Yer poor child. Look at yer, as cold as Milling Mike after ten rounds with Big Bill.”

  Matilda floundered.

  Her parents had never been ones for embracing. They’d been loving without doubt but undemonstrative – a pat on the head for a book well read had been positively melodramatic. Her friend Evelyn oft placed a comforting arm, but Matilda had forever felt peculiar, not knowing where to put her hands, her body stiffening with the close contact.

  Such warmth from a stranger should have caused an upset, a taut stiffening of spine and sinew, but after the frigid weather, the fright of Green Park and her cousin’s callous dictates, she wished to bury deep into this motherly bosom and plead for hot tea.

  Which doubtless Miss Appleton would tartly decry as unbefitting of a proper governess on her first day.

  “I am fine, thank you,” she muttered into white cotton. “Just rather…chilled.”

  The woman drew back, and if ever a countenance epitomised homely, it was this one. But not in a plain way. No, she radiated joy and welcome, eyes blue as bilberries.

  “Mr H suspected yer might be early. Alert as a bull in Maytime, that boy.”

  Matilda opened her mouth, then closed it.

  With a tongue chatting nineteen to the dozen, the housekeeper-cum-cook, a Mrs Havistock but call me Betty, bustled her to a kitchen and placed her before the open fire, causing those icy toes to twist and tingle.

  “Mr H said he wanted to see yer the moment yer arrived, but them at Billingsgate could hear that belly rumbling so he’ll have to wait.” And Mrs Havistock but call me Betty opened the oven to produce a plate of hot crumpets, followed by a ladle full of chocolate from a pot upon the range.

  Never had Matilda been allowed to partake of breakfast in a kitchen before, and although the chair was without a velvet cushion and the table of bare wood, it was perhaps the cosiest location she’d ever had the pleasure to sit in.

  Nattering as though they were bosom friends, Mrs Havistock but call me Betty commenced making bread – bemoaning the bitter weather, the coal smoke that stained the washing and how Parliament didn’t give tuppence for common folk like them.

  “Now,” she pronounced, pounding dough as though she ought to be in the Boxing Academy instead, “Mr H is sparring upstairs in the practice room but I’ll get flour on the rugs, so it’s one flight up and turn left.” A speculative gaze perused. “Take yer hat off, dearie, and yer pelisse. I’ve had the fires lit since dawn.”

  “Oh, but…” Beneath the pelisse was that brash buttercup-yellow day dress – although ’twas true she was toastier than Betty’s buns. “I am awaiting collection of my governess attire,” she fibbed, peeling off her coat to reveal the vividness.

  “Dunno why, yer could charm them bees from their hive in that dress.”

  “I suppose this colour does rather resemble a pollen-filled flower of spring.”

  Betty stared. “Girlie, where have yer been all yer life?”

  “12 George Street.”

  A shake of head and Matilda was shooed from the kitchen by cumulus clouds of flour.

  In the hallway, she dallied, taking stock of the curious layout, as in any normal abode the kitchens were hidden in the basement. A door to the right lured – which as a rule would lead to the drawing room and parlours – but the odd grunt of pain could be heard from beyond, so she supposed it led to the Academy.

  Matilda scrunched her lips. How could one strike another for pleasure?

  Males were such odd creatures.

  She headed up the narrow staircase, arriving at a lantern-lit first floor.

  An open door opposite revealed a pleasant dining room, and so she supposed this floor to be the living quarters, small but well maintained, covered by fresh paperhangings with the latest chinoiserie patterns and sumptuous rugs of Turkish design. She turned, as Betty had directed, to the left.

  A wide closed door of mahogany confronted her, but as she put hand to handle, a voice bellowed, “Higher.”

  Mr Hawkins, if she wasn’t much mistaken.

  A muffled reply.

  Then a thump.

  With brow creased, Matilda opened the door and gazed into a middling-size ballroom.

  In the centre, Mr Hawkins stood…naked.

  Well, almost naked anyhow.

  Solely knee-length breeches and a white loose shirt clothed his pow
erful frame, those colossal hands raised whilst a slender young man in much the same attire twirled on his toes and batted Mr Hawkins’ open palm with his bare heel.

  Matilda closed her mouth.

  “Better,” he called. “You’d never be able to use this in the ring, but it’s a handy technique to have. Now, put it into sequence.”

  The pair took up a stance similar to the drawings Matilda had studied, but only the young man jabbed out his fists, bare feet dancing soundlessly upon the wooden floor. Mr Hawkins ducked and dodged, his Herculean shoulders straining the cotton seams of his shirt, rolled sleeves displaying bronzed forearms and rippling sinew.

  No actual hitting appeared to be taking place, merely fists brushing as though to measure distance and reach.

  Skin glistened, Mr Hawkins’ shirt allowing a slab of tanned muscle to peek through.

  And weren’t his lower legs hairy?

  Matilda blinked.

  In 1813, she’d visited Burlington House with her parents to view the marble artefacts purloined from Greece. One frieze had displayed a centaur fighting a disrobed man – all defined muscle and grey-veined, hairless skin – and since then Matilda had thought herself au fait with a male’s components.

  Yet…

  What the frieze had failed to depict was the grace of movement, the sheen of exertion, the harsh breathing and heaving chest, the hairy legs and–

  The buttocks were the same though, and her new employer also sported a fine pectoralis major with a prominent–

  Matilda removed her glasses and wiped them clear on her skirt.

  Then promptly replaced them.

  The young man twirled and stabbed out a foot, his fluid agility a sight to behold, but Mr Hawkins caught the foot before it could clout him on the chin, his shirt front pulling to reveal–

  Matilda dropped her reticule.

  Bright hazel eyes twisted in her direction.

  The foot tumbled from Mr Hawkins’ grip – no effort whatsoever to cover his unseemly dishabille, and he strode towards her, retrieved her reticule from the floor and offered it with open palm.