“Of course.”
Megan felt on fairly firm ground here. She had done an article a few years back about an experimental educational program that had been started by a group in Massachusetts. The founders of the group had emphasized the value of allowing youngsters a break during the day in which they could burn off their youthful energy; it had been their contention that healthful exercise would also recharge the students’ mental faculties. It had sounded wonderful to Megan, who had always suffered through the last part of the school day, longing to get outside and run, and she suspected that the duchess, with her unusual and forward-thinking views, would be willing to try an experimental program in education, as well.
Plus, she did not want to be stuck in the nursery for the entire day. She needed to move through the house, to become familiar with the layout of it and determine what areas she should explore further. She would be able to walk around a bit while the twins were out playing.
“You are the best tutor we ever had,” Alex assured her solemnly.
She smiled. “I hope that means you won’t put frogs in my bed or anything of that sort.”
“We wouldn’t do that,” Con protested, adding tellingly, “not to you, miss.”
Megan could not keep from chuckling. “But you have done it to others, I’ll warrant.”
Another look passed between the twins.
“That’s all right,” Megan told them. “You needn’t reveal your secrets. Probably better if I don’t know, actually. Now, let’s put in thirty minutes for luncheon here, after spelling and grammar. And play—shall we call it exercise time? That sounds better, doesn’t it?”
She quickly inserted the additions into the schedule. “There we go. So…” Megan’s stomach tightened at the thought of facing the actual teaching. “I suppose I should see where you are in Latin and Greek. Um, where are your books?”
The twins pulled out their texts and composition books, and opened them. “Here is where we stopped with Mr. Fullmer,” Con pointed out with a sigh.
“Good. Well…” Megan looked at the pages of Greek. She understood not a word of it. “The best thing, no doubt, would be to start reading where you left off. And are there exercises to do?”
“Yes. At the end of the reading.”
“Very well. Read these pages, and then do the questions at the end.” She had no idea how she would check their answers, she reflected, but she would deal with that problem when she came to it. “Why don’t you do that after we do the Latin?”
She picked up the Latin text and flipped through it. At least she recognized some of the words, but since it had been almost ten years since she had studied it, her grasp of the language was severely lacking.
“Fullmer had us write out translations of what we read.”
“How dreadfully dull,” Megan commented before she thought. She caught herself at Alex’s laugh. “That is—I mean—well, why don’t you try reading it aloud?”
She realized her mistake as soon as she said it. If one of the boys didn’t know a word, she would probably not be able to provide the answer. She could not take it back now, however. The twins obviously found this a less onerous burden than copying out the translation, and they grabbed their texts and started in on a letter from Pliny the Elder, Alex beginning.
Megan propped her head on her hand and listened. His reading brought back memories of afternoons in the convent school, listening to one of the other girls stumble through some translation while Megan had tried not to doze off, motivated to stay awake by sight of the ruler in Sister Mary Teresa’s hands. She had, Megan realized now, forgotten how boring Pliny the Elder was.
Twenty minutes later, as she found herself nodding off, she stood up, stifling a yawn, and told the twins that it was time to move on to their Greek exercises.
The rest of the day was gotten through in much the same manner—asking the twins where they had left off in their studies, then setting them to work onward from there. She was on safe enough ground in spelling, grammar and literature, as those had always been her best fields, and she knew enough to get by in history, she thought, by reading ahead of her students a little. Math might be almost as severe a trial as Greek, she feared, but fortunately the twins both seemed to excel at the subject and asked no questions as they went about their exercises.
Her greatest good fortune was Thisbe’s offer to teach the twins in science, for she quickly found out the first afternoon that the twins knew far more than she about plants, animals, the stars, chemical reactions and such. They were filled with glee when Megan told them that she was going to hand over their tutoring in the area to their eldest sister.
What made it even nicer was the fact that it would free up another hour and a half that she could use to search the house. Megan spent that time, as well as the twins’ outdoor period, in wandering about the mansion, poking into nooks and crannies. She reasoned that if anyone questioned her about being somewhere, she could always claim that she had gotten lost in the huge house.
She started with the third floor and moved downward. There were several empty rooms just down from the nursery, but the next room she opened had an occupant.
A small, stoop-shouldered man with a shock of disordered white hair was bending over a large table, and he turned in surprise to look at her. A pair of spectacles rested on the end of his nose, and he pushed them up into his hair as he gazed at her.
“Oh!” Megan exclaimed. “I’m so sorry. Forgive me. I did not realize the room was occupied.”
“No harm, my dear,” the elderly man said with a shy smile. “You merely startled me. I was laying out my Welsh longbowmen.”
With a closer look, Megan now saw that what she had thought was a large table was in fact a large piece of thin wood propped up on two wooden sawhorses. On the piece of wood was a topographical layout of land, painted green. There were a myriad of little iron figures, some arranged in careful rows, but the majority still lying in a heap.
This was not the only such “table” in the room. Several flat pieces of plywood stood on sawhorses. All the others were finished products, with rolling land and flat land, and even small bodies of water. The landscapes were dotted with trees and hedges and brown roads. Miniature armies and navies were spread across the various tables, all laid out in precise order. It was all Megan could do to keep her jaw from dropping in astonishment.
This man, she realized, must be the great-uncle about whom Theo and Mrs. Bee had spoken. But the man’s use of lead soldiers went far beyond anything Megan had imagined.
“It’s Agincourt,” Lord Bellard was saying now, looking at her hopefully.
“Ah, yes.” Megan remembered that the housekeeper had said something about Agincourt. “‘Cry God for Harry, England and St. George!’”