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

Part 5

Cora had not been home in six years.

She had left the cottage at sixteen in a borrowed coat, with her father in chains and her hand bound in linen, and she had sworn to her mother that she would send money, and she had, every month, without fail, even when it meant she ate nothing but bread.

She had never gone back.

She had been afraid — afraid of what she would see, afraid that going back would undo something, afraid of arriving too late.

The carriage turned down the lane on the third day of the journey north, and the wheels crunched on the frozen mud, and Cora found herself gripping the edge of the seat with both hands, glove and bare, and she could not make herself let go.

And then the cottage came into view: gray stone, crooked chimney, a patch of green before the door, and a thin woman sitting by the window with sewing in her hands.

The carriage stopped.

Her mother looked up.

Cora could not move. She sat there in a duke’s carriage, wearing a duke’s wool, with pearls around her neck, and she could not make her legs work at all.

Then her mother stood up, quite slowly, and the sewing slid off her lap onto the floor, and she put her hand flat against the glass, and her face did something that Cora would remember for the rest of her life.

She was out of the door and running down the path before she knew she had moved.

Her mother met her halfway, and neither of them said anything for a long time, because there was nothing to say that would not have been too small.

“You’re thin,” her mother said at last, into her shoulder.

“I’m not.”

“You are. You’ve been eating badly. I can always tell.”

“Mother, I’m a duchess.”

“I don’t care if you’re the Queen of Sheba,” said her mother. “You’re thin, and your hands are cold, and you’ve been sleeping badly, I can see it in your face. Come inside this minute.”

And Cora Bell — who had stood in front of a hundred peers and a lord of the realm and a hangman’s platform — did exactly as she was told.

Behind them, Thomas Bell climbed down from the carriage and stood in the lane with his hat in his hands.

His wife had not seen him yet.

Cora watched her mother’s face change as the old man came up the path — watched the confusion, and then the disbelief, and then the slow terrible collapse of six years of grief — and then she stepped back out of the way and let them have it.

They did not run to each other.

Her mother walked, and her father walked, and they stopped a foot apart and looked at each other, and her mother reached up and touched his beard — the gray, wild beard that had not been there before — and then she put her arms around him, and they stood in the cold garden and held on.

Neither of them spoke. They did not need to.

A blackbird sang in the apple tree. The wind moved through the bare branches.

Cora stood beside the Duke and cried, and he did not say anything, because he had learned by then that she did not want to be talked to when she cried. He only put his hand on her back, flat and warm, and let her.

Later, inside, over tea, her mother said the thing that Cora had been dreading.

“I have to know,” she said. “Both of you. I have to know what happened. Every day, I have thought about it. I have made up a story in my head a hundred different ways and none of them fit, and I need the real one. I will not sleep until I have it.”

So they told her.

Cora told her about the fire, and about the magistrate, and about the man in the black coat and the words as long as the girl keeps her mouth shut. She told her about the registry office, and about arriving at Ravenshollow and recognizing the Duke in the corridor, and about deciding never to speak. She told her about the water, and the pearls, and the cellar, and the snow, and three silver coins from a man she hardly knew. She told her about London, and the soup line, and the old man on the church steps who had turned out to be alive.

Thomas Bell told her about the prison colony. The heat. The chains, at first, and then the ticket-of-leave, and the years of shearing and fencing and hauling, and the way men died of nothing at all — a cut, a fever, a snake, a bad tooth. And the whaling ship, and the eleven months at sea, and the feeling of standing on the deck in a gray morning and seeing the cliffs of England come up out of the mist, and knowing that to step ashore was to risk hanging, and stepping ashore anyway.

Her mother listened to every word without interrupting.

When they had finished, she was quiet for a long while, looking into the fire.

Then she said: “I thought he was dead. I have thought he was dead for five years. And every Sunday I put on my good shawl and I walked to the church and I prayed for the dead, and I prayed for you, and I came home and sewed, and that was my whole life. That was the whole of it.”

She turned to her husband.

“And now you are sitting in my kitchen,” she said, “and you are thin as a rake, and you look like a beggar, and I am so angry with you that I could hit you.”

“I know,” said Thomas Bell.

“You didn’t write.”

“They don’t let convicts write, Ellen.”

“You could have tried.”

“I tried eleven times,” he said. “Eleven letters. The first one, in the first month. I wrote them all, one after another, and I gave them to the man who was supposed to send them, and I watched him take them, and I never found out what happened to a single one of them. Some of them I paid for with tobacco. He took the tobacco and the letters both.”

Her mother’s face worked.

“So I stopped,” said Thomas Bell. “That was the worst of it. Not the flogging, not the heat, not the ship. It was the day I stopped writing. Because I thought, if I keep writing and nothing ever comes back, then she is dead, and it is my fault, and I will not be able to stand it. So I stopped, and I told myself you were alive, and I kept telling myself that for four years, and it was the only thing I had.”

Her mother got up.

She walked to the dresser, took down a small wooden box, and set it on the table between them. She opened the lid.

Inside were thirty-seven letters, tied with string.

“Eleven of them came,” she said quietly. “Over four years. The last one came two years ago. I have read every one of them so many times that I know them by heart, and I have not been able to throw them away, and I have not been able to open the box without crying, and I have kept it on the top shelf where I could not reach it.”

Thomas Bell put his hand over his eyes.

“You thought I was dead,” he said. “And I thought you were dead. And both of us were alive the whole time.”

“Yes,” said Ellen Bell. “That is what they did to us.”

The Duke of Ravenshollow, sitting in a corner of that kitchen with a cup of tea going cold in his hands, said nothing at all.

But that evening, alone with Cora in the lane, he said: “I want to find out who took those letters.”

“Edmund—”

“I want to know. If it was a clerk, or a superintendent, or a man paid by someone to make sure those letters never left the colony, I want to know, and I want it written down, and I want it read in front of a court.”

Cora looked at him for a long moment in the dusk.

“You do realize,” she said, “that this will take ten years.”

“Then it will take ten years,” said the Duke.

It took eleven.