The Duke Diaries by Sophia Nash Page B

young men destined for Eton next winter. Their superior intellect was inspiring as she listened to their lessons. But the second half of the day had involved teaching a large group of the tenant children to read. She had thought she would go mad after three hours of childish primers.
    But at least it had distracted her from thinking about Rory . . . and his absurd campaign to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons when she would only ever do the right thing for the right reasons. And honor had no place in this. It was love or it was nothing.
    As long as she could withstand the siege by the very man to whom she would most like to surrender.
    Verity glanced up just in time to catch a young boy in the back of the room passing something to another boy, his brother, if she remembered correctly. She gave him a speaking glance, and pointed a finger toward his primer. He immediately complied.
    She turned her attention to the next day’s lesson plans in front of her at the desk. The vicar would not approve of her sensibilities right now if he knew how she was praying for Miss Woods’s sister’s quick recovery, all for very uncharitable reasons. She stared out the one window of the simple schoolhouse with the peaked roof. She had one final half hour of this impossible, never-ending day.
    The livery stable was suddenly all hustle and bustle when an elegant burgundy and gold barouche conveyed by a matched quartet of gleaming bays came to a halt in front. Who could it be? No one of the neighborhood would travel locally in so fine a vehicle. She craned her neck only to see a ravishingly beautiful lady emerge and accept the aid of a servant while descending.
    Verity abruptly pushed back from the desk, causing the chair’s legs to make a squealing noise, which drew the attention of the entire class. She quickly crossed to the window without explanation. She knew the lady. She was certain. And yet . . . what on earth was Lady Mary Haverty, best friend of her two older sisters, doing in Derbyshire? She was supposed to be in Scotland, where she was to meet her soon-to-be-husband, Laird MacGregor, for the very first time. Mary’s remove from London, the first meeting, the wedding, and the procreating were all to be accomplished in very short order. Then again, Mary had taken a mere fortnight to come to the decision to accept the terms of an arranged marriage to an unknown maternal cousin and powerful Scottish laird. It had been a source of intense debate between the elder Fitzroy ladies and their friend.
    Verity glanced at the small gold watch broach pinned to her bodice. Then she studied the silent, expectant faces of the children. What was ten minutes in the grand scheme of things? Was this not precisely the sort of rigid thinking of her former governesses who had made her itch to put amphibians in their beds?
    “Go on, then. You have almost uniformly been perfectly wonderful. I shall see you tomorrow, then. Oh, and”—she smiled—“whoever left this lovely welcoming gift for my first day”—she sent a pointed glance toward a carrot-topped boy in the third row before she withdrew an enormous lizard-like creature from a desk drawer using a handkerchief—“my mother once suggested to me that Great Crested Newts prefer ponds to governess’s beds. And I do believe they like desk drawers even less. So please return him to his watering hole if you will.” She placed the newt in a box on the desk as the boys laughed and made ready to leave. The guilty party sheepishly removed the animal on his way out with the rest of them.
    Verity quickly gathered her affairs and the lesson plan that required a bit of revision, and was ready to leave when a sound alerted her to the entrance of a young boy of eight or nine. Tom, was it? He was a little too thin, and she already had a plan for tackling that problem.
    “Your ladyship?” he asked shyly, sidling up to her desk.
    “Yes?”
    “Me brover John and—”
    “ My brother John,” she