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

Chapter 5

The next morning, the Duke sat at breakfast with Lady Cordelia and her mother.

Cordelia looked lovely, as always. She had slept badly, but no one would have known — powder and a careful hand had done their work. She laughed at the right moments. She asked about his ride. She poured his coffee with two hands, the way he liked it.

But the Duke noticed that she barely touched her food. He noticed the shadows under her eyes, gray as ash beneath the rice powder. He had been a soldier, briefly, and a magistrate’s son always, and he noticed things whether he wished to or not.

“Did you not sleep well?” he asked.

“Not very well.” Cordelia smiled and set down her fork. “I was upset about that dreadful maid yesterday. The insolence of the girl. I am sure I shall laugh about it in a week, but at present—”

“The one with the glove,” said the Duke.

Cordelia’s cup stopped halfway to her lips.

“Glove?”

“I met her on the stairs last night. She told me she was burned in a fire years ago.” He looked at Cordelia across the table, and his voice was perfectly even. “Strange. It made me think of you.”

For one terrible second, Cordelia Vain could not speak.

The words were there in her throat and her jaw would not shape them. The silver, the roses, the fire, the whole warm room fell away, and she was six years younger and standing in a borrowed truth that had grown around her like ivy around a tree.

Then she put her cup down, and gave him a soft, sweet smile.

“Of me, darling? How romantic.” She laughed. “But I am sure half the poor girls in England have burned themselves on a kitchen stove. It is hardly the same thing.”

“No,” said the Duke slowly. “I suppose it isn’t.”

But he was not thinking about kitchen stoves.

He was thinking about a night six years ago — a night he had never told anyone the whole truth about, because he did not know the whole truth himself.

He had been twenty-four then. Not yet a duke, only a young lord traveling north on business, and he had stopped for the night at a small coaching inn on the North Road called the Crown and Anchor.

He remembered going to bed early. He remembered waking choking. Smoke everywhere, thick and yellow, and heat like the open mouth of a furnace. He had tried to reach the door and a burning beam had come down across the room, and after that everything went dark — but not completely dark.

Because there had been a hand. Small and strong, pulling at his collar.

He remembered being dragged across the floor, and a stair rail going past his face, and the roar of the fire getting further away. He remembered cold night air on his skin like a blessing. And he remembered a voice — a girl’s voice, close to his ear, singing, singing so that he would not fall asleep and die with his lungs full of smoke.

Guide me home when the dark is deep.

He remembered one more thing.

When the girl pulled him through the doorway, her sleeve had caught fire. He had heard her cry out. He had felt her burning hand press against his shoulder as she shoved him clear.

When he woke two days later in a stranger’s house, Lady Cordelia Vain was sitting beside his bed in a chair drawn up close.

She told him she had saved him. Her family’s carriage had been passing on the road. She had seen the fire, run inside, and pulled him out with her own hands. Her father, Lord Vain, confirmed every word of it.

Alexander had wept. He had been so grateful, so young, so certain. A year later, when his father died and the dukedom came to him, he had asked for her hand, because it seemed the only honorable thing a man could do. She had risked her life for him. He owed her everything.

He had never once heard her sing that song.

He had asked her about it, once, in the early days. Cordelia had laughed and said she did not remember singing anything. She had been too frightened. She had been half out of her mind.

Her hands, when he finally saw them without gloves, had been smooth and white and perfect. Not a single mark on them. She told him the burns had healed beautifully, that the doctors had been amazed. And he had believed her. Why wouldn’t he?

“Alexander.” Cordelia’s voice pulled him back. “You’ve gone very far away.”

“Forgive me,” he said, and stood up from the table. “I have letters to write.”

When he was gone, Lady Vain leaned across the table, her silk rustling, her voice dropped low.

“What was that about?”

Cordelia’s smile had vanished. Her face, in the gray morning light, was cold and hard as a churchyard stone.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing that cannot be fixed.”