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

Chapter 6

At the cottage, the morning light fell across the small table and lit Cecily’s work like a small fire.

She had not meant to take up the embroidery again. But her hands had wanted something to do, and the linen with the half-worked leaves had wanted finishing, and now she sat with her shoulders curved over it and her needle going in and out of the cloth so quickly that she did not hear Hannah come in.

Hannah stood behind her for a long time without speaking.

The stitches were tiny, even, laid in a pattern that fanned along the curve of a leaf as though the silk had grown there rather than been put there. No woman in Fennwick could work like that. There was no one in the two valleys who could work like that. Margaret at the vicarage, who had taught half the parish, did not know how the trick was done.

“You see,” Hannah said at last. “Such skill does not come from nowhere.”

Cecily smiled faintly without looking up. “I suppose I must have been taught well.”

“You must have been taught,” Hannah said, “by a woman with very expensive hands.”

A silence.

Cecily set the needle down and looked at the hoop, then at Hannah.

“Tell me the truth. Did you know who I was, before he came?”

Hannah sat down across from her, slowly, like a woman lowering herself onto something that might break.

“I knew there was something wrong with you the day Ewan carried you down off that road,” she said. “Not the memory. That I understand — shock takes people that way, and the physician said the same. It was your hands. You were bleeding from a gash in your head and you were holding a handkerchief between two fingers, and there was a name worked into the corner of it in stitches I have seen before.”

Cecily went cold.

“Seen where?”

Hannah did not answer that.

“Do you believe he loves me?” Cecily asked instead, quietly.

Hannah rose and stirred the kettle over the fire, taking her time.

“I believe,” she said at last, “that he fears losing you.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“No.” Hannah met her eyes, kindly, and did not soften it. “But it is often where love begins.”

Cecily turned from the window and looked at the hoop again, and it was then — with her fingers resting on the leaves she had worked without knowing how — that the room behind her eyes opened.

A corridor. Long, cold, high windows throwing pale rectangles down onto marble. Her own footsteps, and the sound of them going on and on with nothing to stop them. Doors on either side. Every door closed.

She saw it for perhaps two seconds. Then it was gone, and she was sitting in a cottage in Fennwick with her heart hammering and Hannah’s hand on her shoulder and her voice coming out of her own mouth, thin and strange.

“There was a house. A very large one.”

Hannah’s hand tightened. “Somerville —” she stopped herself, and started again, and the slip sat in the room between them. “Wrenmoor.”

“Yes. But it was so empty.”

“Empty?”

Cecily pressed her fingers to her temple, chasing it, losing it.

“I remember walking those corridors day after day. There were servants everywhere. There was never any noise. And I remember —” her voice failed, came back — “I remember being alone.”

Hannah did not say anything. She simply put her hand over Cecily’s.

“Is it possible,” Cecily asked, very quietly, “to be lonely inside a marriage?”

Hannah looked toward the window, and then, as though she could not help it, toward a small framed drawing on the wall above the fire. It was a view of a house — a great house with towers and a long approach, done in a careful, patient hand.

“I know it is,” she said.