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

Chapter 17

Wrenmoor Hall came up out of the woods at her the way a fact comes up in an argument — all at once, and undeniable.

Towers. The long pale front. The terrace steps going down in stages to a gravel sweep. And the drive between the limes exactly where she had said it would be, and the lodge with two chimneys at the bottom of the hill exactly where she had said it would be, so that her own memory, which she had been treating for a month like a broken thing, quietly proved itself right twice inside a minute.

There were servants on the front steps. A whole line, standing in the cold, no one having told them to.

Cecily did not understand why they were all looking at her the way they were — until the chaise stopped and the door opened and an old man in black came down the steps and went straight past the Duke and took her hand in both of his.

“Welcome home, your grace,” he said, and could not finish the sentence.

Cecily looked at Adrian, who was watching her with an expression she had not seen on him before — a kind of held breath.

“You did not tell them to do this.”

“I told them the truth,” he said. “Three months ago. That you were missing and that I did not know whether you were alive. They have known for weeks that you had been found. Nobody could bring themselves to take the ivy off the west door.”

They went in.

The hall rose over her — a stone staircase going up on the left, four windows throwing pale light down onto the black-and-white floor, a fire burning in a grate big enough to stand in. It smelled of beeswax and cold stone and lilies going over.

It was exactly as it had been in the dream.

Every door in the corridor was closed.

Cecily walked the length of it slowly, ahead of him, with her boots making the sound that had come back off the walls in her sleep every night for a month, and stopped in front of the second door on the left and put her hand on the handle.

“If anything here troubles you,” Adrian said behind her, “we can leave. There is the house at Petersfield. Or we can go back to the inn and drive home tomorrow. I mean it.”

“No,” Cecily said.

She opened the door.

The gallery was empty and clean and full of light, the long windows down one side exactly where they should be. No furniture. No books. Nothing on the walls.

“I could not be in this room,” Adrian said, from the doorway. “After. I had it cleared. I am told that was a coward’s thing to do, and I have not argued with anybody about it.”

Cecily stood in the middle of the room where she had sat on the floor four years ago with a book she was not reading.

“Where are the books?”

“Library. Ground floor, west.”

“And the chair I used to sit in?”

“There is no chair. You never used a chair.” He paused. “You sat on the floor with your back against the window frame, and I used to think it was the oddest thing about you, and I never once asked you why.”

“Because the floor was warmer,” Cecily said, and the words came out of her without any thought at all, arriving fully formed, and she turned around.

Adrian Ashford was standing in the doorway of the room with his hand braced against the frame, and he was looking at her as though she had just stood up out of the grave a second time.

The house creaked somewhere in the cold.

“There is a box in the sewing room,” Cecily said slowly, “off the kitchens. It has a false bottom. I put a thimble in it four years ago.”

And in the doorway, behind Adrian, a woman stepped out of the shadow of the corridor — grey, upright, in a plain black dress with a chatelaine at her waist — and said, in a voice Cecily knew from the first syllable:

“There is a box. I have kept it in the pantry since the day you left, your grace, because I could not bear to leave it in that room.”

Cecily stared at her.

“Mrs. Whitlow,” she said.

The housekeeper’s face broke entirely.

And Adrian, standing between them with one hand still on the doorframe, went the colour of the snow outside.