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

Chapter 16

Cora frowned.

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t think we’ve—”

Then her eyes fell on his hand.

On the back of it, faded blue against the brown skin, was a small tattoo. An anchor. And above the anchor, a crown.

The sign of the Crown and Anchor.

Her father had had it done the year she was born, in a parlor in a town by the sea, when he was young and had money in his pocket and a wife who laughed easily and a daughter who had not yet been born. He used to let her trace it with her finger when she was little, sitting on his knee by the fire, while her mother said Thomas, you’ll give the child Ideas, and he said let her have ideas, they’re free.

The cup of soup slipped out of Cora’s hands and fell onto the stones.

The old man’s eyes filled with tears.

“Cora,” he said. “Cora, my girl. Is it really you?”

Cora Bell threw her arms around the old man and held him as if she would never let go.

He was so thin that she could feel every bone in his back through the rags. He smelled of the sea and of cold and of hunger. His breath rattled in his chest. But he was her father, and after six years — after all the nights she had cried herself to sleep believing he was dead — he was here.

“Papa,” she kept saying. “Papa. Papa.”

Thomas Bell wept into her hair like a child.

The vicar’s wife came hurrying over when she saw them. She was a kind, round, gray-haired woman named Mrs. Dobbs, and when Cora explained as best she could through her tears — the inn, the fire, the sentence, the six years — Mrs. Dobbs did not ask a single question more.

“Bring him inside,” she said. “There’s a stove in the vestry. He’ll die out here tonight if we leave him.”

They helped him into the little room behind the church, and Mrs. Dobbs brought blankets and hot tea with a spoonful of honey in it, and Thomas Bell held the cup with both shaking hands and drank it slowly, with his eyes closed.

“How are you here?” Cora whispered, kneeling beside him. “Your sentence was seven years. It has only been six.”

Her father looked at the floor.

“I couldn’t wait any longer, Cora.”

He coughed, and it took him a long time to stop.

“Every night in that place, I dreamed of you and your mother. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. Nobody sends letters to a convict.” He turned the cup in his hands. “A whaling ship needed hands. The captain didn’t ask questions and the pay was nothing and the work was killing, and I took it. Eleven months at sea, and here I am.”

Cora went cold all over.

“Papa,” she said. “You know what the law says. A man who comes back before his time is up—”

“They hang him,” said her father quietly. “Yes. I know.”

The words sat in the warm little room like stones.

“Then why?” Cora’s voice broke. “Why would you risk it, why would you come back, why—”

He reached out and touched her face with his rough, sunburned hand.

“Because I would rather hang in England, having seen my girl’s face one more time,” he said, “than live forever on the other side of the world without it.”

He paused.

“Your mother. Tell me the truth. Is she—”

“She’s alive,” said Cora. “She’s sick, Papa. Her chest has been bad for years, but she’s alive. She’s in the cottage. She talks about you every single day.”

Thomas Bell closed his eyes, and tears ran down into his beard.

They talked for hours by the stove.

Cora told him everything — the Duke, and Cordelia, and the glass of water, and the pearls, and the cellar, and the snow, and Lord Vain’s smile through the carriage window, and the three silver coins from a man she barely knew.

When she had finished, her father was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, “There is something you don’t know, Cora. Something I never had the chance to tell you.”