The Education of Mrs. Brimley Read online

  He opened his mouth as if to reply, then hesitated, narrowing his eyes. “Has someone told you otherwise?”

  Heat rose in her cheeks. She looked away. “Several people, in fact. I have an uncle and a female cousin who would most certainly disagree with your observation.”

  He frowned. “They have done you a disservice.” He picked up his board with paper. “I propose to prove that to you, but first we must move beyond this issue of embarrassment or neither of us will progress.”

  “That is easier for the one dressed than for the one not.” Her lips quirked. His admonishment of Uncle George and Penelope lifted her spirits, but her arms remained locked about her chest.

  Before she could utter another word, he unfastened the remaining buttons on his shirt, letting the loose cloth hang from his broad shoulders.

  “Lord Chambers!” she gasped. Proper etiquette insisted she shouldn’t stare, but no ladies’ training had prepared her for the sight of his exposed chest.

  With a quick shrug, he removed the thin fabric and tossed it aside, presenting her with a wide expanse of hard muscle furred with the most intriguing mat of black curling hair that narrowed as it approached the waistband of his pants. She bit her lip; her chest tightened. She had seen the cartoons in Punch about men who wore corsets to narrow their waists and flatten their stomachs. Although Lord Chambers possessed those fashionable physical endearments, his manly shape was obviously natural. Firm muscles, not padding, filled out his jackets.

  After her shock receded, curiosity advanced. Her fingers itched to tactically explore this forbidden region. Was a man’s chest hair coarse or silky? Dense like a terrier, or softly accommodating like a . . .

  “You are staring, Mrs. Brimley. I had thought to make you feel more comfortable.” The tilt of his mustache suggested that had not been his intent at all. “Would you prefer I put the shirt back on?”

  “No . . . Yes.” She shook her head as if the action would empty it of her errant observations. “I appreciate your gesture. I apologize . . . I’ve never seen a man assembled quite like you, sir.”

  “I shall assume that is a compliment.”

  In her shock at his gesture her arms had dropped to her side. She had forgotten that he could fully view her in her partially clad state. It would do no good to hide from him now.

  “My lord—”

  “Nicholas,” he corrected. “I believe we may dispatch with society’s amenities.” He stepped closer to her. Her heart raced. “I prefer that you call me Nicholas. And perhaps I may call you . . . ?”

  “Mrs. Brimley,” she replied without hesitation. She needed the distance that such formalities offered, especially when confronted with such manly perfection. She needed to hear the alias as well as a reminder that he didn’t know her heritage. If he ever learned of her past, he would no doubt abandon her as unworthy of respect. The thought calmed her racing pulse. She adjusted her spectacles. “You shall catch a draft without proper covering.”

  “There are other ways to stay warm,” he said, recovering his shirt from its resting place. The timbre of his voice warmed her indeed. “Perhaps in a later lesson, we can explore those options.”

  She was learning, she thought, squashing the question that rose to her tongue. He would not bait her into removing yet another item by asking for an explanation.

  “What do you wish me to do now?” she asked, her voice rasped from the burning in her throat.

  He smiled with an expression of gentle understanding. “I’d like you to position yourself in various postures so I might work on the composition.”

  “What sort of postures?”

  “Are you familiar with the Greek deity, Artemis?” he asked, settling the white linen of his shirt over his shoulders.

  “I am a literature teacher, sir,” she huffed, reminding herself that she should incorporate Greek mythology in her literature curriculum. “Artemis, daughter of Leto and Zeus, and twin sister to Apollo, was a goddess of hunting and archery, and she was a defender of children as well.” She smiled. “We have that last item in common.”

  She knew full well that as the virgin goddess, Artemis shared another trait with her, but she saw no need to remind Chambers. Every painting of the huntress she had ever viewed displayed her in a tunic that left her legs and arms bare. A bit of hope blossomed in her chest. Perhaps Chambers would allow her to remain partially clothed after all.

