For eleven years the ninth Duke of Ashgrave had kept his scarred face out of every room in England. Then a carriage went into a ditch in a storm, and Mercy Ren — who fed strangers before she asked what they were worth — looked at him without flinching. He lied about his name. She forgave him. His cousin Reginald never would.

PART 8

From that moment, the evening was a wreck in slow water.

Men who had spent the first hour inventing reasons to leave discovered unaccountable attachments to the champagne. The major who had planned to look the Duke’s good side in the eye and be brave found that the Duke’s scarred side was now, inconveniently, the side people asked about first, and that asking was somehow no longer an act of courage but of common interest — and the Duke, to the major’s horror, answered, in a level tone, that the burn gave him no particular pain, only the cold, and that he had in recent months been persuaded, with some effort, out of the habit of arranging himself for the room.

Reginald had left by a servant’s door within the half hour, with a courtesy no one returned. Whatever farewells were owed him were paid in the silence and not accepted.

And the county — the county, as counties will, had begun its turn before the candles were half burned down. The incident had been witnessed. The seal of Penrose and Penrose had been dragged in the evening’s account. By the time the first carriage pulled away in the small hours, the story had been altered, polished, and distributed in its final corrective edition: the Shadow Duke’s entire shortcoming, it transpired, was that he had hidden his face for eleven years, and everyone knew that a man who hides a burn hides nothing else of consequence; whereas the woman from Thorncraft had, after all, proved herself a harbor in the storm — one heard she had set the shoulder, fed the man, endured the county’s whisper-campaign with a fortitude that was frankly very Ashgrave, and the vicar’s wife, possessed of the only unlicensed broadcasting authority in the district, had declared, with finality, that the whole affair had been an exemplary lesson in the wages of imagination.

“Well,” the vicar’s wife said to Mercy, two mornings later, in the cottage kitchen, where the brass-bound herbal sat on the sill between them under the honest light, “I will tell you plainly, Miss Ren. You will be the most celebrated commoner bride in three counties, and the celebrations will be insufferable, and you will find yourself forged into a legend within a month — the woman who set the Shadow Duke’s shoulder and cooked him the last rabbit. You will be sick of the rabbit by Christmas.”

“I did not do anything differently,” Mercy said. “There was a storm, and a crash, and a man who needed a hearth. The county has simply decided, now that it is safe to do so, that this makes me admirable rather than suspicious.”

“Precisely,” said the vicar’s wife, with relish. “And it will do exactly the same to you on some other Tuesday, when it is again safe to be suspicious. You will not build your marriage on the county’s opinion, Miss Ren, or it will come down the first wet autumn.” She settled the teapot with an ordered, domestic triumph. “Build it, I should say, on the one man in this county who looked at you the same way in the ditch as he did in his own ballroom, with three hundred candles lit, in front of every conscience in the district, for no other reason than that you are who you are. That,” said the vicar’s wife, “is the only opinion in Ashgrave worth the keeping.”

The spring wedding was held at the small parish church nearest Thorncraft — at Mercy’s insistence, in the light, under the open door, with the lane chalked for the wheels and the crocuses coming up the bank of the beck — and the church was full to the porch, and the county was all in attendance, perfectly behaved, utterly convinced that it had been behind the match since the beginning.

The one departure from expectation was the book she carried.

She had refused the prayer book. She carried, instead, bound in brass, held against her breast like a heart made of leaves — her mother’s herbal, unopened, the pages still smelling faintly of another woman’s winter hands — and the old vicar, who had known Mercy’s mother when both were young and the cottage had a garden full of the world’s remedies, said afterward that it was the most honest Bible he had ever married a woman to.

She had told Gideon the story of the herbal the week before the wedding, sitting on the garden wall where the last of the season’s work lay boxed and waiting: that her mother had died when Mercy was ten, that the herbal was all the grammar of her childhood that remained, that her father had been offered good money for it in the bad years and had refused — it is the only book my wife ever truly wrote, he said, and I will not sell her handwriting to pay my own mistakes — and that about all her father had ever managed to leave her, besides the cottage and the debts, was that example, which was not the worst inheritance in the county.

Gideon listened from the wall with his scarred side to the light, and said: “My father left me the arithmetic of a household. Yours left you the only ledger I know of that keeps accounts in mint and tansy.”

“I will teach her,” Mercy said, “when we have her.”

“Teach her,” Gideon said, “what?”

“Which greens are safe for a fever,” Mercy said, “and which lies a man tells when he is afraid of being known. It is the same page in the same book, if you know where to look.”

She was teaching the daughter that, a year later.