Tiffany Reisz - The Headmaster

She pulled her phone out of her bag and found that she had no bars at all. Not a huge surprise. The waitress had warned her the area was a cell phone dead zone. Gwen walked down the path but picked up no signal at all. She’d try contacting Tisha again tomorrow. She headed back to Hawkwood Hall to retrieve her things from the headmaster’s quarters. In a row of windows on the second floor she saw the faces of thirty teenage boys staring at her—a question in their eyes.

“He’s letting me stay!” she called out to them.

They cheered the news, and Gwen could only shake her head in wonder. In what world were teenage boys excited to get a new English teacher? Was this North Carolina or Heaven? Whatever it was, it was her home now for one week.

One week. And then maybe…just maybe…forever.

Chapter Four

Gwen carried her things from Hawkwood to the cottage Headmaster Yorke had said would be hers for the week. She couldn’t believe she would get to live here permanently if she got the job. With fingers trembling from excitement, she turned the key in the lock and stepped into an elegantly appointed foyer. On her right she saw the parlor with antique patterned sofas and carved wooden chairs. On her left she spied a smaller room with a writing desk. She had her own office here, too? Wonderful. She wouldn’t even have to use the one at the school. Then again…the headmaster had warned her not to get comfortable. Did he have no intention of keeping her on at all after a week? She knew she’d pass a background check, and as long as she had a place to live and three meals a day, she could live on a small salary. All she could do was her best and keep her fingers crossed that the headmaster liked what he saw. She certainly did.

Someone had been in the cottage already and turned on the lights for her. Something about the house seemed so familiar to her. This cottage had the same sort of lighting as her grandparents’ house, the same sort of table lamps and flickering yellow bulbs. A moth danced around the Tiffany-style ceiling light. She let it be. No moth had ever hurt her. She welcomed its small, fluttering company.

So quiet…so peaceful…so serene. She heard no traffic from the highway this far back in the woods. Silence reigned here, an almost unearthly silence. Closing her eyes she could almost hear her own heartbeat, her own breathing.. After living next door to college students for years, Gwen considered the silence a taste of paradise.

The school might be quiet now, but every floorboard in the old cottage creaked as Gwen carried her luggage through the hallway and up the stairs. She counted fourteen steps on her way up. She could walk from one end of her old apartment to the other in fourteen steps. Now she had an entire cottage to herself. Two whole stories. A grand parlor. An office. A kitchen and dining room… She laughed when she opened the door to the bathroom and saw the antique claw-foot bathtub. She would live in that bathtub. It could fit two people in there easily. Two people? Not a terrible idea. She allowed herself a single second to imagine herself and the handsome headmaster in that bathtub.

She pushed the thought out of her head. No. Bad girl. He might be tall and devilishly handsome when he was talking at her in his posh British accent, but she knew better than to get involved with a coworker, let alone a boss. There were rules against that. Good rules. Smart rules. Sensible rules. She would follow them.

Unless he didn’t want to.

Gwen opened the door to the master bedroom.

“Wow,” she said aloud. She’d never seen a bigger, grander bedroom in her life. The bed itself wasn’t much larger than a double, but it had a blue-and-gold embroidered headboard that arched four feet over the top of the pillows. The bed linens were white and lush and soft. She sat on the edge of the bed and sank deep into the sheets. She wondered why Miss Muir, the previous literature teacher, had left this place. Who could walk away from this sort of beauty? Gwen loved it here already.

On the nightstand sat an oil lamp. A real live oil lamp. Gwen hadn’t seen an actual oil lamp in years. Her grandparents had a couple as backups for when a storm knocked out the electricity. Gwen opened a drawer and found a book of matches. She struck a match and lit the lamp. Firelight danced across the room. She put the matches back and noticed a book tucked far back in the drawer. She pulled it out and saw it was nothing more than a Bible. Not the typical hotel room Bible, however. This one sported a genuine leather cover—black and supple. She flipped open the front page and saw a name written inside it. “This Holy Bible belongs to Rosemary Leigh Muir.”

So this Bible belonged to her predecessor then? Headmaster Yorke had been annoyingly cryptic about what had happened to the woman who’d once held the position of English literature teacher at Marshal. Perhaps she’d quit the job after an argument. Perhaps she and Headmaster Yorke had disagreed over the curriculum. Perhaps she’d grown tired of the year-round schedule? But she was gone now, and Gwen was here instead.

For the first time Gwen considered the reality that she was the one and only woman at William Marshal Academy. Would this cause any sort of problem? Surely not. The boys were all far too young for her to see them as anything but boys. She’d always preferred older men. Cary had been almost thirty when they’d started dating shortly after her twenty-first birthday. Headmaster Yorke appeared about forty—the perfect age in her estimation. Old enough to have achieved maturity and wisdom. Young enough to still be…Gwen paused and searched for the right word.

Virile. Virile was the right word. He might be the glasses-wearing headmaster of a boarding school, but his deep voice, broad shoulders and overwhelming presence made him the picture of masculine virility.

Gwen put the Bible back into the drawer before she accidentally happened upon that verse that said something about not lusting after your new boss. She should try to find out what happened to Miss Muir so she could mail her book back to her. Although Gwen wasn’t particularly religious, she respected the beliefs of others. It might be a family heirloom, too. According to the copyright date on the inside, the book had been printed in 1920. A ninety-year-old Bible was certainly worth something to someone if only for sentimental value.

She laid the mystery of Miss Muir aside while she unpacked her bags and settled into the house.

Gwen decided to spend the entire weekend working on a lesson plan. The boys said they were sick of Ivanhoe. It must be Headmaster Yorke’s favorite book, but she hadn’t even read it. Sir Walter Scott appeared on none of her college or graduate reading lists. Last semester she’d taken a seminar on the Brontës. Great books, but probably a bit too girl-oriented for a class of nothing but boys. No romances for a while—not until they learned to trust her judgment. She’d ease them into the Brontës and Jane Austen in time. Charles Dickens was always a good bet. Boys loved Dickens. David Copperfield might be too long for a one-week trial. Great Expectations ? Possibly. Young Pip aids a convict, meets a crazy woman, falls in love with cold-hearted Estella and learns valuable life lessons about who is and who is not his friend. Young readers loved crazy Mrs. Havisham in her decaying wedding dress, and the moldy rat-eaten wedding cake. A wonderfully Gothic tale. She’d start there with the boys. Hopefully they hadn’t read it yet.

All Friday night, Gwen mentally composed her lectures. Monday she’d introduce them to the life and works of Charles Dickens and give them an introduction to Great Expectations. Tuesday they’d talk about the first three chapters. She had it all planned out. A perfect week. Headmaster Yorke would never want to let her go.