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

Chapter 23

They opened the box together in the small hours, in the drawing room, with the lamp on the floor.

It took most of the night.

Cecily’s letters were the harder ones — hers were warm. She had not remembered being warm. She had remembered only the corridor, the silence, the loneliness, and she had built a whole woman out of those three things and that woman had not written these.

The roses are the wrong colour and I am sorry.

There is a seat in the west drawing room, under the window, and I sit in it sometimes and think you would like it if you ever came up.

I heard you come in at two o’clock and I nearly came down. I did not, because I did not want to be a nuisance. I would rather write it than say it.

I do not know how to be your wife. Everyone here knows how to be something and I do not. If you have a spare hour this month, would you teach me?

Adrian went through them with his jaw set so hard that Cecily eventually reached over and put her hand flat on the paper and made him stop.

“Read them one at a time,” she said. “It is not a punishment.”

“It is.”

“No. It is a record of a woman who was brave for two years.” She took the bundle out of his hands and set it aside. “Read mine.”

His were shorter. He was not a man who wrote easily, and it showed, and somehow that made them unbearable.

The matter of the Dorset property is settled in your name. I have put the deed in the post to Barlow & Grieve. It is yours outright. I should have said so in person. I am telling you because you will want to know that you have somewhere to go.

You were right about the west field drainage. I have told Hardy so.

I am in London until Thursday and there is nothing here at all. I thought you should know that, in case you wonder why I am quick to come home.

I have not spoken to you properly in eleven weeks. I do not know how to begin and I am not writing this to be forgiven. I am writing it so that there is a record.

Cecily read the last one twice, and then a third time, and then she put it down and looked at the ceiling of the drawing room for a while.

“You wrote that in the third week of the second year,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And I left in the eleventh.”

“Yes.”

“Adrian.” She turned to face him. “If that letter had reached me I would not have gone.”

“I know.”

“Say it.”

“I know,” he said. “I know it, and it will be the thing I carry, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make this easier.”

Cecily picked up the letter, folded it, and put it into the inside pocket of his coat, where it would stay for the rest of his life.

“Then carry it,” she said. “But carry it correctly. You did write it. You wrote it, and it was taken, and the man who wrote it is not the man who let me stand in that hall with my case in my hand.”

Near dawn they came to the very bottom of the box.

Under everything, flat against the wood, was a single sheet in a hand that was neither of theirs, on paper with a London solicitor’s stamp corner, dated the January that Cecily left, and addressed to the Dowager Lady Ashford.

A covering note. One line.

Her ladyship is advised that the petition will be lodged upon receipt of her signature, and that the physician’s report is enclosed for her use.

And beneath that, in a different ink, added later, in Lady Ashford’s own hand:

Hold. Not yet. She will go of her own accord before the spring, and it will be cleaner.

Cecily read it in the grey light with the birds starting up in the limes outside.

“There it is,” she said.

And she felt, at last, the thing she had been unable to feel all night: not sorrow, not gratitude — anger. Clean, cold, entirely her own.

She folded the sheet very carefully and put it in the pocket of her dress.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we are going to London.”