  “Do you have a bow and arrow?” she asked, becoming more enthusiastic. “I could pose with that.” She mimicked plucking a taut string on an invisible bow.

  He chuckled. “Introducing a weapon into our sessions may not prove the most intelligent endeavor. I envisioned depicting Artemis’s Revenge.”

  Her mind raced, mentally reciting the stories of Artemis. “Wasn’t Actaeon turned into an animal?”

  He nodded. “Actaeon spied on Artemis and observed her bathing. Artemis turned him into a wild stag as punishment for viewing her naked body.”

  “Surely, you don’t intend—” Her cheeks heated again.

  “Let us stick for the moment with the poses,” Chambers said, a tight smile lifting one side of his mustache.

  “You promised I could wear a thin gown.” She refused to concede the point. “I remember distinctly. You said you wanted to paint me naked, but you’d settle for a thin gown.”

  “Mrs. Brimley, I remember our conversation.” His smile disappeared, replaced with something akin to frustration. “At this moment, I am only thinking about the composition of the painting. Now, may we continue with the poses?”

  She sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Pretend for the moment that you are a goddess, a beautiful forest nymph preparing to bathe in a lake or a pond. How would you approach it?”

  “I don’t swim,” she said sullenly.

  “But you do bathe, do you not?” He, in turn, sounded exasperated.

  Good. What was that line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? “One fire burns out another’s burning; One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.” Perhaps his anguish would lessen her embarrassment.

  “Play the game with me, Mrs. Brimley. Pretend you are a goddess. What would you do?”

  “I’m quite sure I would have a large cloth towel wrapped about my body.” Emma edged her voice with a bit of defiance, clutching one fist to her chest in mimicry. When his only response was a lowered brow, she closed her eyes and eased into the role. “Then I’d test the water with my toes to see if it was overly cold.” She lifted one stocking-clad foot in pantomime.

  “Would your hair be piled high on your head? Or loose, curling softly about your pale, sun-dappled shoulders?”

  Sun-dappled. She liked the sound of that. With her eyes closed, she could easily pretend she was something she was not, a beautiful goddess above reproach, welcomed by all with open arms.

  “Only a child or a woman in her chambers would wear her hair down,” she said, caught up in the fantasy. “Artemis would wear her hair up but with bits of wildflowers and greenery as ornamentation.” She imagined herself in a serene woodland setting straight from one of Wordsworth’s poems.

  “Yes, I can see it,” his voice encouraged. “Are you alone? Or have you attendants about you?”

  “I am alone,” she replied. “Except for the forest creatures, of course.” In her fantasy world, she watched a bird chase another across the pond. The rustling of squirrels stirred the trees overhead. The animals wouldn’t judge her, criticize her.

  “You approach the water . . .” His voice surrounded her as if he were part of the vision. She responded with a careful step, imagining water the color of the clear sky overhead, swirling around her calf. The sweet, refreshing water, free of London’s dirt and grime, yet tempered by the sun’s warmth, welcomed her into its depths. Filtered sun-beams beckoned her forward.

  “The towel?” the voice asked.

  She clasped both hands to her chest then flung them wide, imagining the towel billowing behind her like a sail
. She lifted her face to the sun and arched her back. She was a goddess.

  “Magnificent!”

  The catch in his voice and the stab of a protesting whalebone stay shocked her back to reality. She opened her eyes and wrapped her arms around her chest as if they had transformed into her imaginary towel. Had she really stretched and arched in the immodest fashion of her fantasy? Heat flooded her face. She turned her back to him and searched for her discarded bodice.

  “What are you doing?” Chambers asked, alarmed.

  She slipped her arms through the black crepe sleeves as quickly as possible.

  “Don’t do that,” he protested. “You were wonderful.”

  “Please, sir,” she said over her shoulder, as she hastily worked the buttons through the holes. “I was wrong to think I could do this.” Tears muddied her gaze as she looked down at her handiwork, dismayed to find that she had misaligned the buttons to their respective buttonholes. With a frustrated sigh, she unfastened and worked to refasten the closures.

