“If you make Father sad, I will . . . I will . . .”
Eloise watched the poor little boy’s face grow red with frustration as he fought for words and bravado. Carefully, gently, she crouched next to him until her face was on a level with his and said, “Oliver, I promise you, I am not here to make your father sad.” He said nothing, so she turned to his twin and asked, “Amanda?”
“You need to go,” Amanda blurted out, her arms crossed so tightly that her face was turning red. “We don’t want you here.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere for at least a week,” Eloise told them, keeping her voice firm. The children needed sympathy, and probably a great deal of love as well, but they also needed a bit of discipline and a clear idea of who was in charge.
And then, out of nowhere, Oliver hurled himself forward and pushed her hard, with both hands against her chest.
Her balance was precarious, crouching as she was on the balls of her feet. Eloise toppled over backward, landing most inelegantly on her bottom and rolling back until she was quite certain the twins had received a nice look at her petticoats.
“Well,” she declared, rising to her feet and crossing her arms as she stared sternly down at them. They had both taken several steps back and were staring at her with a mixture of glee and horror, as if they couldn’t quite believe that one of them had had the nerve to push her over. “That,” Eloise continued, “was inadvisable.”
“Are you going to hit us?” Oliver asked. His voice was defiant, but there was a hint of fright there, as if someone had hit them before.
“Of course not,” Eloise said quickly. “I don’t believe in striking children. I don’t believe in striking anyone.” Except people who strike children, she added to herself.
They looked somewhat relieved to hear it.
“I might remind you, however,” Eloise continued, “that you struck me first.”
“I pushed you,” he corrected.
She allowed herself a tiny groan. She ought to have anticipated that one. “If you do not want people striking you, you ought to practice the same philosophy.”
“The Golden Rule,” Amanda piped up.
“Exactly,” Eloise said with a wide smile. She rather doubted she’d changed the course of their lives with one little lesson, but nonetheless it was nice to hope that something she’d said provoked some consideration.
“But doesn’t that mean,” Amanda said thoughtfully, “that you should go home?”
Eloise felt her small moment of elation crumbling to dust, as she tried to imagine what leap of logic Amanda was about to embark upon to explain why Eloise should be banished to the Amazon.
“We’re home,” Amanda said, sounding exceedingly supercilious for an eight-year-old. Or maybe she was supercilious as only an eight-year-old could be. “So you should go home.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Eloise said sharply.
“Yes, it does,” Amanda replied with a smug little nod. “Do unto others as you would like done to you. We haven’t gone to your house, so you shouldn’t come to ours.”
“You’re very clever, did you know that?” Eloise asked.
Amanda looked as if she wanted to nod, but she was clearly too suspicious of Eloise’s compliment to accept it.
Eloise bent down so that they were face-to-face, all three of them. “But I,” she said to them in a very serious—and slightly defiant—voice, “am very clever, too.”
They stared at her with wide eyes, their mouths hanging slack as they regarded this person who was clearly so different from any other adult they’d ever met.
“Do we understand each other?” Eloise asked, straightening her spine and smoothing her hands along her skirts in a deceptively casual manner.
They said nothing, so she decided to answer for them. “Good,” she said. “Now, then, would you like to show me where the dining room is? I’m famished.”
“We have lessons,” Oliver said.
“You do?” Eloise asked, arching her brows. “How interesting. Then you must return to them at once. I imagine you’ve fallen behind after spending so long waiting outside my door.”
“How did you know—” Amanda’s question was cut short by Oliver’s elbow in her ribs.
“I have seven brothers and sisters,” Eloise answered, deciding that Amanda’s question deserved an answer, even if her brother hadn’t allowed her to finish her sentence. “There isn’t much about this sort of warfare that I don’t already know.”
But as the twins scurried down the hall, Eloise was left chewing her lower lip in apprehension. She had a feeling she shouldn’t have ended their encounter with such a challenge. She had practically dared Oliver and Amanda to find a way to evict her from the premises.
And while she was quite certain they wouldn’t succeed—she was a Bridgerton, after all, and made of sterner stuff than those two even knew existed—she had a feeling that they would throw every fiber of their being into the task.
Eloise shuddered. Eels in the bed, hair dipped in ink, jam on chairs. It had all been done to her at one point or another, and she didn’t particularly relish a repeat performance—and certainly not by a pair of children twenty years her junior.
She sighed, wondering what it was she had gotten herself into. She had better find Sir Phillip and get to the task of deciding whether they would suit. Because if she really was leaving in a week or two, never to see any of the Cranes again, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to put herself through the trouble of mice and spiders and salt in the sugar bowl.