She Gave a Lost Stranger a Ride Home—Hours Later, the Duke Knocked on Her Door
Chapter 12
She lay awake for a long time that night.
The little room over the kitchen was warm now — she had had the flue cleared in her second week, and had discovered that the previous housekeeper’s quarters had been used for eleven months as a lumber store, which explained a great deal about the previous housekeeper. The wind moved around the corner of the building with the sound of something patient going past.
Nell.
She had been Miss Farrow to every employer she had ever had. She had been girl, and you, and Farrow, and once, memorably, the other one. In eight years at Thornbury not one person above the basement stairs had said her Christian name aloud, and if she was honest — and she was trying, lying in the dark with the wind going round the corner, to be honest — she had not especially minded. It was not a wound. It had simply been the weather. You do not resent the rain for falling on you.
But a man had put the name in his mouth like something that mattered, at eleven o’clock at night, with ink on his hand and a burnt letter in his ink tray, and it had landed in her chest in a place she had believed for twenty-six years was closed for business.
She turned over. She thought about Lady Thornbury’s letter, and found, to her surprise, that she was not thinking about the letter.
Fifty miles north-east, in a house she had not seen since she was fourteen, there had been a man who was a schoolmaster in a small town in Durham. He had taught Latin to farmers’ sons and had died of a chest infection in a bad winter when she was eighteen, and had left behind him no money, no property, and no family to speak of. What he had left behind instead was a daughter who could read a ledger at fourteen and who understood, before she understood much else, that the world was going to require her to be useful.
She had looked at her two doors. Maid or governess. Both were a kind of invisibility. The difference was that a governess was required to sit in the drawing room and perform belonging in a house where she would never belong, and Nell had chosen the other thing — the door where she would at least always know exactly where she stood.
She had never once regretted it.
She had simply never imagined that anyone would ever come looking behind the door.
The following week, she sent Craddock down to Thornbury with a message for her ladyship.
It was three lines long, written on Blackmoor stationery, in Nell’s own hand, and it thanked Lady Thornbury for the character reference, and it stated that the reference had been filed, and it stated that his grace’s solicitors would be writing separately regarding a matter of drainage on the north boundary.
The reply came back within the day, and it was not a letter at all. It was a note, and it said, in its entirety:
The matter may be considered closed.
Craddock delivered it with a face of perfect granite. Nell read it, folded it, and put it in the drawer, this time on top of the coal receipts.
That evening, at the kitchen table, Mrs. Tandy asked, with elaborate casualness, what had become of the coffee platters from Thornbury.
“They arrived,” Nell said. “Two of the six are cracked.”
“Imagine that.”
“Indeed.”
Mrs. Tandy went back to her pastry, and the two of them sat in a silence that was entirely comfortable and entirely full of understanding, and that was the end of the discussion.