One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,43

say about the matter when Millrose told him what he’d done. But in the meantime, he meant to do what he could to keep her safe. “When Lord Kingston and Master Philip are ready, I will be most eager to discover what they know.”

“Yes, sir,” said young Kingston with a crisp bow, and his brother echoed him, though with notably less enthusiasm at the prospect.

The boys gathered up the materials their mother had requested, and she ushered them toward the stairs, once more with her arms around them, a mother hen guarding her brood.

But it was not Langley’s interference she needed to fear.

When the noise of their footsteps had faded, he examined the schoolroom more thoroughly. The small and rather haphazard collection of books on the shelves beneath one row of windows surprised him, though of course they had the massive library downstairs at their disposal as well. Scattered hints of history, science, mathematics. Clearly their mother was involved in their instruction, but was she entirely responsible for setting the boys’ lessons? Men’s and women’s educations were different, making Dulsworthy’s concern about their preparation for school suddenly easier to understand.

Opening the door to his left, he peered into the boys’ shared bedchamber but did not go beyond the threshold. Needless prying was not the way to inspire trust. A bed sat on either side, one crisply made, the other rumpled—not difficult to guess which belonged to whom. Rather surprising that the sons of a nobleman were expected to make them up at all.

At last he went to the other door and found what he had anticipated finding, a room set aside for a nurse or a governess. Or a tutor. It reminded him of nothing so much as his quarters at the Underground, though at least here he had a window.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t reach it at present. The narrow channel between the bed and the opposite wall was filled with crates, boxes, and an ancient brass-bound trunk; rolls of canvas—specimens of the boys’ artwork, perhaps—lay stacked like logs atop the unmade mattress.

He recalled Lady Kingston saying something about ordering a space to be cleared for him, though of course, that could not have been true, as he had not been expected. No matter. He did some of his best thinking while his body was otherwise occupied. He shrugged out of his coat, hung it over the rail of one of the straight-backed schoolroom chairs, rolled up his sleeves, and got to work.

Sometime later, his progress was interrupted by the arrival of a housemaid, bearing an armload of linen and a basket of cleaning supplies, the handle of a broom threaded carefully through the lot, like a knitting needle through a ball of yarn.

“Let me help you with that,” he offered, brushing the dust from his hands and his clothes.

The young woman, reddish haired and ruddy cheeked, appeared startled, as much by his dishabille as his offer. She blinked at him, her eyes moving up and down, then dropped her gaze. “Th-thank you, sir.”

He juggled the cleaning supplies onto the table and laid the linens on the seat of one chair. “I’ve only just managed to clear a path through there,” he said, gesturing toward the piles he’d tried to arrange neatly around the perimeter of the schoolroom, beneath the windows and on the shelves. The trunk had been filled with old clothes—costumes for home theatricals, by the look of things. Boxes of books, mostly primers and moralizing tracts for children that did not look to have seen much use. Maps. Toy soldiers, their painted uniforms worn away by more than one generation of hands. A globe that had been made when the American colonies were still, well, colonies. Displaying the collection of odds and ends gave the schoolroom a busy, well-used look. He suspected the boys wouldn’t mind it, but he was not so sure about Lady Kingston.

“I managed to wrest open that window, too,” he called after the maid, who had disappeared into the little bedchamber. “Someone had painted it shut.”

He’d been determined to get the better of it, though, for nature dictated that heat rose, and here on the fourth floor of the house, the air at midday was stifling.

His shirt clung damply to him as he now set about opening more windows, inviting a warm, desultory breeze through the larger space of the schoolroom. Remembering the maid’s scandalized expression, he unrolled his sleeves and picked up his wool coat, though he couldn’t bear to don it just