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

Chapter 8

The parcel was still there when she came back up the lane.

Brown paper, tied with string in a knot so neat it looked like something a clerk would tie, sitting on the low stone wall exactly where the man had stood. Snow had gathered in the folds and begun to melt in a thin dark line down the side.

Cecily stood over it for a while.

Nobody in Fennwick would leave a parcel on a wall in a snow squall. Nobody in Fennwick tied string like that. She looked up the moor road, but the road was empty and the light was going and there was nothing on it but the wind pushing a torn branch along the ruts.

She picked the parcel up.

It was heavier than it looked. Warm, oddly, as though someone had carried it inside a coat for a long way.

Hannah was at the mill, so Cecily went up to her room, sat on the bed, and untied the string. The knot came apart in one pull — the way knots do when someone has tied them to be untied.

Inside the paper was linen. Inside the linen was a bundle of wildflowers, white and pale lilac, their stems wrapped in damp moss so they would not wilt on the road. And under the flowers, flat against the paper, a single pressed flower, brown and brittle and years old, laid on a scrap of card.

On the card, in a hand she knew because it was her own — the same lean letters, the same small closed e — three words:

You preferred these.

Cecily sat there a long time with the cold coming through the window and the smell of wet moss rising in the small room.

He had kept a dead flower for years.

He had kept it in a book, probably, or a drawer, until it was flat enough to lie on a card, and then he had ridden three days with it in his coat to leave it on a wall in a village where no one knew his name.

She did not understand the man at all. Every fact she was given about him argued with the last. A duke who let his wife be lonely. A husband who did not ask her to stay. A stranger who stood two hours in the wind on the far side of a square so that he would not frighten her.

And a man who carried a dead white flower for years and did not say a word about it when he handed it over.

Cecily pressed the fresh blossoms between the pages of the linen and put the card in the elm box, under the unsent letter, where she would not have to look at either of them.

Then she went down and put the kettle on, because Hannah would be home soon and cold, and because her hands wanted to do something ordinary.

She was still standing at the hearth when she heard, through the wall, Hannah on the path outside — and Hannah was not alone.

Two voices. Low, urgent, pitched not to carry.

“— you promised me,” Hannah was saying. “You swore it in front of the fire.”

“I promised nothing.” A man’s voice, oldish, frayed at the edges. “I said I would not tell her. I have not told her.”

“You left the box where she’d find it.”

“I put it where she’d find it.” A pause. “Hannah. She’s been three weeks in this house and she thinks she came out of a ditch a stranger. The woman deserves to know she wrote that letter. She deserves to know she wrote it to you.”

The door handle turned.

Cecily had just enough time to set the kettle down quietly and turn her back to the room, and when Hannah came in with a basket of peat on her hip and the cold behind her, her face was exactly as it always was — red-cheeked, narrow-eyed, thoroughly unremarkable.

“Wind’s getting up,” Hannah said. “There’ll be snow by morning.”

“Yes,” Cecily said.

And behind Hannah, on the threshold, stood a man she had never seen before — grey, stooped, with a miller’s hands and a coat patched at both elbows — who looked at Cecily across the kitchen as though she had risen out of the floor.

He took his cap off very slowly.

“Miss,” he said.