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

Epilogue

Part 1

The carriage reached Ravenshollow Hall at dusk on the third day after the wedding.

Cora had seen the house before, of course. She had scrubbed its corridors and polished its silver and knelt on its cold stone floors for three months. She knew the smell of it — beeswax and coal smoke and old wood — and she knew the sound of it, the way the west wing creaked when the wind came off the moor, the way the pipes clanked at six in the morning.

But she had never once walked in through the front door.

She sat in the carriage with her hands folded in her lap and watched the great gray house come up out of the darkening park, with its long windows and its towers and its ivy, and she felt her chest tighten in a way she had not expected.

Edmund took her hand. The burned one. He always took that one first, as if he had decided, on the docks at Wapping, that he would never again let her hide it.

“You don’t have to go in through the front door,” he said. “If you would rather go round to the servants’ entrance, we will. It is your house. You choose.”

Cora looked at him.

“That,” she said, “is exactly why I am going in the front.”

The footman opened the door. The steps were swept and the lamps were lit and the whole staff of Ravenshollow Hall was drawn up in the great hall to receive her — the butler, the housekeeper, the cook, the footmen, the maids, the kitchen girls, the stable boys, all of them in their best, all of them standing very straight.

Cora walked up the steps and through the door and stopped on the black-and-white marble, and every face in that hall turned toward her.

She knew those faces. Every one of them.

She had eaten with these people. She had mended Molly’s apron and shared her bread with Peter and held the ladder for the boy who cleaned the high windows. And she had stood in this very hall with her hands held by two footmen while Mrs. Pratt pulled a string of pearls out of her apron and the Dowager Duchess called for the constable.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

Then Mrs. Pratt stepped forward, and her face was working, and she said, in a voice that was not quite steady:

“Your grace. Welcome home.”

And she curtsied, and she held it — the deepest curtsy Cora had ever seen her give, deeper than she had ever given the old Duke, deeper than she gave the Dowager Duchess.

Behind her, all of them went down at once. Forty servants, bowing and curtsying to a girl they had watched dragged down to a cellar.

Cora stood on the marble and did not know what to do with her hands.

She had imagined this moment a hundred times in the attic, and in every version of it she had said something cutting and perfect. In every version she had made them feel it.

But what she actually felt was not triumph. It was a strange, enormous, aching tenderness for every one of them, because she knew — better than the Duke would ever know — what it cost a servant to bow to someone who had once been a servant. She knew the small humiliations they had swallowed to do it. She knew that half of them were terrified of her and the other half were terrified for her.

“Please get up,” she said. “All of you. Please.”

They got up.

“That will take some getting used to,” said the Duke quietly, at her shoulder.

“Everything will,” said Cora.

That night, she could not sleep.

She lay in a bed four times too large for her in a room hung with blue silk, and she listened to the wind off the moor, and she thought about the little attic room she had shared with Molly and the wind rattling that small window in its frame.

At two in the morning she got up, put on a shawl and her shoes, and went down the back stairs.

The kitchen was dark and warm, with the banked fire glowing red in the range. And sitting at the long table in the dark, alone, with a cup of cold tea in front of her, was Molly Green.

Molly looked up and went scarlet.

“Your grace! I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep, I’ll go up at once—”

“Sit down,” said Cora.

Molly sat.

Cora took the kettle, put it back on the range, and made two cups of tea. Then she sat down across the table from Molly Green, and put one of the cups in front of her, and folded her hands around her own.

For a while neither of them said anything.

“Is it true?” Molly said at last, in a very small voice. “That she threw the water, and you said it, and it came true?”

“It came true.”

“And the pearls?”

“Jenkins put them there.”

“And Hobbs—”

“Hobbs told the truth.”

Molly nodded slowly, and stared into her tea.

Then she burst into tears.

“I didn’t help you,” she sobbed. “I was standing right there, and I wanted to say something, and I didn’t, and then they took you down to the cellar and I lay in the attic and listened to you humming, and I never—”

“Molly.”

“—and I was so frightened, Cora, I was so frightened that I just lay there and I didn’t do anything at all—”

“Molly. Look at me.”

Molly looked up.

“You came up the servants’ stairs at midnight in a house full of lords,” said Cora, “and you told the Duke of Ravenshollow the truth to his face, when you thought it might cost you your place and your bread. That is not nothing.”

“There’s going to be a wedding,” said Molly miserably. “My sister’s wedding. And I’ll have nothing to wear and nothing to give her—”

“Then we will find you a dress,” said Cora. “And I will give you something for your sister.”

Molly stared at her.

“You’re a duchess,” she said.

“I know.”

“You can’t just—”

“I can,” said Cora. “That is the whole point of it, Molly. If I cannot be kind to the people I came from, then I have learned nothing at all.”

And Molly Green put her face in her hands and cried, and Cora Bell — the Duchess of Ravenshollow — sat in a dark kitchen in her shawl with a cup of tea and let her.