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

Chapter 9

The man’s name was Isaac Beckett, and Hannah introduced him as her husband’s brother, and he sat at the far end of the table all evening with his cap on his knee and said nothing.

But he looked. Every time Cecily moved — lifting the pot, reaching for the salt, turning the hoop of embroidery toward the light — his eyes followed her hands.

At the door, when he left, he turned back once.

“Whatever you decide,” he said to her, “she did right by you. Remember that.”

Then he was gone into the dark, and Hannah shut the door and stood with her hand flat against it for a moment before she turned.

“Hannah,” Cecily said.

“Bed,” Hannah said. “You’re grey as ash.”

Cecily lay awake most of the night.

In the morning she went walking, because walking was the only thing that made her head quiet. She took the path down along the millrace toward the river, where the water ran high with melt and the trees stood bare and cold above it, and she had gone perhaps half a mile when she heard the rhythm of a horse behind her.

She turned.

Adrian Ashford had dismounted twenty yards back — carefully, deliberately, so that the horse would not come at her — and he stood holding the reins with his hat in his other hand.

“I hope I am not intruding,” he said.

His tone was polite. Almost formal. The tone of a man addressing a lady at a distance in a drawing room, and not the tone of a man addressing his wife in a muddy lane.

“You are not,” Cecily said.

They stood there while the river went on making its noise beyond the trees.

“I found your parcel,” she said.

“I hoped you would.”

“You wrote on the card.”

“I did not write on it.” He said it steadily, watching her face. “You did. That is your hand. It has been in a book of mine for four years.”

Cecily looked at the water.

“Why did you not say so yesterday?”

“Because you would have asked me why I kept it,” Adrian said, “and I did not want to answer that in a village square with twelve people watching.”

She almost smiled. Almost.

They walked, in the end — she did not remember agreeing to it, only that at some point they were both moving the same direction along the path, the horse following behind on a loose rein, and he kept a good two feet of distance between them, and did not once try to close it.

The early air smelled of wet earth and cold iron. Meltwater ran somewhere under the leaf mould. It was, Cecily thought, the first peaceful half hour she had had since waking without a name.

“You truly mean to stay here,” she said. “As long as it takes.”

“Yes.”

“You have estates. Tenants. A seat in Parliament.”

“Yes.”

“And yet you are here.”

Adrian looked across the river to the far bank.

“For two years,” he said, “I believed my duties were the largest thing in my life. I was raised to think so. I was congratulated for thinking so.” A pause. “I have since discovered how small those duties feel when the one person who was meant to share that life walks out of the door.”

Cecily studied him. “You speak as though you regret our marriage.”

“I regret how little I understood it.”

They went on. Then, ahead of them, the path narrowed and dropped, and a boy of about eleven stood up to his ankles in mud beside a handcart sunk to the axle, tugging at the shafts and getting nowhere.

Adrian did not hesitate. He handed Cecily the reins and walked forward, and, before the boy could do more than gape, he had set his shoulder under the tail of the cart and lifted it clear of the rut as though the load had been a basket of eggs.

“Thank you, sir,” the boy said.

Adrian put his hat straight and came back.

“You did not have to do that.”

“No,” he said. “But it needed doing.”

“That is not what I said.”

“No,” he agreed. “It is what you meant.”

They walked on another twenty yards in silence, and then Cecily said the thing she had been turning over since the parcel.

“You are not the man I expected.”

Adrian did not look at her.

“And you,” he said, “are not the woman I deserved.”

The sentence lay between them on the path, and neither of them picked it up.

When they came back to the mill bridge he stopped and she went on alone, and she was thirty paces up the lane before she understood what had happened to her — that she had turned around twice to look at him standing there, and that the second time she had felt something she could not name, and that it was the closest thing to disappointment she had felt since the day she woke up in a strange bed.

She walked into the cottage with her heart slightly out of rhythm.

Hannah was at the table with the elm box open in front of her.

She had the unsent letter in her hand.