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

Chapter 15

In London, it was worse than Cora had ever imagined.

Three days of knocking on doors. Three days of registry offices where the clerks wanted a reference in writing and she had none, and where the word Ravenshollow made their faces change. She did not dare say the name of the house at all after the second day, but it did not matter. A girl with one glove and no papers and no one to vouch for her was not a candidate for anything.

Three nights sleeping in a church doorway with her bag clutched against her chest, waking every hour at the sound of footsteps.

By the fourth day she had one coin left, and she was very hungry.

She wandered down toward the river, where the great ships came in from every corner of the world. The docks were loud and filthy and full of rough men who whistled at her and then, seeing her face, looked away. The air smelled of tar and fish and coal smoke and the brown water. Everywhere there were ropes and masts and shouting.

But there was a little church near the water — St. Mary’s, gray and squat and stubborn, with a bell tower that leaned — and there the vicar gave out bread and soup to the poor every evening.

Cora stood in the long line in the cold.

She had never in her life asked anyone for anything. She had worked since she was nine. But she stood in that line with her head down and her bag against her skirt, and when her turn came, the vicar’s wife gave her a heel of bread and a cup of thin soup and said, “God bless you, dear,” in a voice that did not sound like a performance.

Cora thanked her and turned away to find somewhere to sit.

That was when she saw him.

An old man sitting on the church steps alone.

He was terribly thin. His clothes were rags that had once been a coat, and his boots were wrapped in cloth, and he was coughing — a deep, painful, grinding cough that shook his whole body and went on and on.

He had no bread.

He had come too late, and there was none left.

Cora looked at the bread in her hand. She was so hungry that her stomach had stopped complaining and had begun instead to ache like a bruise.

She walked over, knelt down in front of him, and held it out.

“Here,” she said gently. “Take it. I’m not hungry.”

The old man looked up slowly.

His eyes were sunken and red from the cold, and his beard was gray and wild, and his face was brown and deeply lined — the face of a man who had spent years working under a burning sun on the other side of the world.

He reached out a shaking hand for the bread.

Then he stopped.

He was staring at her. Staring at her face as if he had seen a ghost.

“That voice,” he whispered. “I know that voice.”