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

Chapter 14

She took the note out into the lane to read it alone, because she could not read it in front of him.

The light was going. She stood in the lee of the wall with the wind coming up the valley and unfolded the square of paper.

Eleven words. Her own hand.

I have gone to my aunt’s. Do not follow me.

And underneath, smaller, added in the same ink but written clearly later, in a hurry, with the pen pressed too hard:

You would not want me anyway.

Cecily read that second line about twelve times.

She did not remember writing it. She did not remember the desk, the midnight, the hall, the carriage. But she stood in a cold lane in Fennwick and recognized that sentence the way you recognize your own voice on a recording — obscurely, uncomfortably, beyond argument.

That was her. That was what she had thought.

She had been wrong about him. But she had believed it. That was the part that took her legs out from under her: she had believed it so completely that she had written it down as a farewell.

And he had been right. One word in that hallway and she would have stayed, out of duty, out of manners, and every year after would have proved her correct.

She folded the note and put it in her pocket. She was aware that he had watched her walk out to read it and had not asked for it back.

The village had changed while she had been inside her own head.

She noticed it properly walking home. The well in the market square had a new coping of dressed stone, and the pump handle moved cleanly instead of sticking halfway. The schoolhouse roof, which had leaked in three places, had been re-laid with good slate. The mill path — the one that turned an ankle twice a week — had been drained and gravelled and finished with cut edging, so neatly that no one who did not live here would have noticed a thing.

Two children ran past her at the end of the lane and stopped.

“Miss! Miss — thank the Duke for the well, will you?”

Cecily paused. “You should thank him yourselves.”

“We did.” The smaller one was puffing. “He said thank you.”

“Thank me?”

“He said the village was kind to his wife.” The boy said wife the way you would say a word in a foreign language, carefully, not at all sure it was allowed. “So it’s the same, isn’t it.”

They ran off.

Cecily stood in the middle of the lane with her hands in her coat and the wind taking the last of the light out of the sky, and felt something go through her that wasn’t memory and wasn’t gratitude and was not yet anything she had a name for.

Not duty. Not fear.

The other thing.

She found Hollis coming out of the Barrow & Bell with a lamp, and asked where the Duke had gone.

“Up the mill path, my lady,” Hollis said. “He walks it every evening now. Says he likes to see the water.”

She went after him without deciding to.