SHE PRETENDED TO BE A “BOY” FOR 7 MONTHS TO AVOID AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE—UNTIL THE DUKE FOUND OUT…

Chapter 31

Rose Foster Hawthorne grew up in a house with a garden on the south wall.

She learned to walk in that garden, and to run in the lane, and to sit on the stone bench at the crossroads while her mother put flowers on a grave under a yew tree and said nothing for a while. She learned the sheep before she learned to read, because Reuben took her out to the flock at six months old, exactly as promised, and after that she could not be kept out of the orchard. She learned that her father was a duke, which she found uninteresting, and that her father could not ride with anyone but her, which she found extremely interesting, and that her mother could not be made to do anything by anybody, which she found to be a basic law of the world, like gravity.

She learned to read from the ledger in the study.

Not the household accounts — she was not interested in those. The other ledger. The one tied with string, in the drawer, which her mother took out one afternoon when Rose was nine and said, “Sit down. There is something I want to read you.”

She read it aloud, the whole of it, over three evenings.

Rose listened with her chin on her knees. She did not say very much. When her mother finished, she sat for a long time with her arms around her knees, and then she said:

“Uncle Arthur.”

“Yes.”

“I do not like him.”

“No,” said Josephine. “Neither do I.”

“Are you going to forgive him?”

“I have thought about that for twelve years,” said Josephine. “And what I have decided is this. Forgiveness is not something you owe anybody. It is not a duty. It is a thing that happens to you, sometimes, or it does not. He has never asked me for it, and I do not think he knows how to ask. So there is nothing to give and nothing to refuse. What there is, is this house, and this room, and the roses, and you.” She closed the ledger. “That is what I chose to build instead.”

Rose thought about it.

“Is that enough?” she asked.

“It has been enough for twelve years,” said Josephine. “And it is getting better every year. That is the whole trick of it, Rose — not to make one enormous thing that cancels everything out. To make a great many small things that add up.”

The house on the hill was part of Rose’s life too.

They went often. Rose knew the corridors of Hawthorne better than most of the staff, and knew that the study had a painting of Foster Hall pinned to the wall by the window, and knew that the room at the end of the second-floor corridor — her father’s old chamber, bare and strange — had one thing in it: a framed page on the desk that her mother had once written, and that nobody was allowed to move.

Once, when she was eleven, she asked her father about it.

“What is that frame?”

“It is a letter your mother wrote me,” said Raymond.

“Why is it in a frame?”

“Because it is the most valuable thing in this house,” he said. “Everything else in this room can be replaced. That cannot.”

Rose looked at the frame, and at the bare walls, and at the empty mantel, and then at her father, who had brought her up here to show her the room where he had grown up cold.

“It is a very sad room,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why do you keep it like this?”

Her father was quiet for a moment.

“Because it is where I learned what not to do,” he said. “And because your mother told me once that a man who has cleared away everything from his childhood is not a man who has let go — he is a man who has not looked at it yet.” He looked at her. “I have looked at it now. You may have it repainted if you like.”

Rose considered this seriously.

“Not yet,” she said. “I will decide when I am older.”

Her father nodded, as though she had said something very wise, and took her down to the stables to see the mares.

Margaret Wilton wrote again when Rose was twelve.

Josephine had written to her once, after the first letter — He is happy. The roses came back — and had not expected a reply, and had not received one for four years, and then a letter came that was not addressed to Josephine at all.

It was addressed to Miss Rose Foster Hawthorne.

Josephine brought it to her daughter in the garden and sat down on the wall beside her and said, “You do not have to open it. You do not have to know who it is from. But if you do open it, I will tell you everything you want to know about the woman who wrote it.”

Rose opened it.

Josephine told her the whole story that afternoon, on the wall in the sun, with the roses going over the stone behind them: the engagement, the broken betrothal, the letter her father had burned without ever reading it aloud to anyone until twelve years after, the fact that Raymond Hawthorne had spent a decade as the villain of a story that was not his to tell and had let it stand because a young woman asked him to.

Rose listened, and read the letter — a short, careful letter from a woman in Devonshire with three children and a garden of her own, who had heard that a daughter had been born at Foster Hall and had wanted, once, to say that she hoped the girl grew up in a house where she was allowed to be exactly what she was.

“That is a kind letter,” Rose said.

“Yes.”

“Did she do a bad thing? Running away?”

“She did a hard thing,” said Josephine. “She was twenty-two and her father was going to sell her to somebody, and she got out the only way she could see, and she left a man behind her carrying the blame for it.” She looked at the wall. “I have thought about Margaret Wilton more than I should. I have never once decided whether I would have done the same in her place, and I have come to believe that is because I never had to. My road out was a pair of scissors and a name I made up. It could have been a cavalry officer, if I had met one.”

Rose looked at the letter for a long time.

“Write back to her,” she said.

“You may write back to her. It is your letter.”

“I will write back,” said Rose. “But I will tell her about you. She should know that the house turned out all right.”