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

Part 10

Twenty years after the fourteenth of January, there was a wedding at the little church across from the Crown and Anchor.

Thomas Ashworth, heir to the Duchy of Ravenshollow, aged twenty-two, married the daughter of a Yorkshire wool merchant who had absolutely no title, a great deal of common sense, and a laugh that could be heard from the stables.

The Duke’s mother — the Dowager Duchess — had been dead for ten years and her chair by the fire was empty.

Molly Green, who was now Mrs. Molly Peters and had five children and a face full of laugh lines, came up from London with the whole brood, and stood in the church and cried from the first hymn to the last, exactly as Mrs. Pratt had done twenty years before.

And Elias Hobbs, who was sixty-nine years old and could no longer carry the lantern for a whole circuit of the inn, sat in the front row at Cora’s insistence and did not sing a word.

After the ceremony, the whole party went down the road to the Crown and Anchor, where Thomas Bell, aged seventy-one, stood behind his own bar and poured ale for the entire village and would not take a penny for it.

Ellen Bell was in the kitchen with the pies. Her chest was bad again that winter, but she was there, and she had been there for every summer wedding for twenty years, and she intended to be there for a great many more.

In the evening, when the dancing started, Cora slipped out of the taproom and stood in the yard alone, looking at the dark fields beyond the inn.

It was the same place.

Twenty years later, and it was exactly the same place — the same grass, the same gate, the same low stone wall that had been there when she was sixteen and the whole world was ending.

She stood there for a long time.

Then her husband came out and stood beside her, and took her right hand — the scarred one, the one he had taken first for twenty years, every single time — and turned it over in his own.

“Are you thinking about it?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You always do. On this day.”

“I always do.” She looked out at the fields. “I was sixteen. I did not know anything. And I ran into a burning building because someone had to, and it cost me everything, and it gave me everything, and I have never once been able to work out how I feel about it.”

“You are allowed to feel both,” said the Duke.

“That,” said Cora, “is the most sensible thing you have ever said to me.”

“I have been saving it for twenty years.”

She laughed. And then, in the dark yard, with the music coming through the taproom windows, she said:

“Edmund.”

“Mm.”

“Say it.”

So he said it, softly, in the dark, the way he had said it every year on the fourteenth of January for two decades, because it had become their ritual — a thing that belonged to no one else in the world.

“You will remember this day.”

And Cora Bell, the Duchess of Ravenshollow, born in a room above a coaching inn on the North Road, stood in the dark and looked at the fields, and nodded.

“I will,” she said. “Every year. For the rest of my life.”

And she did.