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

Part 7

Cora’s son was born in the spring of the third year, at four in the morning, after eleven hours that the Duke of Ravenshollow spent walking up and down the corridor outside the blue bedroom and saying, whenever anyone came out, “Is she all right? Is she all right?” until the midwife took him by the shoulders and told him to go and sit down or she would have him removed.

He did not sit down. He went to the chapel, which was cold, and which he had never once entered in his life, and sat in the back pew with his hands folded and his eyes closed, and did not know what he was doing there.

At four in the morning the midwife came for him.

“You have a son,” she said, “and a wife who has been asking for you for the last hour, and if you say anything foolish I will not be responsible for my actions.”

Cora was sitting up against the pillows when he came in, with her hair dark with sweat and her face gray with exhaustion and the baby in her arms, and she looked at him and said, quite clearly:

“He has your frown.”

“He does not have my frown.”

“He has had the frown since the first minute. Look at it.”

The Duke of Ravenshollow looked down at the small red furious face of his son and saw, unmistakably, his own frown.

He had to sit down on the edge of the bed.

“What shall we call him?” he said, when he could speak.

“Thomas,” said Cora.

The Duke looked at her.

“Your father—”

“My father is alive,” said Cora. “He is alive, and he is standing in my mother’s kitchen at this very moment being shouted at for leaving his boots in the hall. I do not need to name a child after him to keep him.”

She looked down at the baby.

“Thomas, though,” she said. “Because when my father was sixteen years old, and nobody in the world cared whether he lived or died, he tattooed an anchor and a crown on the back of his hand and he decided he was going to be a man who kept an inn and kept it honestly. And then a lord burned his house down and the law put him in chains and sent him to the other side of the world, and he came back anyway.”

She stroked the baby’s head.

“So yes. Thomas.”

The child was christened in the little church across from the Crown and Anchor, in the autumn, with the whole village crowding in and Molly Green’s children making a great deal of noise at the back, and Hobbs standing by the door as he always did, and the Dowager Duchess holding the baby over the font with a face like a description of the weather.

She was sixty-eight years old and she had held a great deal of power for a very long time and she had, in the last few years, become quietly, dangerously fond of her daughter-in-law.

“They will say terrible things about him when he is grown,” she said afterward, handing the child back. “They will say his mother was a housemaid and his grandfather was a convict. You know that.”

“I know it,” said Cora.

“Good,” said the Dowager Duchess. “Because knowing it in advance is the only armor that has ever worked.”

The boy grew up in two houses.

He spent the winters at Ravenshollow and the summers at the Crown and Anchor, and by the age of six he could draw a decent pint with a great deal of foam and could not read a word of Latin, and by the age of nine he could argue about the price of oats with a horse trader and lose, and by the age of eleven he could check a ledger and find a mistake in it.

He was taught by a series of tutors, most of whom he ran off. He was taught by his mother, who made him read the newspaper aloud every evening and then asked him what he thought and would not accept I don’t know as an answer.

And he was taught, in a way that neither of his parents ever quite planned, by Elias Hobbs.

Every night of that boy’s childhood, when the family was at the inn, a lamp went past his window. Every night, an old man walked around the building with a lantern, checking the taproom and the kitchen and the passage and the hayloft and the scullery.

And one night, when the boy was eight, he got out of bed and went down and found Hobbs in the yard.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking the lamps.”

“Why?”

Hobbs looked at him for a long moment, with the lantern in his hand.

“Because a long time ago,” he said, “I was asleep when I should have been awake, and a house burned down, and a man went to prison for it, and a girl burned her hand pulling my master out of the fire.”

The boy stared at him.

“I did not set the fire,” said Hobbs. “But I might as well have. So now I check the lamps.”

He walked on, and the boy stood in the yard in his nightshirt in the cold, and then went back to bed and lay awake for a long time, and never asked about it again.

But when he was grown, and master of the house himself, he walked the corridors of Ravenshollow Hall every night before he slept, with a candle, past every grate and every sconce, checking.

He never told anyone why.