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

Chapter 3

“Blackmoor,” he said.

She kept her eyes on the road.

Blackmoor Hall lay three miles beyond Thornbury, up on the high ground between the two rivers, where the moor widened into something vast and almost biblical. It had stood empty the better part of a year. Boards over the windows, chimneys cold, the drive gone to weed. Everyone in the valley knew this, the way small places always know the business of their absent great men — with a mixture of quiet resentment and a fascination that nobody would admit to out loud.

“The house is shut up,” she said.

“I am aware.”

“So you are staff, coming to open it.”

Another pause. His grey eyes were on the dark road, following the ruts through the lamplight.

“Something like that,” he said.

Nell did not press. It was not her place to press, and besides, a man’s reasons for being on this road in this weather at this hour were his own. She had learned early that a partial truth is often the most honest thing a person can offer when they have not entirely chosen the situation they are standing in.

She drove on. The rain did not let up. Bramble picked her way through the worst of the ruts with the philosophy of a very old animal who had long ago stopped expecting the world to make sense.

And the silence between them was not uncomfortable. That was the strange part — the part she would think about later, turning it over in the dark of her little room. It was simply the silence of two people with nothing to perform for each other. No social ground to establish. No first impression to manage. In Nell’s experience that silence was rare and valuable, and she said nothing at all to break it.

“You are not going to ask me a great many questions,” he said at last.

“No. Most people would.”

“Most people,” he said, “would also have driven past a body in a ditch and told themselves it was not their concern.”

“Most people are not driving a cart with room in the back.”

He turned his head and looked at her properly. She did not look back. She was negotiating a stretch of road where the drainage had failed entirely and the surface had become something very like cold porridge.

“What is your name?”

“Nell Farrow.”

“And what takes you along the Mireside Road at this hour, Nell Farrow?”

“Provisions. I am a maid at Thornbury House.” She guided Bramble around a deep rut. “Thursday is my half-day. I fetch the household stores on the way home. It saves the estate the cost of sending a man out specially.”

“You drive the provisions cart yourself, in October, in the dark.”

“I like the drive.”

A pause, filled up with rain.

“The rain,” she said, “is considerably less offensive than most of the guests currently staying at Thornbury House.”

He said nothing.

“One of them rang for me at three o’clock this morning to ask me to warm a shawl. The rain has never once asked me to warm anything.”

The sound that came out of him then was unmistakable. A short, rough laugh, dragged up out of his chest as though it had surprised him — as though it had found its own way out before he could decide whether to allow it. He pressed the cloth harder against his temple and winced at the pressure.

“You should have that seen to properly when you arrive,” she said, returning to practical matters with the ease of a woman who had long ago concluded that feelings were a luxury and logistics were what actually kept people alive. “Head wounds bleed freely and then appear to have stopped when they have not. Spirits to clean it. Not water. Water will open it again.”

He looked at her.

“You speak with authority.”

“I have worked in a house with fourteen indoor servants for eight years. People cut themselves. The parlour maid dropped a mirror last February and spent a week with her hand wrapped in a tea towel. Someone has to know what to do about it.” She paused. “Also, one of her ladyship’s guests walked into a glass door at considerable speed last autumn. Spirits. Not water.”

The grey eyes held on her for a beat longer than necessary. Then he turned back to the road ahead.

“Spirits,” he said quietly, as if filing something away. “Not water.”

They covered the last mile in a silence that had become, if anything, even more comfortable than the first. It leaned gently against the rain and the lamplight and the steady sound of Bramble’s hooves, and Nell thought it was one of the better silences she had stood inside in recent memory.

Then the gates of Blackmoor rose out of the dark.

Heavy iron between pillars of dark stone, each pillar crowned with a carved falcon, wings spread, in permanent declaration. Beyond them the house was barely visible — a great shadow against a blacker sky — but lights were beginning to bloom in the lower windows. Someone was awake. A household was stirring itself.

Nell drew Bramble to a halt.

“This is as far as I take you,” she said. “Thornbury is a mile back the other way and I cannot leave this horse standing in the rain.”

He climbed down more smoothly than she had expected, though she watched him test his weight with the deliberate care of a man who intended to take nothing for granted again. He turned back to her. The gate lanterns caught the dark line of the cut on his temple, the rain-plastered hair, the complete absence of rank or pretension. He looked, in that light, exactly as he had looked in the ditch.

“I did not ask your name,” Nell said, because it had only now occurred to her that between keeping him upright and keeping him mobile, the elementary courtesy had slipped past her entirely.

He looked at her for a moment. A considered look. The look of a man making a small and deliberate choice.

“Rowan,” he said.

No title. No surname. Just the name, offered plain, the way she had offered him the harness rag.

“Rowan,” she repeated. She gathered up the reins. “Put spirits on that cut, Rowan. Good night.”

“Good night, Nell Farrow.” He paused with one hand on the gate. “Thank you for not driving past.”

She clicked her tongue at Bramble. The cart moved off into the rain. She did not look back, because looking back served no practical purpose, and above all things Nell Farrow was a practical woman.

Which was why, half a mile down the road, she was still turning it over.

Because there had been two horses out there in the dark. His, that expensive grey, standing hip-shot in the rain. And here at the gate — she had seen it as the lantern swung, one clean second of it — four more, saddled and waiting, with men standing at their heads. Men who had come out not running, not shouting, not with lamps and questions, but in the slow, orderly way men move when they have been told in advance that somebody is expected.

Expected.

At an empty house. At half past nine on a wet Thursday in October.

That was the moment Nell Farrow first understood that she had not, after all, picked up a groom.