She Was Forced to Wear Black and Sit in Silence… Until the Feared Duke of War Chose Her

Chapter 12

Colonel Blackwood left Ravenmoor House at first light with two men and a sealed letter, and he was gone four days.

The four days were the longest of Rosalind’s life.

She did not go home. Lord Ambrose Vane had been informed of his daughter’s whereabouts by a footman, and had sent back no reply, which Rosalind found she preferred to any message he might have written. Lady Honoria sent one letter, in a hand that shook, containing four sentences, three of which were about what people would say.

Cordelia sent eight.

Delia — Rosalind had never had much of a relationship with her younger sister; there had been too much shame between them, and their mother had made sure of it. But the letters came anyway, in a breathless seventeen-year-old scrawl, full of questions Rosalind found she could answer.

Is his house very grand? Is he kind? Are you frightened? Mother says he must be cold and cruel because men who come back from wars are cold and cruel. Are you frightened, Rosalind? Write and tell me the truth. Everyone here has gone mad. Belinda Thorne called and Mother would not receive her. What is happening?

Rosalind wrote back twice, short letters, and told her sister only: He is not cold and he is not cruel. I am not frightened of him. I am frightened of other things, and I will tell you about them when I see you.

On the third day, the Duke took her to see the locked room.

“I have not opened it,” he said, standing in the corridor with the key in his hand. “Two years. The housekeeper has dusted it and that is all. I told myself I would do it when I was ready.”

“And?”

“I have decided that being ready is a luxury I no longer have.”

He put the key in the lock, and it turned with a dry grinding sound, and the door opened on a room that smelled of old linen, dust, and lavender, gone faint and sweet and dead.

It was a lady’s room, and it had been left exactly as it was.

A china wash set with a hairline crack in the pitcher. A book of poetry face down on the windowsill, holding a place in the middle. A chair drawn up to the fire. Brushes on the dressing table, and in the silver dish beneath them, a few pale hairs, still curled.

Rosalind stood in the doorway and did not go in, because it was not her room, and she had no right.

“It is not warm,” she said.

“No.”

“You have not lit the fire in here.”

“I have not been able to.” He stood beside her, looking in. “The last person who lit a fire in this room is the man who killed her.”

They stood there together for a while.

“You should sit in it,” Rosalind said.

He looked at her.

“Not tonight. Eventually. Sit in the chair by the window with the poetry book on your knee, and be in this room in the daylight, and let it become a room. Otherwise it will stay a grave and you will live in a museum of the worst night of your life.”

He was quiet.

“You have a strange way of being kind,” he said at last.

“I have had three years to think about the difference between comfort and kindness,” Rosalind said. “Comfort is for the person doing it. Kindness is for the person receiving it.”

On the fourth evening, a rider came up the drive at a gallop, mud to the saddle, and the door of Ravenmoor House flew open.

Colonel Blackwood came in with his coat sodden and his face set hard, and behind him, brought in from the carriage by two men, came a small, stooped figure in a black traveling cloak, hat pulled low.

The physician had been found.

He had resisted. He had wept. He had, according to Blackwood, tried twice to bribe his way free and once — in the carriage at Crawley — to jump out into the road.

But he had come.

They brought him into the library and sat him down in a chair by the fire, and when the Duke of Ravenmoor walked in and stood in front of him, Dr. Pell took one look at his face and began to shake so badly that the chair rattled on the boards.

“You know why you are here,” the Duke said.

“Your Grace—”

“You are going to tell me everything. Every word your wife’s brother paid you to keep.”

The physician’s face was the color of suet. He looked at Rosalind, at Blackwood, at the door, as though calculating whether any exit from this room remained open to him.

None did, and he knew it.

He put his face in his hands.

“She took her own life,” he said.