The Duke’s Fiancée Threw Water at the Maid — She Wiped It Off and Said, “You Will Remember This Day”

Chapter 12

At the servants’ door, somebody was waiting in the shadows.

Cora’s heart leapt so hard it hurt. For one wild second she thought — she actually thought — that it would be him.

It was not.

It was Elias Hobbs, the Duke’s valet. An older man, gray at the temples, with a stoop in his shoulders and hands that had spent forty years folding other people’s clothes. He had been in service at Ravenshollow longer than the Duke had been alive. He had never, in three months, spoken more than four words to Cora Bell.

He pressed something cold into her hand.

Three silver coins.

“Take it,” he said. His voice was rough, as if he had been shouting or crying. “It isn’t much, but it’s something.”

Cora stared at the coins in her palm, and then up at his face. The snow was settling on his shoulders. His eyes were wet.

“Why would you do this?”

Hobbs looked at the ground.

“I’m sorry, girl,” he said. “I’m sorry for all of it.”

“For all of what?”

But Hobbs had already turned away, and he walked back into the dark house quickly, like a man fleeing something, and the door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded, in that empty yard, like the end of the world.

Cora stood there for a moment with three coins in her hand and a question burning in her chest.

Sorry for all of what?

Then she stepped out into the night.

The snow was falling thick and silent. The long drive stretched ahead of her, pale as a shroud, running a mile between black trees to the iron gates. There was no moon. There was no sound but the crunch of her own footsteps and, once, far off, the bark of a fox.

She pulled her shawl tighter and began to walk.

High above her, in the window of his study, the Duke of Ravenshollow stood watching.

He had not moved for a quarter of an hour. He had watched the door open and the small gray figure step out into the white, and he had watched her stand there, and he had watched her begin to walk.

Everything in him told him to go after her.

He could not have said why. He could not have put it into words a living soul would believe — I heard a song in the cellar, and it was the song from the fire, and I have not slept properly in six years. He was the Duke of Ravenshollow. He did not chase housemaids down snowy drives on the strength of a tune.

So he stood at the window and did nothing, and hated himself, and did nothing.

He was about to turn away when he saw the lights at the far end of the drive.

A carriage was coming through the gates.

A black carriage, pulled by four black horses, driving fast through the snow, the lamps swinging, the wheels churning up white spray. It came on at a pace that was reckless on such a night, and the Duke frowned and leaned closer to the cold glass.

As it passed the girl, it slowed down.

Then it stopped completely.

The Duke’s hand went flat against the window.

He could not hear anything from that distance. He could only see the carriage window slide down, and a man’s face lean out into the falling snow, looking down at the small figure on the drive.

For a long moment, nobody moved.

Then the window went up, and the carriage rolled on toward the house, and the girl stood alone in the road as if she had been turned to stone.

The Duke knew that carriage. He knew the crest on the door — the falcon and the broken chain.

It belonged to Lord Alaric Vain.

And down on the snowy drive, Cora Bell stood frozen, her whole body shaking, and not from the cold at all.

Because the man in the carriage had looked straight at her, and smiled, and said only four words.

Hello again, Miss Bell.