Her old school friend Winifred was lovely, as sweet and soft as a soufflé.Īlas, those were not helpful characteristics when it came to raising children. “Good afternoon, Winnie,” Eugenia said, rising from her desk and coming around to greet her ladyship with genuine pleasure.

“Lady Pibble and Marmaduke, Lord Pibble,” her housemaid announced. Eugenia didn’t see many blue boys in the course of a day, but she often saw mothers with the hysterical air of a woman ill-prepared to domesticate the species of wild animal known as an eight-year-old boy. The boy’s mother, Lady Pibble, trailed in after him. No laughing! Not even when her housemaid ushered in a boy wearing a brocade curtain pinned like a Roman toga-although the gleaming blue that coated his arms and face clashed with the senatorial drape of the curtain. As the owner of the most elite agency for governesses in the whole of the British Isles, she had to maintain decorum at all times. Not only did she have to keep those delicious details to herself, she couldn’t even burst into laughter until she was in private. She knew which of the Duke of Fletcher’s offspring had stolen a golden toothpick and an enameled chamber pot and, even better, what he had done with them.

For example, she knew precisely how the Countess of Ardmore’s second-best wig had made its way onto the head of a terrified piglet, which dashed across the terrace when the vicar was taking tea. A lady who has attended fourteen lectures about Chinese porcelain will Ming this and Tsing that all evening a baron who has published an essay about vultures in a zoological magazine will undoubtedly hold forth on the unpleasant habits of carrion-eaters.Įugenia Snowe’s area of expertise, on the other hand, would have made dinner guests howl with laughter, if only it were appropriate to share. Nothing ruins a dinner party like expertise. Snowe’s Registry Office for Select Governesses

Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloisa James