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

Chapter 16

Christmas at Blackmoor Hall was a small affair that turned into a large one by accident.

It began as eleven people: the household, Nell, and the two oldest tenants from the home farm, who had known Rowan’s father and who had nowhere else to be.

Then Craddock’s sister arrived from the village. Then Arthur’s mother. Then the family of the man who had come to clear the west guttering, because the snow had closed the road and there was nowhere for them to go, and Mrs. Tandy was not going to send a woman with two small children out into a blizzard on Christmas Eve.

By Christmas dinner there were twenty-six people at three tables in the servants’ hall, and Mrs. Tandy was magnificent, and Craddock stood at the end of the room and read the grace from a book older than the house, and cried, and did not apologize for it, and nobody asked him to.

And at the top of the second table — because Nell would not hear of the first table, which was the long one and the one with the good china, and which was hers by right of office and which she had assigned to the guttering family with the two small children, on the basis that she was no longer in the business of eating standing up and neither were they —

At the top of the second table, Nell sat beside the Duke of Blackmoor and ate goose, and nobody found it strange, and somehow that was the strangest thing of all.

Afterwards, in the hall, Rowan stood by the fire and watched her.

She was on the floor with the two children, who had been given a set of wooden animals somebody had carved at the estate workshop, and she was doing something entirely straight-faced that was making them shriek with laughter. Susan stood behind her, holding a mug, grinning.

Arthur had rigged a lantern with a candle and a sheet of coloured paper and was projecting red light onto the ceiling, with the intense concentration of a man with a project.

Craddock was asleep in a chair.

Rowan stood and watched, with his shoulder against the chimneypiece, and did not move for a long while.

When Nell finally got up, dusting her skirts, she found him looking at her.

“What,” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “I am practising.”

“At what?”

“Looking at a room,” Rowan said, “and knowing exactly where I am standing in it.”

The wedding was in the small stone church at the edge of the estate, in January, on a morning when the sky was a brilliant scoured blue in the aftermath of three days of snow.

Nell wore grey. She had considered black and rejected it, and had considered white and rejected that too, on the grounds that she was twenty-six years old and had spent eight of those years hauling coal, and a woman should be allowed to choose a colour without a committee. Grey was what she chose. Craddock, when he saw her, had to look at the ceiling for several seconds.

There were no watercolours at the wedding. No cousins from Bath. Twenty-one people came, most of them from the household, and the two oldest tenants from the home farm, and the guttering man and his wife and their two children, who had stayed the week and had never quite left.

Craddock stood as a witness and wept with complete and unashamed dignity.

Mrs. Tandy did not cry. Mrs. Tandy instead produced a wedding breakfast of such excellence that she insisted on serving it herself in the library, because she was not going to trust the handling of the good china to anyone else on this particular morning, and would not be argued with.

Arthur stood at the church door in the cold with his collar too tight, looking like a man who had just understood something important and was taking it extremely seriously, and shook hands with eighteen people, and got all eighteen names right.

And when it was done, and the light was going, Nell Farrow walked out of a small stone church as the Duchess of Blackmoor, and stopped on the step, and looked back at the door she had just come through.

“Are you all right?” Rowan said.

“I am counting,” she said.

“Counting what?”

“Where I stood,” said Nell. “It took me a long time to find out, and I want to be sure I remember it.”