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

Chapter 5

The next morning the entire village knew a duke had come.

Fennwick was not built for nobility. It was a huddle of slate and smoke at the meeting of two valleys, four hundred souls who fished the river, worked the mill, and cut peat off the high moor. Men who owned nothing and owed nothing paused with their axes in the air as the tall dark rider went slowly along the narrow road between the low stone walls.

Adrian Ashford did not ride like a man of rank that morning. He rode like a man looking for something.

Every doorway he passed, he looked into. Every bend in the lane, he leaned toward. He studied windows, gates, the mouths of alleys, as though his wife might be standing in any one of them and he could not bear to miss her by looking a moment too late.

Behind him, at a respectful distance, Hollis followed on a grey mare.

“Your grace,” the servant said quietly, as they slowed near the marketplace. “You have scarcely slept.”

Adrian dismounted without answering.

Sleep had become impossible, and had been for weeks. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the same thing. A shattered carriage at the bottom of the Ravensmoor incline, one wheel spinning slowly in the freezing rain. A horse with a broken leg, screaming. A coachman dead across the driver’s box. And the empty space in the grass where his wife should have been.

Blood on snow, he thought. And nothing where she should have been.

They gave him a room at the Barrow & Bell, the inn on the square, because there was nowhere else. The innkeeper, a round man named Tobin Lorry, bowed so many times getting him up the stairs that Hollis finally had to take him by the elbow.

“Your grace, the room is small, I’m sorry, it’s the best —”

“It is warm,” Adrian said. “It has a window facing the lane. It will do.”

Tobin Lorry blinked. He had not expected the window to matter.

Adrian stood at that window for most of what was left of the morning, and the thing he was looking at was a slate roof halfway up the hill, from which a thin ribbon of smoke rose in the still cold air.

“I wrote to her aunt,” he said at last. “Six letters. There is no aunt. There was never an aunt.”

Hollis, unpacking a small leather case on the bed, said nothing.

“I have gone through the house three times,” Adrian said. “I have gone through every account, every letter, every drawer she ever locked. I have had men in London reading the marriage settlements as though a document could tell me why my wife hired a carriage in the middle of the night and drove out of my gates in the rain.” His hand closed on the edge of the shutter. “And there is nothing. Not one word.”

“There is the letter,” Hollis said.

Adrian did not move.

“You’ve read it, sir. Every night these three weeks.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

The Duke of Wrenmoor looked out over the slate roofs, the mill, the muddy square where a boy was trying to drag a handcart through the ruts, and said nothing at all.

Down in the yard, Tobin Lorry’s daughter was hauling water, and in the kitchen the girl said something that carried up through the cold air, clear as a bell.

“— the lady from up the hill that come out of the wreck at Ravensmoor. They say she had a box of silk under the seat and a gold ring on her finger and she couldn’t tell ’em her own name.”

Adrian’s hand went very still on the shutter.

Hollis turned.

“Sir —”

“She has been here,” Adrian said. “Three weeks. Three miles up a road I have ridden past four times.”

He picked up his gloves.