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

Chapter 19

Inside was a tiny room, warm and golden with the light of a stove.

An old man lay asleep under a pile of blankets on a low cot, his gray beard rising and falling with his breath, his face thin as paper. And kneeling beside him, washing his forehead with a cloth and singing softly to him, was Cora Bell.

She had taken off her glove to wring out the cloth.

In the firelight, the Duke saw her right hand clearly for the first time.

The skin was twisted and shiny from her fingertips to her wrist, pale and puckered where the flesh had melted and healed wrong. It was an old burn. A terrible one. The kind of burn that comes from gripping something heavy — something the weight of a grown man — and dragging it through fire.

The Duke did not realize he had made a sound.

But Cora heard it. She looked up.

Their eyes met across the little room, and neither of them said a word.

The stove crackled. The old man slept on. Outside, the fog pressed against the little window like a hand.

Then Cora stood up and pulled her glove back on, quickly, as if she had been caught doing something shameful.

“Your grace,” she said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The Duke did not move from the doorway. His eyes were still on her right hand.

“You were singing,” he said.

His voice was not steady.

“That song. I have heard it every night for six years in my sleep. In the smoke. In the dark.”

Cora said nothing.

“Show me your hand,” he said quietly.

“Your grace, please—”

“Please.”

Cora hesitated.

Then she pulled the glove off again, slowly, and held out her hand in the firelight.

The Duke crossed the room. He did not touch her. He only looked, for a long time, at the ruin of her hand — and his face, the face the whole world called cold, crumpled like the face of a boy.

“It was you,” he whispered. “Wasn’t it? It was you who pulled me out.”

Cora looked at him for a long time.

There were so many things she wanted to say. Six years of things. They rose up in her throat all at once and stuck there, and what came out instead was almost nothing.

“It doesn’t matter now, your grace,” she said softly.

“It is the only thing that matters.”

“Go home. Marry Lady Cordelia. Be happy.” Her eyes were shining. “That’s all I ever wanted for you.”

“It doesn’t matter?” The Duke stared at her. “I have given my whole life to the wrong—”

“Please.” Her voice cracked. “Please just go.”

The Duke looked at her, and then at the sleeping old man, and then back at her.

He was not a stupid man. He could see that she was frightened — terribly frightened, and not of him. He could see the way her eyes kept going to the cot, to the old man’s face, as if he were the answer to a question the Duke had not yet thought to ask.

“I will go,” he said at last. “Tonight. But I will come back in the morning, and you and I will talk properly, and you will tell me everything.”

He took out his purse and emptied every coin in it onto the little table.

“Whatever it is you are afraid of,” he said, “I promise you, I will not let it hurt you.”

Then he went out into the fog.

Cora sat down on the floor beside her father and cried until there was nothing left in her at all.

She did not know that on the other side of London, in a fine house on Grosvenor Square, a man in a black coat was already standing before Lord Alaric Vain, with snow still melting on his shoulders, telling him everything he had seen.