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

Chapter 16

They left before dawn three days later, in a post chaise Adrian hired at the Barrow & Bell rather than send for one of his own carriages, which Cecily understood to be deliberate and did not comment on.

Hannah stood in the lane to see them off.

“None of that,” she said, when Cecily began to thank her. “I have not done anything but feed you, and I was paid for worse work than that in my time.”

“Hannah.”

“Get in the carriage.”

“Hannah.” Cecily took both her hands. The red, chapped, clever hands that had taught her ten thousand stitches and never once been thanked for it. “You kept a drawing on your wall for four years.”

Hannah’s mouth worked.

“It is a good drawing,” she said.

“You left the box where you meant me to find it.”

“I did no such —”

“You did.” Cecily held on. “You did, and you knew it, and you told Isaac exactly what you thought about it in my hearing and made him carry the blame. Which is the most Hannah thing you have ever done.”

Hannah laughed — a wet, cracked, entirely real laugh — and then hugged her hard, and then stepped back and straightened her apron and became, at once, a woman in a lane saying goodbye to a caller.

“Write to me,” she said. “I don’t care what you remember. Write to me anyway.”

Ewan drove the first stage. Adrian rode outside beside him, which was not remotely appropriate for a duke and which he did anyway, and through the small window Cecily watched the two of them talking about horses for four hours without either of them mentioning anything that mattered.

The country opened out. Fennwick dropped behind its two valleys, and the road went up over the moors, and somewhere beyond the second rise the land began to look like land she had seen before.

She knew the moment they reached Ravensmoor, before anyone said it. There was no signpost. There was simply a long straight climb, and at the top a bare shoulder of hill with a wind coming over it, and the road turning along the edge of a drop where the stone had been set at the rim like a fence the earth had shrugged off.

The chaise slowed.

“Here,” Ewan said from the box.

Cecily looked down the drop.

She could see the whole thing — the incline, the bend, the place where the near horse had gone over and dragged the rest with it, the strip of flattened grass under the bank where a woman had lain in six inches of snow for a night and a day with a handkerchief between her fingers.

The coachman’s grave-marker was up on the verge. Small. Wooden. Somebody maintained it.

“Did you put that there?” she asked.

“His name was Nathaniel Cooper,” Adrian said, from the box. “He had a wife in Reading and two boys. I pay the widow an annuity. It is not enough, and I sent the marker because I did not want the spot unmarked for her in case she ever came to see it.”

Cecily sat back against the cushions and looked at the back of her husband’s coat, and at the line of his shoulders, and at the way he had said I did not want the spot unmarked in the flat voice of a man who had thought about it far too often.

The chaise moved on.

Somewhere past the next bend the road ran down through beech woods, and the trees closed over, and Cecily sat forward suddenly with her hand on the window frame, because she knew these trees.

Not from memory. From a drawing.

Her own drawing, done in ink on cheap paper, sitting in a plain frame above a woman’s fire in Fennwick.

“Adrian,” she said — the first time she had used his name in his hearing — and the sound of it made him turn his head sharply toward the window.

“I remember the road coming down,” she said. “I drew it. There is a lodge at the bottom of the hill with two chimneys and a gate, and after the gate the drive runs between the limes for a quarter of a mile, and then —”

She stopped.

“Then you see it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It is exactly as you remember.”

“Yes.” She sat back. “That is what frightens me.”