  “You’ve done nothing wrong. There’s no reason to hurry away.” By the proximity of his voice, he was rapidly approaching her back.

  “Do not touch me. Don’t you dare touch me,” she threatened with a sob. “You promised.”

  “I won’t touch you. I just wanted to show you what we accomplished.”

  A board with paper attached edged around her side. She took it from his hand and looked at the sketch. The drawing was hasty and lacking in full shading and color, but the artfully crafted lines detailed the head of a gentle, beautiful woman with a long graceful neck. Elegant fingers reached as if to pluck a bloom from her high coiffure woven with ivy and pale flowers. The woman appeared too beautiful to be her likeness and yet it was. The embarrassment that had heated her face slowly receded.

  “This is what you drew?”

  “This is what I saw,” he said. “To me, you were a goddess.”

  She turned to face him and handed back the drawing. “I am a teacher and, I fear, a poor moral stalwart of my students.” She hastily pulled on a petticoat. “Do not look for me to return, Lord Chambers. I will not submit to the mockery of your sketches or to the lies you preach.” The bottom of her bodice interfered with the fastening of her crinolines and her skirts, but experience led her fingers to the proper closures.

  “What lies? What mockery?” Chambers asked, refusing to let her dress in peace.

  Emma sighed, stopping her progress to point out the obvious. “I am not the beautiful woman you have presented in those sketches. My own eyes tell me that. And the nonsense you present about widening passages and the arousal of a woman’s passions could truly be harmful to my girls. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I spoke the truth,” he declared. “I thought that was your purpose in seeking my counsel.”

  She searched for her boots, finding them half under the divan. With a tug on her skirts, she coaxed them out with a foot. “I will grant that a woman’s body would not easily accommodate that aberration you drew for me earlier.”

  “Aberration!”

  “So some sort of widening might be in order.” She ignored the dangerous edge to his voice. “But I cannot accept that such a practice would be pleasurable, or that a woman could be aroused in such a way to make the act of coupling pleasurable.”

  She sighed heavily. To some in society the very act of bending at the waist to retrieve her boots would be considered indecent, but after this afternoon’s activities, she no longer cared about Chambers’s opinion of her proprieties. Her embarrassment was just too great. She plopped on the divan and bent over her boots, hoping the indecent posture would hide her face from view.

  If the act of coupling were as pleasurable as he described, and a woman could be aroused to want to engage in such activity, even without the benefit of marriage, then her uncle could have been correct all these years. No! That couldn’t be. That would make her mother a . . .

  She faced Chambers, placing all manner of conviction in her words. “Arousal in the manner you suggest is a purely masculine state.” It must be. It must be.

  “You are so very wrong.” His voice suggested he was enjoying the debate. Anger lashed through her. This was not something about which to bicker. She turned her back, preparing to leave.

  “Women have the capacity for arousal as much as men,” Chambers said, almost mocking her. “Perhaps more.”

  Enough! Emma clenched her hands into fists and spun on her heel. “My mother was not a whore!”

  Silence filled the space between them. Emma clutched a gloved fist to her open mouth, appalled by her own words. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. Shock drained the laughter from Chambers’s face. He appeared frozen, distant, cold.

  A sadness slipped into his eyes, or was it pity? She had seen that expression before, most recently in her suitor’s eyes a moment before he turned and walked out of her life. To see that same look in Chambers’s eyes hurt beyond measure. Soon, she suspected, he would treat her with the same regard as the tavern women rumored to visit Black Oak. Her edict not to touch would be ignored, all because of the circumstance of her birth. With tears burning in her eyes, Emma lowered her gaze to push past him on her way to the door.

  “Don’t go,” he said as she tried to brush past him. “I apologize if my words somehow implied a disrespect to your parentage. There was no intent. Please do not leave.”

