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

Chapter 3

Down in the servants’ hall, Molly Green came running with a towel before Cora had even sat down.

“Cora Bell, are you mad?” she hissed, wrapping the towel around Cora’s shoulders. “You don’t speak to a lady like that. You don’t speak to the future duchess like that. She could have you thrown out on the road tonight — in January — with nothing. What were you thinking?”

Cora dried her hair and said nothing.

“What does it even mean?” Molly demanded. “You will remember this day. What sort of thing is that to say to a lady? It sounds like — like a curse. It sounds like something out of a story.”

Cora looked down at the gray glove on her right hand.

She was quiet for a long time. Molly, who had learned by then that Cora’s silences were not rudeness but something closer to weather, sat down on the bench beside her and waited.

“It means,” Cora said at last, “that some people think the past stays buried.”

“What past?”

“Nothing.” Cora stood up and folded the towel neatly. “It means nothing, Molly. Forget it.”

“I won’t forget it.”

“Then forget it anyway. It’s safer.”

Molly opened her mouth to argue, saw Cora’s face, and closed it again.

Upstairs, there was a great deal of talk about the incident, and none of it was about the water. The talk was about the maid. A housemaid, throwing words at Lady Cordelia Vain! Struck out of her senses. Snake in the garden, if you ask me. By dinner the under-butler had declared the girl a radical, and the second footman had decided she was a thief in waiting, and nobody at all remembered that a woman had been humiliated in front of eleven witnesses for the crime of singing while she dusted.

That was how it worked. Cora had known it since she was sixteen.

Inside her chest, her heart was pounding like a fist on a locked door.

Six years.

Six years, and Cordelia Vain had not changed at all.

The afternoon passed. Cora cleaned the grates. She polished the silver until her left hand ached, since her right hand could not stand the cold water for long. She ate dry bread in the corner with her back to the wall, and she did not look at anyone, and she thought about the door at the end of the long corridor and the man behind it, who had no idea in the world that she existed.

She had known, the very first morning she arrived, that this was his house.

She had been carrying coal up the back stairs, and he had walked past her in the hall — tall, dark, thirty years old, with the cold serious face that the newspapers loved to describe — and her knees had gone so weak that she had nearly dropped the scuttle on the flags.

She had recognized him immediately. She would have recognized him in the dark, by the weight of him, by the smell of smoke that she still dreamed about once a month.

He had not even glanced at her. Why would he?

That day she had made a decision, sitting on the coal cellar steps with her burned hand in her lap. Never tell him. Never tell anyone. Keep the glove on. Earn the wages. Send the money home. Wait.

And she had kept that promise to herself for three months, and one careless morning of humming had broken it.

That evening, the Duke returned from a long ride across the estate.

Edmund Ashworth, sixth Duke of Ravenshollow, was thirty years old and looked older. People said he had not laughed in years. People said he was cold, that he had a face like February, that he would marry Lady Cordelia Vain because she was beautiful and well-connected and because the match suited two great houses.

The old servants knew better.

The old servants said the Duke had simply seen too much, too young. They said he had been different before the fire — before the night he nearly died on the North Road and came home with a scarred chest and a silence that no doctor could cure.

He was climbing the main staircase when he passed a housemaid coming down with a basket of linen.

She stepped aside and curtsied, the way maids always did, and he would have walked straight past her, because he passed a hundred servants every day and saw none of them.

But something made him stop.

Her right hand, on the rim of the basket, was wearing a glove. Indoors. In a warm house. In the middle of winter, when every other maid in Ravenshollow went bare-handed because gloves cost money.

“You,” he said.

Cora froze.

“Why does a housemaid wear a glove indoors?”

She kept her eyes on the floor. “An old burn, your grace.”

The Duke was silent for a moment.

Something about her voice. Something about the way she said those three words — flat, practiced, pre-owned, as if she had said them ten thousand times and hated them more with every repetition. He could not have said what it was. He only knew that the back of his neck had gone cold.

“How did you get it?”

Cora hesitated. Just for one breath. One breath too long.

“A fire, your grace. A long time ago.”

Behind the Duke, on the landing, his valet Elias Hobbs was carrying a silver tray with the evening brandy.

At those words, the tray slipped in his hands.

The decanter tipped. The glass rolled, dropped, and burst on the flagstones with a crack that echoed down the whole stairwell, and brandy spread in a dark stain across the stone like something spilled from a wound.

“Forgive me, your grace,” Hobbs said quickly, dropping to his knees. His voice had gone strange and high. “Forgive me. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t—”

When the Duke turned back, the maid was already gone down the stairs.

He stood there for a long moment, frowning at the empty place where she had been. Then he shook his head, and went on up to his rooms.

Behind him, on his knees in a spreading pool of brandy, an old man pressed both hands flat against the floor and did not get up for a long time.