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

Chapter 23

When Rowan was forty-one, and Nell was thirty-nine, and their daughter was nine, they had a bad winter.

It came in from the north in the second week of January and did not lift for eleven days. The road was closed. The mail stopped. A sheep byre on the high farm went down under the weight of the snow and they lost thirty ewes in an afternoon, and Rowan was out on the moor for two days with the grey and four men and a sledge.

He came back on the second evening, half-frozen, with his hands split open and his face grey, and Nell put him in a chair by the fire in the library and took his boots off, and did not say anything at all, because she had learned, over thirteen years, exactly when the right thing to say was nothing.

He sat there for a long time with his eyes shut.

Then he said, without opening them: “I fell in a ditch once.”

“You did.”

“Best thing that ever happened to me.”

“I know.”

“I would not have—” He stopped. He started again. “If you had driven past. If you had thought, as most people would have thought, that it was not your concern. There would have been nobody. I would have died in four inches of water in a ditch on the Mireside Road, and the house would still be full of dust, and the roof would have come in by now, and Craddock and Mrs. Tandy and Arthur would have gone somewhere else and been fine, and there would have been nobody at all.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her.

“I think about it sometimes. That is all.”

Nell put the boots by the fire. She sat down on the footstool by his chair, which she never did, because she considered footstools undignified.

“You did not die in the ditch,” she said. “You were driven home by a woman with a cart. And then you came to the door and gave her back a rag. And you have spent thirteen years being worth it, which is the part that matters, because the ditch was only ever the first three minutes.”

She looked at the fire.

“The rest was the job.”