  “You wish me to stay?” she asked, incredulous. “After what I’ve told you?”

  “You’ve told me nothing, Mrs. Brimley. You just corrected what you perceived to be an incorrect impression.” He stepped nearer; she could feel him along the small hairs on her nape. “You’ve been running away all your life, to the extent that you now live among strangers. You have nothing to fear here. Why are you running again?”

  But she did have a great deal to fear, especially from Chambers. He had managed to reach deep inside her, like no other man, and make her yearn for a closeness that she thought was impossible. She could lose her position at Pettibone if the sisters learned of her illegitimate birth, but that was a mere complication compared to Chambers’s inevitable rejection.

  “Face your fears, Mrs. Brimley. It is the only way to be free of them. No one beyond these walls will know what transpires here. You can trust me.”

  Could she? Chambers was unlike any other man she’d ever known. If she shared the nature of her past, would he look at her with condemnation? Or would they continue as before? She turned to face him.

  “I was born on the wrong side of the blanket. My father had his way with my mother but did not marry her.”

  Chambers nodded. “It is a common enough tale. A sad one, indeed, but hardly enough to consider one’s mother a—”

  “All these years, I have believed that my father must have forced himself upon my mother,” Emma said as if Chambers had not spoken. “I believed that he ruined her. That he was at fault.”

  “Society is often unfair in the way—”

  She held up her hand to silence him. “Let me finish, sir. You have suggested that a woman can be aroused much like a man.”

  He glanced away and said something under his breath.

  “It is said that a woman who enjoys intimacy with a man, outside of marriage, is a . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to repeat the word. “Is not genteel. My uncle has often said that my mother enjoyed that single act of indiscretion, and indeed would so again if he had his way.”

  This time she heard Chambers’s low curse murmured with malice.

  “If what you said about a woman’s arousal is true, then it stands to reason—”

  “What has your mother said about this?”

  “My mother died two weeks before I came to Pettibone. Indeed, that is one of the reasons I answered the spinsters’ ad for a teacher.” She lowered her gaze. “We never discussed it. There were many things that we never discussed. Now that she is gone . . .”

  Tears burned her eyes. Oh Mama, so many things I should
have said . . . She couldn’t force words around the lump in her throat. She dug in her sleeve for her mother’s handkerchief, but it wasn’t there. The loss of that small piece of linen, one of the few remembrances of her mother, broke the barrier that held back the tears.

  “Look at me,” Chambers directed in a soft, comforting voice. She raised her gaze, and he gently blotted the tracks of tears on her cheeks with his handkerchief. She sniffed, pulling the full scent of turpentine and linseed oil into her consciousness. It was a scent she associated uniquely with Chambers, and now would be associated with this simple act of kindness. Instead of thanking him, more tears flowed from her eyes, causing her to remove her spectacles.

  “You loved your mother very much,” he said.

  “She was a good woman, a kind woman,” Emma insisted, eager to correct her uncle’s impression. “She prayed at church every Sunday, and she never so much as smiled at another man, even though Uncle George tried to make her do it. She took care of me. She loved me.” She sniffed. “And I loved her.”

  “Of course you did.” He smiled, and dabbed at her cheeks.

  She wanted to crawl into his arms and forget that with her mother’s passing, she was alone in the world. Her gaze slipped from Chambers’s eyes to his lips. What a fool she was for insisting he not touch her. Even now, he was careful to caress her only with the handkerchief. That pulled a weak smile to her lips.

  “If your mother gave herself to only one man, it stands to reason that she loved him,” Chambers said.

  “Why then didn’t he marry her?”

  “Why indeed.” He grimaced. “Some men aren’t worthy of the gift they are offered. Had your father married your mother, you would not question her character.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then it stands to reason that the fault lies with your father. His character is the one to question, not that of your mother.” He used the tip of the handkerchief to coax her chin up. “Your uncle was wrong. Your mother was not what he suggested.”