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

Chapter 22

The first Christmas at Blackmoor after the wedding, Mrs. Tandy made a cake that took her three days.

The second Christmas, she made two, because the first one had been eaten by the guttering family and their children, who came every year now and had stopped asking whether it was all right.

On the third Christmas, there were forty-one people in the servants’ hall and the dining room was empty, and nobody suggested using it, and Craddock read the grace and cried and did not apologize, and everybody had long since stopped expecting him not to.

That was the year that Rowan stood up at the end of the meal and said, in a voice that was mostly steady, that he had not been raised to inherit and had not wanted it when it came, and that he had spent the first year of it trying to work out how to be the sort of man who deserved such a house, and that he had failed, and that a woman with a cart horse had come along and fixed the roof, and that he did not have the words for the rest of it, and so he would simply say thank you.

Then he sat down.

Craddock cried harder. Mrs. Tandy did not cry, but she did have to go into the pantry for a moment, and she blamed the onions, and there were no onions.

And Nell Farrow — the Duchess of Blackmoor, the woman who had been furniture with a pulse, useful and invisible and replaceable, the woman who had been girl and you and Farrow and once, memorably, the other one — sat at the head of the second table with her hand in her husband’s hand under the tablecloth, and looked down the room at forty-one people who were warm on a night in December, and thought, with the practical satisfaction of a woman closing a very long ledger:

Balanced.

They had a child in the fourth year. A girl, small and furious and loud.

They named her Elizabeth, after nobody at all — or rather, after the woman Nell had been for twenty-six years and had not entirely stopped being, and did not want to entirely stop being, because she had been, on the whole, a decent sort of woman, and had done the work.

The child grew up in a house where the servants’ hall was louder than the dining room, where the housekeeper sat at the second table and the duke sat next to her, where nobody flinched at a raised voice, and where the fish came on Thursdays.