"No Governess Sits at My Table," the Duke Said—His Maid Set a Place for Her Anyway

"No Governess Sits at My Table," the Duke Said—His Maid Set a Place for Her Anyway For a year, Amelia Poole has taught the Duke of Elmsleigh's orphaned niece her letters, her sums, and her manners, and taken every meal in the schoolroom because the Duke of Elmsleigh has one rule that never bends. Governesses do not sit at his table. She has told herself it is only propriety, only the ordinary shape of her place in a great house, and she believes it, until the night a housemaid lays a second plate at his table without asking anyone's leave, and the whole room goes silent waiting to see what he will do about it. Then a borrowed page of household accounts puts a number in front of Amelia that does not match what she has actually been paid, and she understands, slowly and with growing unease, that the same rule that has kept her from his table has also kept her from ever seeing his books. The family solicitor who suggested that rule in the first place has been counting on exactly that. Amelia keeps her own careful record, to the farthing, because it is the only kind of proof a woman with no standing is ever allowed to carry. When Mr. Ashby reads the trust accounts aloud at her own birthday dinner for the child she loves, he makes the one mistake a clever man makes only once, naming a figure nobody at that table had asked him for.