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

Part 6

The ground where the inn had stood had been empty for seven years.

Nobody had built on it. Nobody had wanted to. The charred beams had fallen in and rotted, and the blackened stone had sunk into the earth, and in the spring the weeds grew up through the ash and the villagers walked past with their eyes down. There were people in that parish who genuinely believed the place was cursed.

Cora stood on the charred ground in April with her father and looked at it for a long time.

“There’s no sense in it,” Thomas Bell said at last. “You can’t build on a thing like this. It’s bad luck.”

“There is no such thing as bad luck,” said Cora. “There is only what people do and what people allow. And I am tired of allowing.”

She bought the land from the parish the following month.

It cost almost nothing, because the parish could not give it away, and the sale caused a small scandal, because a duchess in a village of two hundred souls is a thing that takes some getting used to. There were letters to the bishop. There was a sermon, in the third week of the building, about the sinfulness of pride, delivered by a curate who had not been told who had commissioned the new inn.

He wrote a letter of apology to Ravenshollow Hall afterward, and Cora wrote back and told him that his sermon had been the best-attended service in the parish in eleven years and that he should not apologize for a single word of it.

The architect was a young man from York with a limp and a great many opinions. He wanted to build something grand, with columns and a portico and a courtyard.

Cora looked at the plans and said no.

“It has to be a place where a tired man can come in out of the rain,” she said. “No columns. Good thick walls, low ceilings, a fire you can see from the door. Windows facing east so the morning comes in. And it has to be built so that a cook can work in that kitchen without cursing, because my mother has been cursing that kitchen of hers for thirty years.”

The young architect stared at her.

“That,” he said, “is a very particular brief.”

“I am a very particular duchess,” said Cora.

It took fourteen months. In the spring it rose out of the ground: gray stone from the same quarry as the old walls, a slate roof, two chimneys, big windows facing east, a courtyard of flat stones, and a stable block. And over the door, on a freshly painted board, a golden crown above a blue anchor, copied as exactly as the painter could manage from the little faded tattoo on Thomas Bell’s hand.

They opened on the first of September.

There was no grand ceremony. Cora refused one. But the whole village came, and the dock workers from London came up on the coach — nine of them, in their best, all slightly uncomfortable — and Mrs. Dobbs came and the vicar came, and the Dowager Duchess came, which caused a sort of local earthquake, and Molly Green came and Peter came, and Mrs. Pratt came and cried, and Hobbs came, and stood at the back.

The first cup of ale drawn in the new Crown and Anchor was handed to Thomas Bell, and he stood in the middle of his own taproom with his wife beside him and did not drink it, because his hands were shaking too much.

Then he laughed — a great, cracked, delighted laugh — and drank it in one long pull, and the whole room cheered.

It was busy from the first week.

Travelers came from miles away, not because the ale was better or the beds softer — although the ale was good, and the beds were honest — but because there was a story about the place, and people wanted to shake the hand of the innkeeper who had nearly hanged.

Thomas Bell learned, over the first year, how to be a man with a story.

At first he told it badly. He would get to the part about the ship and the two years of silent letters and his voice would go, and he would have to go and stand in the yard for a while.

He got better at it. He learned which parts the listeners wanted and which parts he needed to give them whether they wanted them or not.

And one evening in the second autumn, a young man in a strange coat came in, sat down at the end of the bar, and ordered a pint. He had a West Country accent and a habit of asking questions, and over the next two hours he asked a great many of them, and Thomas Bell answered every one.

The young man turned out to be a writer from London, and he went away, and one year later published a book with a green cover and a ridiculous title and a central character who spoke far too well for an innkeeper from the North Road.

The Crown and Anchor filled with people who had read the book.

Thomas Bell read it too. He was, by then, able to read the newspaper headlines and the accounts and the receipts; he never managed a novel. Ellen read the book aloud to him, in the evenings, by the fire, and when she got to the parts that were not true, he laughed until the tears came.

“Did we really have a parrot?” he asked.

“No,” said Ellen.

“Did I really fight a man on the deck of the ship with a cutlass?”

“You did not.”

“Shame,” said Thomas Bell. “That was my favorite part.”