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

Chapter 24

The house stood in the fifth generation, and the sixth, and the letters came and went, and the moors went on being indifferent to what the county thought of anybody.

Blackmoor Hall had a library with a ceiling that stayed up. It had a kitchen with a range that worked and a pantry with fish in it on Thursdays. It had silver that was inventoried and boots by the door, and a room in the east wing that had once been shut for fourteen months and had been a nursery for nine years and then a study again, and had never once been shut since.

It had a servants’ hall with a long table, and a second table, and at the head of the second table there was, for a very long time, a chair that everybody knew was the best chair in the room.

And on the wall of the estate office, above the desk where the account books were kept, there hung a small framed thing that visitors sometimes asked about and that nobody in the household could entirely explain.

It was a piece of cloth. A strip of old harness rag, washed and pressed flat, mounted behind glass with a handwritten label beneath it in a woman’s firm hand.

The label said, in its entirety:

Returned. It is possible.