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

Chapter 25

They drove down through Dorsetshire in April, and the limes were in leaf, and the roses in the west garden were still the wrong colour.

Cecily had them left alone.

There was a great deal to do at Wrenmoor that spring, and none of it was grand. The dowager went north to the dower house at Hutton, with two servants and no keys, and did not write, and was not written to, and the post bag was abolished in the first week and the letters came down to the hall table like anybody’s. The west door had its ivy off. Mrs. Whitlow was given the house and did it better than it had ever been done by anyone. Jackson’s name was taken off the roll of the household and put in a file.

Ewan came down once, in June, to see the estate, and stood in the great hall with his cap in his hands and said it was a deal of stone for one family, and Adrian agreed with him. Hannah came in September, and stayed three weeks, and complained the whole time about the light in the sewing room, and then rearranged it herself, and then sat in the middle of the rearrangement and cried for ten minutes with her apron over her head while Cecily held her hand and said nothing at all.

Two things did not change.

The first was the corridor. Cecily walked it every morning — the long one, the marble one, the four windows throwing their pale rectangles down — and went on walking it deliberately, because she had learned that a place stops being a prison the moment you can leave it and the moment you choose not to.

The second was the west drawing room.

It was hers. She had it opened, and aired, and papered, and the holland taken off the furniture, and she kept the brick on the chimney breast exactly as it was, and she put in nothing she had not chosen with her own hands. The window seat she left alone entirely, down to the worn place in the boards where a woman had sat with her back against the frame for four years and nobody had ever asked her why.

She sat there most afternoons. It was the warmest seat in the house.

And on a Tuesday in the middle of October, with the year’s last cut grass coming in through the open window and the fire lit early against the cold, Cecily Ashford sat on that window seat with her husband’s second page in her pocket, and her husband’s coat over the arm of the chair, and her own hand resting thoughtfully over the gentle curve beneath her dress, and heard from the far end of the corridor the sound of boots on marble.

She did not get up.

She had spent four years in this house waiting for that sound and telling herself she did not care whether it came. She had spent eleven weeks in a fishing village learning that it was the one sound her body had kept when everything else had gone. And she had spent six months since learning that the two of them — the man and the woman — were both of them people who had been taught the wrong things early and were doing the work now, every day, out loud, like adults, which was harder than anybody ever said it would be and better than she could have imagined.

The boots came closer.

In the doorway, Adrian Ashford stopped, the way he still did — still careful, still giving her the room, even now, even after everything — and looked at her sitting in that particular seat in that particular light, and something in his face did an unguarded thing, and for once he did not get it under control.

“You are sitting where you always sat,” he said.

“I know.”

“I have been trying to find my way to you for four years.”

“I know.”

“And you are here.”

“I am here,” Cecily said. “I am here, and I am not going anywhere, and if you want to know whether I love you —”

She held out her hand.

“— the answer is yes. It has always been yes.”

He crossed the room and took it, and knelt down on the worn boards, and put his forehead against her palm, and stayed there, and outside the window the limes went on moving in the wind, and somewhere below in the kitchens a woman’s voice was laughing at something, and the whole enormous stone house, which had been built four hundred years ago to hold a family’s name, was full — completely full, in every room of it — of nothing but ordinary sound.

The man who could not say “stay” married a woman who could not say “I am lonely.”

For two years and four months, a staircase between them kept either word from being heard.

It took a broken carriage on a hill at Ravensmoor, a forgotten name, a fishing village, a box of unsent letters, and a woman in a cottage who kept a drawing on her wall for four years, for the two of them to say it at last — out loud, and in the same room, and to each other.

He never once asked his wife to stay. She never once told him she was leaving.

And in the end neither of them ever had to say it again.

THE END