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

Chapter 15

She had expected to find him striding. Instead she found him standing still at the place where the race turns, and he heard her boots on the gravel and turned around, and something in his face did an unguarded thing for a quarter of a second before it got itself under control.

“You should not have walked out without a lamp,” he said. “It is nearly dark.”

“Do not,” Cecily said, “start telling me what I should and should not do.”

Adrian stopped.

“Very well,” he said.

They walked back up the path to the village and then past it, to the field behind the Barrow & Bell where a stand of old oaks stood bare against the sky, and there was a bench there, split and mended, and they sat on it. Not close. Not far.

“Why the well?” she said.

He looked at her.

“Do not tell me it was practical,” she said. “You told Hannah that. She repeated it to me. The well was collapsing, the roof leaked, that is practical. I want the other answer.”

Adrian was quiet for a while. The wind moved through the branches overhead and made the sound bare branches make, like something being sifted.

“When I thought you were dead,” he said, “I sat in my study at Wrenmoor for six days and did not eat. Hollis had to take the newspapers away from me because I was reading the notices as though a list of the dead might have one more name on it.”

Cecily did not move.

“And on the seventh day I understood something about myself that I have not enjoyed knowing.” He turned his hat over in his hands. “I had given you everything society says a duchess should want. A great house. Servants. Position. Respect. Money enough for a hundred and forty years. Every account balanced, every tenant seen to, every door of that house properly hung.”

A pause.

“And I had never once given you myself. Not an hour. Not a walk in the garden. I sent you to Derbyshire with the housekeeper when your mother died because I had a vote in the Lords that week.”

Cecily looked at the ground.

“You believed duty was enough,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“Now I know that duty is only the skeleton of a life.” He said it slowly, as though he had tested every word of it in the dark. “It is what holds the whole thing upright, and it looks like a person from a distance, and there is nothing inside it. Love is —” He stopped.

“Love is what?”

“The breath,” Adrian said. “The breath that keeps it alive. And a skeleton without breath is just a house with everything correctly hung and no one in it.”

Cecily sat on the bench in the cold and found that she was crying, quietly, without any drama, and that she did not especially mind him seeing it.

“You are very different,” she said, “from the man I imagined when Hannah first told me a duke was at the gate.”

“I am sorry to disappoint.”

“You misunderstand me.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “The man I imagined was exactly the man you have just described. The house with nothing in it. And I have spent three weeks watching you be somebody else.”

Adrian did not say anything. He did not reach for her.

“Which of you is real?” she said.

“Both,” he said. “That is the whole trouble with me.”

They sat a while longer. Then Cecily said, “My memories come in pieces. Small ones. Yesterday I remembered a gallery with the long windows open, and there was cut grass, and I was sitting on the floor, and —” she hesitated — “and I was waiting for the sound of your boots in the corridor. And I was glad.”

Adrian Ashford went completely still.

“I do not remember the rest,” she said. “I do not know what happened after. But I know that I sat there all afternoon with a book I was not reading, because I wanted you to come past.”

“Which gallery?” His voice was not steady. “On the west side. First floor. Second door on the left.”

“Yes.”

“That is where I —” He stopped and started again. “I came to find you that day because I had ridden home early from London and I did not want to be in the house until you were in it.”

Cecily looked at him.

“A book of pressed flowers,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That is where the flower came from.”

“Yes.”

They sat there under the bare oaks with the last light going, and the distance between them on the bench was perhaps eight inches, and neither of them closed it.

Then Cecily said, “Take me to Wrenmoor.”