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

Chapter 19

They did not open them that night. Cecily insisted on that, and Adrian did not argue, which she understood later was the first time he had let her decide anything without offering a reason.

Instead they sat in the small morning room — the only room in the house with a fire and no portrait in it — and Mrs. Whitlow stood in the doorway and answered questions for an hour.

“How many came in?”

“Sixty-one, madam, that I know of.”

“And went out?”

“Fifty-eight, your grace. Not counting the one on the hall table.”

Adrian sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped.

“Where in this house did I leave my letters to her?”

“On the silver salver in the study, your grace. As you always did. And every evening Jackson carried the salver up to her ladyship’s rooms with the household correspondence.”

“Jackson.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“Who left this house seven years ago with a reference from my mother.”

“Yes, your grace.”

Cecily watched the two of them and felt the floor of her understanding tilt.

Sixty-one letters. She had spent two years in a marble corridor believing that her husband did not think of her, and he had written to her sixty-one times, and the post had gone up a staircase to a set of rooms that were not his.

But that was only half of it, and she knew it before she asked.

“How many letters did I write to him?”

Mrs. Whitlow did not answer.

“How many, Mrs. Whitlow.”

“Fifty-eight, madam.”

“And how many of mine reached him?”

“None of them, your grace.” The housekeeper’s voice finally broke. “Not one. Not one in two years. And I have carried this box up and down these stairs since you left, and I have never once had the courage to take it to his grace’s study and put it on the desk, because I did not know how to explain what I had allowed to happen in a house I was supposed to keep.”

Adrian stood up and walked to the window and stood there with his back to the room.

“The Dorset property,” he said, very quietly.

“Your grace?”

“The Dorset property. My father’s settlement. I signed it over to my wife in the second year of our marriage, free and clear, in her name alone. I put it in the post to the solicitor from the study salver on a Tuesday, and I waited for her to mention it, and she never mentioned it, and I concluded that she did not want it.”

Cecily stared at his back.

“Adrian.”

“She never received it,” he said. “Because it went up the back stairs in a bag, the same as everything else I ever tried to give her. Every single thing I ever tried to give her.”

He turned around. His face was terrible.

“Do you know what I did,” he said, “when that property was conveyed back to me three months later with no letter of explanation and my wife’s signature nowhere on it?”

“No.”

“I took it as an answer. I decided that you had refused it. And I put the whole matter in a drawer and I did not speak to you about it for four months, and at the end of those four months you packed a case in the middle of the night and drove out of my gates in the rain.”

The fire shifted in the grate.

“And I let you,” Adrian said. “Because I believed I had been handed my answer.”

Cecily rose and went to Mrs. Whitlow and took the japanned box out of her hands.

“Go to bed,” she said. “It is not your fault. It is a house where the post goes up a staircase and comes back empty, and no one who works in it is to blame for that.”

Mrs. Whitlow went, and could not say anything at all on the way out.

Cecily set the box on the table between herself and her husband.

“Then,” she said, “we should begin.”

And as her fingers touched the tape on the first bundle, they heard, from somewhere beyond the closed door of the morning room, the sound of the great hall doors opening, and the flat familiar voice of a woman who did not belong in this house saying:

“Where is my son? And why is that woman in my hall?”