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

Chapter 31

Thomas Bell received a full pardon from the Crown in the month of March.

The paper came with a great red seal, and it said that he was an innocent man, that he had never been guilty of anything, and that his good name was restored to him forever.

He could not read the fine words himself. His eyes were too full of tears.

So Cora read it aloud to him, sitting beside the fire in the Duke’s London house, while her father held her hand and shook his head over and over.

“Innocent,” he kept whispering. “Innocent, after all these years.”

But there was one more thing he needed before he could believe he was truly home.

The Duke took them north in his own carriage. Three long days on the road, with Thomas Bell wrapped in blankets and a doctor riding beside them, and Cora sitting opposite her father the whole way, watching him sleep, afraid that if she looked away he would disappear.

On the afternoon of the third day, the carriage turned down a narrow country lane and stopped in front of a tiny cottage with a crooked chimney.

A thin woman was sitting by the window, sewing.

She looked up when she heard the horses. She saw her daughter climb down from a duke’s carriage.

Then she saw the old man climbing down behind her.

The sewing fell from her hands.

For a moment she did not move at all — she stood there at the window with her mouth open, and her hand pressed flat against the glass, as if she had seen a ghost and was not sure whether to be afraid or glad.

Then she was out of the door and running down the path in her slippers, through the mud, the way she had not run in years.

Thomas Bell opened his arms.

Cora stood back beside the Duke and watched her mother and father hold each other in the cold spring garden. Neither of them spoke. They did not need to. After six years and half the world between them, they just stood there holding on, and the wind moved through the bare apple trees, and somewhere a blackbird sang.

The Duke took Cora’s hand.

She did not pull it away.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I am only giving back what was stolen.”

The Duke kept his word, and he did more than that.

That summer, on the very spot where the Crown and Anchor had burned, workmen began to build again. New stone walls. A new slate roof. Big windows that let in the morning light. A courtyard paved with good flat stones, and a stable block, and a kitchen garden behind.

And above the door, a new painted sign, with a golden crown above a blue anchor — exactly like the little faded tattoo on Thomas Bell’s hand.

When it was finished, the Duke handed Thomas Bell the key.

“It is yours,” he said. “Free and clear. Nobody can ever take it from you again.”

Thomas Bell turned the key over and over in his rough hands. He tried to speak, and could not.

So he simply held out his hand to the Duke of Ravenshollow, and the Duke shook it, like one man to another.

The new Crown and Anchor opened in September.

It was full every night from the very first week. Travelers came from miles away to see the inn from the newspapers, and to shake the hand of the innkeeper who had nearly hanged, and to drink a glass of ale under the sign with the crown and the anchor.

Cora’s mother cooked in the kitchen. Her chest was much better now — the Duke’s own physician had seen to that, and had come three times in the first month, and had left a bottle of medicine that actually worked.

And out in the stable, in a small clean room above the horses, there was a new stableman.

It was Hobbs.