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

Chapter 18

Mrs. Whitlow had been at Wrenmoor for thirty-one years.

She said this in the sewing room, standing with her hands folded, while Cecily sat on the one chair in the room and Adrian stood by the window with his back to both of them, because he could not look at either.

“Thirty-one years in October,” Mrs. Whitlow said. “I came as a kitchen maid at fifteen. Her late ladyship — your husband’s mother — engaged my mother before me, and her mother before that. We are a Wrenmoor family.”

“Tell me about the box,” Cecily said.

“The box was yours. You kept it on the third shelf, behind the folded linen, and you told me once that if you were ever taken out of this house feet first I was to make sure it went with you.” Mrs. Whitlow’s mouth thinned. “I did not think you meant it. Then one morning in January you came down at four o’clock with your case packed and your coat on, and you gave me a letter and asked me to put it with the post, and I understood that you had meant it.”

The fire in the sewing room was small and the room was warm the way Cecily remembered warmth — trapped, close, smelling of pressed cloth and hot iron.

“What was in the letter?”

“It was addressed to his grace.” Mrs. Whitlow looked steadily at the back of the Duke’s coat. “You sealed it in front of me. You put it on the hall table with the rest of the post. And I went back down to my pantry and I did not sleep, because I had watched you walk out of the west door into the dark on your own two feet and I had not said a word to stop you.”

Cecily looked at Adrian. He had not moved.

“It reached him,” Cecily said.

“No, your grace,” Mrs. Whitlow said. “It did not.”

The room was very quiet.

“All the post in this house,” the housekeeper said, “goes up to her ladyship’s rooms at nine o’clock every morning and is sorted there before it is sent down. It has gone that way since before you were married. Her ladyship’s secretary keeps the bag. Anything going out, anything coming in. It has always been so.”

Adrian Ashford turned around very slowly.

“Say that again,” he said.

“Her ladyship’s secretary keeps the post bag, your grace. As she did in your father’s time, and as she has done since.”

“My mother has not lived in this house for four years.”

“No, your grace.” Mrs. Whitlow’s voice did not change at all. “But her secretary does.”

Something passed over the Duke’s face that Cecily had never seen there — something older and colder than regret. He looked, for a moment, exactly like a man who has put his hand on a wall he believed to be solid and found it to be a door.

“Where is the letter now?” Cecily asked.

Mrs. Whitlow went to the shelf, lifted down the folded linen in the third place, and took from behind it a small japanned dispatch box with a lock, and set it on the table, and then — without being asked — took a key from her chatelaine and opened it.

The box was full.

Letters, in bundles, tied with tape. Dozens of them. Some with seals broken. Some with seals never broken at all. And on top, in Cecily’s own hand, a letter addressed to His Grace the Duke of Wrenmoor, Wrenmoor Hall, Dorsetshire — sealed, never opened, still bearing a smear of wax where she had pressed the ring of her own hand into it three weeks ago.

“I have no excuse,” Mrs. Whitlow said, “except that I did not know what else to do with a letter that would have to go through the person it was about.”

Adrian crossed the room and picked up the letter. He looked at the seal for a long moment.

“Every letter in this box,” he said, “is addressed to me.”

“Some of them, your grace.”

“What are the rest?”

Mrs. Whitlow looked at Cecily.

“The rest are addressed to your grace,” she said. “They came in, over two years. Letters from the Duke to his wife. And I am very much afraid, madam, that you never saw a single one.”