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

Chapter 11

Cecily did not sleep. She sat up with the elm box on her knees and the candle guttering, and one by one she took out everything in it.

The silk. The needles in their paper packet. The linen with its half-worked spray of leaves.

And under the linen, under the false bottom she had not known was there — she found it purely by accident, pressing down to close the lid — a small silver thimble, dented on the crown, and inside it a scrap of paper folded to the size of a fingernail.

On the scrap, in her own hand:

Three things I will keep. The thimble. My name. The road out.

She stared at it until the candle dipped. Then she lay down with the thimble closed inside her fist and slept at last, and dreamed, and the dream was the corridor.

She was walking. She knew it was a dream, and it did not help.

High windows on one side, each one throwing a pale rectangle down onto the marble, and her own footsteps going ahead of her and coming back off the walls the way footsteps do in a place with nothing to hold the sound. Doors on the left. Every one of them closed. The whole length of the corridor had that smell she had been smelling all her life without knowing it — beeswax, cold stone, and lilies going over.

She was looking for something. She did not know what.

At the far end there was a door that stood open, and the light coming out of it was warm — firelight, lamplight, the yellow kind — and she knew, in the way you know things in dreams, that if she got to that door everything would be all right.

And then she was there, and she was standing in the doorway, and it was the sewing room. One window. A table with cloth on it. A woman with her back to the door, dark hair pinned up, hands moving fast over a hem.

“You’re back,” the woman said, without turning. “Sit down. Your hands are frozen.”

Cecily woke with the thimble biting into her palm and tears running into her hair.

She did not get up for a long time.

When she went down, Hannah was already at the fire, and neither of them said a word about the night before; Hannah only looked at her once, closely, and then put a bowl of porridge in front of her and went out to the mill with the peat basket.

Cecily picked up the embroidery hoop.

She had not meant to work. She had meant to sit and think. But her hands went to the linen the way they always did, and she pushed the needle through, and the room did what it did now — opened behind her eyes.

The corridor. The windows. The doors.

But this time there was something else. Another fragment, older, worn thin at the edges like a page read too many times. She was in that same house, but it was summer, and the long windows at the end of the gallery were open, and there was a smell of cut grass coming in. She was sitting on the floor with a book she was not reading, and there were footsteps coming down the corridor behind her, and she knew without turning who it was, and she knew — this was the thing that made her hand stop on the needle — she knew that her whole chest had lifted at the sound.

Because he was coming.

Because she had been waiting all afternoon for the sound of his boots on the marble.

Cecily sat in the cottage with her heart going hard and the needle frozen in the cloth and understood, with a cold shock that ran all the way down her arms, that the memory was not of loneliness at all.

It was the memory of a woman waiting for her husband, and being glad.