She Gave a Lost Stranger a Ride Home—Hours Later, the Duke Knocked on Her Door

Chapter 10

Lady Thornbury’s patience expired on a Monday in late November.

She did not come to Blackmoor. She appeared instead at the back door of her own kitchen — Nell had gone up to Thornbury that morning on the cart to collect a set of serving platters she had arranged to purchase from the estate surplus, since Blackmoor’s good service was still forty years out of fashion and her ladyship was selling off china she had never liked.

Lady Thornbury was standing on the flags with a sealed envelope in her hand and her face arranged into an expression of careful, generous concern.

“I felt,” she said, “that a character reference was the appropriate thing, given the suddenness of your departure.”

Nell took it and read it.

It was a masterpiece of the genre.

Every sentence appeared, on its surface, to be complimentary. Every subordinate clause concealed a blade. She was described as willing — which in a reference meant something less than capable. Enthusiastic without always knowing her place. Thorough, when supervised. Honest, as far as anyone could say. And it concluded by wishing her every success in her future endeavours, which in the grammar of aristocratic correspondence meant a door closed and locked from the inside.

Nell read it twice. She folded it along its own crease and looked up.

“I did not ask for a reference.”

“I thought you might need one,” Lady Thornbury said, “should the Blackmoor position not work out as expected.”

Her expression was calibrated precisely to resemble concern.

“These arrangements between bachelor employers and young female staff can be so unpredictable.”

There it was. Out in the open, wrapped in silk.

Nell felt something cold arrive in her chest and settle there. Not hurt — she had stopped expecting better from Lady Thornbury at about the age of twenty — but a clear, clean anger, the kind that sharpened rather than fogged.

“Thank you, my lady,” she said.

And she walked out.

The letter sat in her apron pocket all the way down the cart track like a lump of coal. She did not tell Rowan. It was not his problem to solve, and she was not a woman who handed her difficulties to other people. She filed it in the back of the household correspondence drawer, beneath the coal receipts, and returned to the supply contracts and the question of the parlour chairs and the dining-room runner.

Which is why it was Craddock — three days later, standing in the estate office with his hands folded and his conscience entirely clear — who told the Duke of Blackmoor.

Not out of malice. Out of the simple uncomplicated loyalty of a man who had served the Blackmoor family for forty years, and who had decided, in his considered way, that his current duke was not in possession of all the relevant information.

Rowan listened to the whole of it without interrupting.

Then he asked one question.

“Where is it kept?”