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

Chapter 20

Spring came up over the moor in the middle of April, and it came all at once, the way it always does up there — three days of wind off the west, and then suddenly the whole valley was green and loud with water.

The roads dried. The county began to call.

They called on the new Duchess of Blackmoor, and they came with a curiosity so transparent that it was almost innocent, and Nell received them the way she had received every awkward thing in her life — head-on, without apology, and with the ledger of the household in her head.

She did it well. That surprised some of them and did not surprise Rowan at all.

She remembered names. She remembered which of them had a son at sea and which of them had a mother who was ill and which of them was quietly in debt. She knew, before the second visit, that Mrs. Hedley of Fenwick would need to be seated near the fire, and that Sir Charles Amble would talk for forty minutes about drainage if allowed, and that the two Miss Ambles would not speak at all unless asked a direct question about horses.

She put out good tea and modest cake, and she did not let anybody be looked at in a way that made them smaller, because she had spent eight years being looked at in exactly that way and had concluded, somewhere around the age of twenty-two, that it was a cheap trick and she would not be using it.

By June, they had stopped coming to look at her.

By June, they were coming to dinner.

And in June, on a Thursday, Nell took the cart down to the village.

She drove herself, which the county found eccentric and which she found restful. Bramble had come to Blackmoor in March — Nell had bought her outright from Thornbury for eleven pounds, which Lady Thornbury had accepted without argument because the alternative was being told no. The old horse had settled into the Blackmoor stables with the philosophical competence of an animal who had been moved before, and had immediately established a hierarchy in which she was, unofficially, in charge of the grey.

Halfway down to the village, on the road that ran along the low wall and dipped into the narrow valley, Nell pulled Bramble up.

She got down. She walked to the edge of the ditch.

It was a perfectly ordinary ditch in June. Full of grass and cow parsley and a little standing water at the bottom, and the light lying across it in that flat, hot, early-summer way. The stone wall was where she remembered it. The curve of the road was where she remembered it.

There was a rock in the road, three feet from the verge.

She looked at that rock for a while.

It was not a large rock. It was exactly the sort of rock a horse would not see in the dark, in the rain, with a rider exhausted out of his wits after a four-day ride to a house that was shut up and cold and waiting for him with bad news.

She stood on the road in the sunshine and thought about the fact that she would have driven past that spot three hundred times in eight years and never once looked at it.

Then she got back into the cart and went on to the village to buy fish.

The fish arrived on the Thursday, and Mrs. Tandy cooked it, and it was excellent, and at the end of the meal she came out of the kitchen herself, which she only did when she was making a point, and stood at the end of the table with her hands on her hips and her face entirely composed.

“Well,” she said, to the Duke of Blackmoor.

“Well,” Rowan said.

“Forty-one years,” said Mrs. Tandy, “and I have never once been permitted to buy a decent piece of fish.”

“I have been told,” Rowan said gravely, “that it was a matter of arithmetic.”

Mrs. Tandy looked at Nell. Nell looked back at her with a face of absolute granite.

Mrs. Tandy said, “Hhmph,” and went back to the kitchen, and was heard to laugh, unmistakably, all the way down the passage.