He stayed. Mrs. Patton began, on the second day, to leave a small plate at his door. Bread and cheese and a slice of cold pie, food that did not require conversation or gratitude, food that appeared and sat and waited until it was eaten or removed.
The village began to talk. He heard voices carrying up from the common room through the floorboards. A duke wastingaway at the Hart and Hare was not something the village was going to let pass without extensive discussion.
He heard his own name spoken on the second evening. Mrs. Patton’s voice, lowered but not low enough. “He has not eaten, Mr. Hewitt. Three days and he has not taken a proper meal. I leave a plate, and sometimes half of it is gone in the morning, and sometimes none of it is, and he sits at that window all day looking down the road. He does not move, and I have seen men grieve before, but I have not seen a man grieve like this, not for a woman, not for anything.”
Mr. Hewitt, the publican, offered the opinion that dukes were not accustomed to being refused and that the refusal was probably good for him.
He sat at the window above them, listened and did not disagree.
On the third morning Mrs. Drummond, the curate’s wife, arrived at the inn to buy eggs and stayed for tea and conversation, and the conversation was about the duke. It was conducted at a volume that suggested Mrs. Drummond believed he could not hear from the first floor, but she was wrong. He heard every word. He heard Mrs. Drummond say that the whole village was talking, that Mrs. Patton was worried, that the duke had been there for three days and had not been seen to take a meal. He heard Mrs. Drummond say, in the gentle voice of a woman who was not entirely sure she should be saying it, that she intended to mention the matter to Miss Goodall at the village shop the next time she saw her, because someone ought to tell the poor girl. The girl had a right to know, and whatever had happened between them was between them, but a man starving himself at a village inn was a public matter and public matters required public intervention.
He did not go downstairs to stop Mrs. Drummond from telling Imogen. He did not ask her not to speak. He sat at thewindow and listened to the curate’s wife plan to tell the woman he loved that he was wasting away half a mile from her door, and he let it happen, because letting it happen was not a strategy. It was an absence of strategy. It was a man sitting in a chair, not intervening, not performing and not doing anything at all except being present.
The fourth day arrived. He sat at the desk and opened the writing paper. His hands shook when he picked up the pen, not from emotion but from hunger, the particular fine tremor that arrived when a body had been running on bread and cheese and cold pie for days and was beginning to protest the arrangement. He steadied his hand against the edge of the desk and began the fourth letter.
This one was about the bed. He wrote about the morning room and the license and the narrow bed with the lavender pillow and the slow careful worship of a man who had kneeled at a woman’s feet because kneeling was the right thing and who had told her he loved her .
He sealed it, set it on the desk beside the first three, returned and unopened; a small stack of cream-colored confessions that no one had read and that he was going to keep writing until someone did or until the writing paper ran out, whichever came first.
Chapter Eighteen
“He is wasting away over a woman, Mrs. Patton tells me. The whole village is talking of it. I thought you ought to know, my dear.”
Mrs. Drummond said it at the village shop on a Tuesday morning, standing between the flour bins and the soap, her voice gentle and uncertain, the voice of a woman who was not entirely sure she was doing the right thing but was doing it anyway. She was the curate’s wife, a small kind woman in a brown pelisse who knew everyone in the parish and who believed that information was a form of charity and withholding it was a form of cruelty.
“There is a duke at the Hart and Hare,” Mrs. Drummond continued, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes searching Imogen’s face for permission to keep talking. “He has been there for three days. Mrs. Patton says he has not been seen to take a proper meal. He sits at the window and watches the road. He writes letters and the letters come back, and he does not eat and he does not sleep. I do not presume to know what is between you, Miss Goodall, but Mrs. Patton is worried, and Mrs. Patton does not worry easily, so I thought you ought to know.”
Imogen stood in the village shop with a basket of eggs in one hand and the other hand pressed flat against her stomach where something had just turned over, slowly, like a key in a lock she had believed was rusted shut. She thanked Mrs. Drummond and paid for her eggs. She walked home very slowly along the lane with her hand pressed against her chest.
He was here. Half a mile from her door. Sitting at a window watching the road she walked twice a day. He was not eating and not sleeping. He was writing letters that she was returning unopened.
She went home, set the eggs on the kitchen table and went upstairs to her room. She sat on the edge of her bed and pressed her hand against her chest and breathed.
The fourth letter arrived that afternoon. She held it at the kitchen door where the footman delivered it along with the previous three and looked at the seal, unbroken, his handwriting on the front, her name, and she did not return it. She carried it upstairs and placed it, unopened, in the drawer of her uncle’s writing desk. The placing was the first thing about the situation that surprised her about herself, because she had been returning letters for a week and the returning had been automatic, a reflex, anger made into action, and now the reflex had broken, and the breaking was not a decision. It was an exhaustion. The anger that had powered the returning had run out.
The fifth letter arrived the next morning. Same drawer.
The sixth delivery was not a letter. It arrived on the morning of the sixth day, a small parcel tied with twine, unsigned, no note. Inside, wrapped in brown paper, was a book. She unwrapped it and her hands went still.
The first volume of her late uncle’s Crébillon. Le Sopha. The edition he had collected over thirty years. The edition that had been pawned twelve years ago to settle the family debt and that she had been looking for ever since, in every bookseller’s shop in London and in three counties, without success.
She held the book. The leather binding was worn but intact, the spine cracked, the pages foxed at the edges, and the smell of it was the smell of her uncle’s library, old leather and dust and the faint ghost of his tobacco. The smell went through her and sat in her lungs and did not leave.
He had tracked it. She had mentioned the Crébillon exactly once, in the cottage, sitting by the fire in her shift with his arm around her, and she had mentioned it because the conversation had been about lost things. The book was a returning. Hewas giving back a thing she had lost, and the giving was not an apology and was not a strategy but an act; quiet, specific, expensive and unsigned. Unsigned meant he did not want credit, and not wanting credit meant the gift was for her and not for his conscience.
She sat on the bottom step of the staircase with the book in her lap and opened it to the first page and read the first line. The words sat on the page, and she could not make them move, because between the words and her eyes was the memory of the cottage, the fire, the rain and his voice saying his father had carried the watch.
The second volume arrived the next morning. Bethany, finding her on the staircase with both volumes in her lap and her face very still, sat on the step beside her without speaking.
Cassie spoke to her that evening over a cold supper.
She had taken the gig that morning, with the head groom beside her because unmarried young women did not drive gigs across the countryside alone regardless of how capable they were, and she had driven to the Hart and Hare because she had received a letter that morning from Mrs. Bromley, the Dowager Duchess of Saintbury’s woman of business. She was congratulating her on the Dowager’s offer to sponsor her next season under the Saintbury name. The letter mentioned, in passing, that the arrangement had been requested by the Duke of Ravenhurst some weeks before, with the express condition that Miss Imogen Goodall was not to be told the source.
“He asked the Dowager,” Cassie said, her fork untouched on her plate, her young face carrying an expression that was older than eighteen. “Mrs. Bromley said weeks before.”
Imogen set her fork down, rose and walked to the window. She looked at the garden before turning to Cassie.
“Did he ask you to keep it from me?”
