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

Part 3

Cordelia Vain wrote to her, once, in the second summer.

The letter came to Ravenshollow in a thin, cheap envelope, addressed in a hand that had once been elegant and was now merely hurried, and it sat on the silver salver in the hall for an hour before Cora noticed it.

She read it in the library, with the door closed.

It began To the Duchess of Ravenshollow, which was itself a considerable effort, since Cora knew perfectly well that the writer had called her that girl for a year.

It was four pages long, and it said, in a great many words, that Cordelia Vain had never been given a fair hearing; that the Duke had been ensnared by a servant’s cunning; that a woman’s mistake in youth ought not to be permitted to destroy her whole life; and that her mother was ill and their house was cold and nothing had turned out as it should.

And then, on the fourth page, the handwriting changed, and became smaller and more careful, as if the writer had stopped performing and begun to think.

I have not slept properly since the fourteenth of January, it said. I do not say this to move you. I say it because it is the only true sentence I have written in this letter.

Cora sat with that page in her hand for a long time.

She had imagined, in the attic, what she would do if Cordelia Vain ever wrote to her. She had imagined tearing the letter up. She had imagined writing back a single line, the same five words, and letting the woman sit with them.

She did none of that.

She took a fresh sheet of paper, dipped her pen, and wrote:

Lady Cordelia,

I have read your letter twice. You did not ask for anything, so I will not offer anything, and I will not pretend that I have forgiven you, because a lie in the first sentence would not serve either of us.

You are right that you are not the only one who has not slept. For six years I did not sleep either, and I did not sleep because of what your family did to mine, and because I had to keep silent about it while receiving wages from the man whose life I had saved.

You chose to save your comfort instead of my father’s life, and you did it more than once, and you did it deliberately, and when you threw that water in my face you did it because you were afraid, and fear is not a defense — I have been afraid every day of my life and it never once gave me the right to hurt anyone.

But I am going to tell you something, and I want you to read it carefully, because it is the only thing I know that will help you.

The thing that is keeping you awake is not what you did to me. It is that you have spent your whole life being told you were beautiful and important, and no one has ever once asked what you were. You had a father who used you, and a mother who admired you, and a world that applauded you as long as you smiled in the right direction. You are not a monster, Cordelia. You are a woman who was given a great deal of power and never given a single reason to be decent, and when the test came you failed it, and you know it.

That is a terrible thing to know. Most people spend their whole lives arranging never to find it out.

What you do now is entirely up to you. Nobody is coming to rescue you. There is no Duke, no carriage, no father with a purse. There is only a cold house in the north and however many years you have left.

I have nothing to say to you beyond this: my mother was sick for six years and I worked as a housemaid to keep her alive. That is the whole story of who I am. If you can find anything at all in yourself that would have done the same, then you are not finished yet.

C.B.

She sealed it, and sent it, and never heard from Cordelia Vain again.

But seven years later, a doctor in a town in the north of England wrote to a charity in London about a woman who had died of a fever in a small house, and who had spent the last eleven years of her life nursing the poor of the parish without pay, and who had left behind almost nothing but a locked box containing a single letter, worn soft at the folds, which she had apparently read every week for a decade.

The charity wrote to Ravenshollow Hall, because the woman’s name had been connected with it, and asked whether her grace wished to have the box.

Cora wrote back and said yes.

She opened it in the library with the door closed, and read her own handwriting, and sat for a long while with the letter in her lap and the summer light on the floor.

Then she put it away, and went down to the kitchen, and asked Mrs. Hedley whether the new girl — the one who had come from the workhouse with no references — had eaten yet.