Winterberry Fire: A Silver Foxes of Westminster Novella (Winterberry Park Book 2)(4)

“Indeed. Next week. At the town hall. It’s a sweetheart’s dance.” Mary sidled closer to him. “Are you going to invite your sweetheart?”

“Uh, I haven’t got a sweetheart,” Tad said.

“Sure you do.” Mary’s smile widened. “Ada Bell.”

Tad blinked. Then he blinked again. “Ada’s not my sweetheart.”

“But you’re sweet on her, aren’t you?”

Tad shifted. “Am I?”

“Of course you are. Ada is pretty and…sweet.” She batted her eyelashes over the ridiculous lie. “And she’s awfully sweet on you.”

Tad grinned, pink splashing across his face. “Is she?”

“Absolutely.”

Footsteps sounded in the hall, and they both turned to look. Ada was returning from wherever she’d gone after Mr. Noakes had told her off. She paused when she saw Mary and Tad looking at her. Tad broke into a huge, dopey grin. Ada smiled politely back at him and continued into the parlor. Mary raised a hand to her mouth to hide her mischievous grin.

“See?” she whispered to Tad as soon as Ada was back to taking down curtains. “She’s completely besotted with you.”

“Is she?” Tad watched Ada, who, admittedly, did have a dreamy look about her. Tad didn’t have to know that look was most likely for the schoolteacher. “Maybe she is,” he said, smiling even wider.

Mary leaned closer to him. “I think you should go after her.”

“After her?”

Inwardly, Mary wanted to roll her eyes. She was afraid she’d have to beat the lout over the head to get what she wanted from him. “Pursue her,” she whispered on. “Woo her. Make love to her.”

Tad’s eyes popped wide. “I don’t know about that.”

“Why not? I’m sure it’s what she wants. Can’t you see it?”

The two of them glanced in Ada’s direction. She was grinning and humming to herself, but as soon as she noticed she was being watched, she snapped to attention. Luckily, she sent Tad a smile.

“See,” Mary whispered. “Go after her, man. Fortune favors the brave.”

“Why, I think I might,” Tad said.

“Here, you ready with these?” Ben, the head footman, walked into the room, drawing Tad’s attention back to the curtains.

“Yes, sir,” Tad said, jumping to help Ben gather the curtains up.

Mary let him go, grinning as she went back to work. She’d planted the seed, and all that was left now was to watch it grow. That and put her own part of her plan into motion.





Chapter 2





The schoolroom was chaos. As usual. Tim waded through a small sea of crumpled bits of paper that some of the younger boys had been throwing at each other in a mock snowball fight to make his way to the chalkboard.

“So if Y equals ten in this algebraic equation,” he said in a loud enough voice to be heard over the cluster of older girls chattering on one side of the room, “what is the value of X?”

“Sir, aren’t letters for reading and numbers for maths?” seven-year-old Ursula Marks said from her desk near the front of the room. Only once Tim turned to her did she remember to raise her hand.

“Yes, Ursula. Letters are for reading, but sometimes they’re used in maths too,” Tim answered her.

A paper snowball came sailing out of nowhere and hit him in the side of the head. He flinched, then turned to see three boys scrambling for the back of the single, large room, laughing uproariously.

“You there,” Tim called after them. “Don’t think I didn’t see that, Digby, Kettering, and Potts.”

“Sorry, sir,” Davy Potts called from the safe haven of the back of the room. “I was aimin’ for Petunia.”

Davy’s older sister, Petunia, broke away from the gossipy conversation she was having with her friends to gasp and shout, “Why, I never! You come here, you little punter.”

Petunia jumped up from her seat and raced to the back of the room, where she grabbed Davy by the hair and started kicking him.

“Stop that, Petunia.” Tim sighed, marching down the center aisle that was supposed to divide the girls’ desks from the boys’.

“But sir.” George Floss tried to stop him, a desperate look on his face. Tim paused. “Algebra?” George appealed to him. “Only, me entrance exams for university is this spring.”

Two other, older boys nodded along with him. Tim glanced to the Pottses beating on each other, to the group of boys who had resumed their snowball fight, and to the older girls, who were now whispering behind their hands and staring at him with starry eyes, then back to the only three pupils in his entire class whom he thought might actually gain some sort of use from higher learning.

He sighed. “It’s nearly three o’clock anyhow. Class dismissed,” he shouted over the din. He turned back to George and his friends as even more chaos erupted. “You can stay behind, and I’ll tutor you directly.”

The older boys looked relieved, but young Ursula got up from her desk with a pout. “I still don’t understand why letters are in maths,” she said, approaching Tim with her schoolbooks clutched to her chest.

“Well,” Tim began, crouching to her eye-level, “some maths are very complicated indeed. They help people who build buildings and ships and carriages. They help people who study the stars and those who heal men and women and children like yourself.”