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

Chapter 22

He took her to the west wing, up the uncarpeted back stair that the servants used, past three closed doors and a window with no curtain, and into a room Cecily had never seen.

Or rather, into a room she realized she was still standing in.

It was the drawing room from every one of her own drawings. The same proportions, the same light, the same long window with the low sill and the seat built into the wall under it. The furniture was holland-covered. The grate was cold. But there, exactly where her ink had put it, was the window seat, and there, on the chimney breast, was the plain brick she had drawn with such care that Hannah had once asked her whether she had copied it from a print.

“You have drawn this room,” Adrian said.

“Four years ago.”

“I know.” He stood in the middle of the floor with the lamp in his hand. “This room has been shut since my father died. Nobody comes up here. I have a watercolour of it in my study that I bought at a sale in Dorchester eight years ago, and I bought it because it was the exact room I never used, and I thought it was strange that a stranger should have drawn it.”

Cecily put her hand on the holland cover of a chair and looked at him.

“Adrian,” she said. “How did we come to be married?”

“You know how. The Marches and the Ashfords. Arranged between families when you were nineteen.”

“Who arranged it?”

He did not answer at once.

“Sit down,” she said. “Put the lamp on the floor. Tell me the truth, since we appear to be in the business of that tonight.”

Adrian Ashford sat down on the floor of the shut-up drawing room with his back against the brick and the lamp beside him, and after a moment Cecily sat down opposite him, on the window seat, exactly where she had always drawn herself.

“There was a fair at Dorchester,” he said. “The year before the settlement. I had gone down to look at a horse and I did not want to be recognized, so I went in through the animal pens and stood in the crowd like anybody else.”

“And?”

“And there was a girl by the ribbon stall arguing with the ribbon seller about the price of green ribbon.”

Cecily felt the floor move.

“She was winning,” Adrian said. “She was winning so thoroughly that the man had begun to laugh. And she turned round with her winnings in her hand and looked straight at me — not at the Duke, there was no Duke at Dorchester fair in a plain coat — she looked at me the way you look at a person when you are in a good temper, and then she went off into the crowd and I did not see her again.”

The lamp hissed quietly.

“Nine months later,” he said, “the Marches came to my mother with a proposal. Their cousin’s daughter, from a parsonage in Wiltshire, no fortune. My mother refused. I overruled her.” He looked up at the window, at the black glass. “I overruled her for the first time in my life and I did it over a girl with green ribbon in her hand who had not the least idea who I was. The settlement was arranged by families because that is how it must be done. It was chosen by me.”

Cecily sat with her hands in her lap.

“All this time,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I thought I had been bought.”

“I know.”

“From the first day. I thought I had been bought and delivered, and that you had accepted a business arrangement, and that the whole of my life was a piece of estate business that had been satisfactorily concluded.” Her voice cracked. “You never told me.”

“No,” Adrian said. “I had four years and I never told you. Because I was raised to believe that a man does not speak of such things, and because it would have looked like weakness, and because —” He stopped. “Because I was afraid that if I told you I had chosen you, and you did not care, I would have to know it.”

The wind moved along the outside of the glass. Somewhere below, in the house, a clock struck eleven.

“Then say it now,” Cecily said.

He looked at her.

“Say it now,” she said. “You have a wife who does not remember loving you. Say it plainly, in this room, and I will believe you, whatever else happens.”

Adrian Ashford, Duke of Wrenmoor, sat on the floor of a shut-up drawing room in the house his mother had ruled by post bag for forty years, and said:

“I chose you at a fair in Dorchester because you were the only true thing I had seen in years. I have loved you since before I knew your name. I am not good at it. I have been taught to be a duke and nothing else, and everything I have done in the four years since has been an effort to make a business arrangement out of the best thing that ever happened to me, because I did not know how else to hold it.”

Cecily looked at him for a long moment.

Then she got off the window seat, and crossed the floor, and sat down on the boards beside him with her shoulder against his shoulder and her back against the same brick.

“Then we will learn,” she said. “Both of us. From the beginning.”