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

Chapter 4

He did not leave at once, and that was the first thing about him she had not expected.

He stood at the gate for a long moment with his back to the cottage, one gloved hand resting flat against the low stone wall as though he needed the world to hold still for a moment. His shoulders rose once and fell.

Then Hollis brought the horses round, and the two men rode away down the lane toward the village, and the snow that had been threatening all afternoon began at last to fall.

Cecily watched until the road bent and took them.

“You knew him,” she said.

Behind her, Hannah was washing a cup that had been clean for some minutes.

“I knew of him,” Hannah said. “Everyone knows of the Duke of Wrenmoor. He’s in the papers.”

“You went white when he said his name.”

The cup clinked against the basin. Hannah set it down, dried her hands with great care, and did not turn around.

“I went white because a duke walked into my kitchen, child. It isn’t a thing that happens in Fennwick.”

Cecily let it lie. She was learning that Hannah told the truth in pieces, like a woman doling out coins she could not afford to lose all at once.

At supper they ate barley broth and bread, and Hannah talked about the mill and the school roof and Widow Parris’s goat, and said nothing at all about the man who had stood in her doorway and called a stranger his wife.

But when Cecily went up to the small room under the thatch, she found something she had not noticed before.

A box. Elm, scarred, with a brass clasp worn bright by handling. It had been pushed under the bed, and one corner of it showed beneath the ruffle of the quilt, as though someone had moved it in a hurry and not quite managed it.

She had looked under that bed before. She was certain of it.

She knelt, and pulled the box out, and sat with it on her lap for a long time without opening it. Through the wall she could hear Hannah moving about below, banking the fire, and then the small sounds of a woman sitting down in a chair and not getting up again for a very long while.

Cecily lifted the lid.

Inside, folded with a neatness that had nothing to do with village life, lay a length of pale silk thread and a dozen needles in a paper packet. Under them, a piece of linen with a half-worked spray of leaves — and beneath that, in a brown paper envelope, a single sheet of writing paper, uncreased, as though it had been written and then never sent.

She turned it toward the candle.

Mrs. H. Beckett,

You will not remember me. But I have thought of your workroom for four years.

Cecily did not recognize the handwriting.

She did recognize, with a jolt that went through her like cold water, the way the letters leaned — the same slant, the same small closed e, as the signature she had found stitched into a corner of her own handkerchief.

Below her in the dark cottage, a chair scraped back.

“Cecily?” Hannah called, and her voice was not steady. “Cecily, what are you doing up there?”