She Forgot the Duke Who Broke Her Heart… Then Fell in Love With Him Again

Chapter 10

Neither of them moved for a moment.

Then Hannah folded the letter, slowly and precisely, along the creases it already had, and set it back in the box, and closed the lid.

“Sit down,” she said. “You’ve been out in the cold.”

“Hannah.”

“Sit down.”

Cecily sat.

The fire was banked. On the wall above it the small framed drawing hung in its plain wooden frame — the great house with its towers, the long approach, the road coming down from the hill. Cecily looked at it, properly this time, the way she had not looked at it in three weeks of living in this room.

“Hannah,” she said. “What is your name?”

Hannah Beckett set both her hands flat on the table.

“Before I married Beckett,” she said, “I was Hannah Trewin. And I worked eleven years in the sewing room at Wrenmoor Hall.”

The room seemed to tilt very slightly.

“I was the under-seamstress,” Hannah went on. “Then the head of the room. It’s a cold house, is Wrenmoor. Grand. Marble on the floors and nothing soft anywhere. I had a workroom off the kitchens with one window, and the girl they brought home as a bride used to come and sit in it.”

Cecily’s fingers had gone numb.

“Because it was the only warm room in the house,” Hannah said.

The fire cracked.

“She was nineteen. Frightened of everything. Couldn’t sit with the ladies — they laughed at her because she was country and the family wanted the land.” Hannah’s chin came up. “She couldn’t talk to her husband. He was up in London, at the House. Or here, with the estate books, in a study she wasn’t to disturb. And he was never unkind to her, I’ll say that for him. He was never cruel. He simply wasn’t there, and being nothing is worse than being cruel, because you can’t fight nothing.”

Cecily heard her own voice come out small.

“I taught her to sew.”

“You did not.” Hannah’s eyes were wet and steady. “You learned. I never had a quicker hand in all my years. Six weeks and you were doing work the likes of which I couldn’t manage. I told you then you had it from somewhere better than me.”

“Then the letter —”

“You wrote it to this house,” Hannah said. “Four years after. One day in January a boy brings a letter up the lane addressed to Mrs. H. Beckett, and I open it, and it says —” She stopped, and had to start again. “It says, You will not remember me. But I have thought of your workroom for four years.”

“And you did remember.”

“I wrote back,” Hannah said. “Straight away, same day. And I said, if ever you’re in the country, the door’s open and there’s a bed under the thatch. And then I heard nothing for months.” Her voice went rough. “And then one night in a snowstorm my nephew Ewan comes hammering on the door with a woman in his arms off the Ravensmoor road, and I look at her face, and I know her before she opens her eyes.”

Cecily sat very still.

“You’ve known who I was since the first night.”

“Yes.”

“Then why —”

“Because you came to me bleeding,” Hannah said, “out of that man’s house, on that man’s road, with a ring on your finger and a wound in your head the size of my palm. And when you woke you didn’t know your own name, and I thought — well.” She wiped her face with the flat of her hand. “I thought, Hannah, my girl, God has given her a rest. And I wasn’t going to be the one to take it off her.”

The wind pressed at the window.

“He came looking,” Hannah said. “Three weeks it took him. And I’ll tell you what I told Isaac — I watched that man stand in a snowbank on the far side of the square for two hours so as not to frighten you, and I’ve watched him put a new roof on a schoolhouse that isn’t his, and I don’t know yet whether it means what it looks like it means.”

Cecily looked at the drawing on the wall again — the long approach, the towers, the little figure at the bend of the road that she had always taken for a walker.

“You kept it,” she said. “Four years.”

“You drew it,” Hannah said. “For me. On your last day.”