She Bought a Broken Mountain Man at Auction. What He Did Next Shocked Everyone.

Chapter 8

London had not been kind to Edward Ashworth. Not that he had given it much chance to be kind.

He moved through the city in the eight months after the war ended the way a man moves through a place he does not intend to stay. Rented rooms with narrow windows and cold drafts. Club dinners with men who tried to talk about the war and men who tried very hard not to, the silence between them heavy with things that could not be spoken. Invitations to country houses that he accepted and then sat through with the polite distance of someone whose mind was always somewhere else, three hundred miles north, in the ruins of a house that had burned to the ground.

He drank moderately. He slept poorly. He existed without direction, without purpose, without any reason to get up in the morning except that lying down was worse.

He had nothing to go back to. His wife was dead. His son was dead. Blackmore Hall was being managed by William. There was no urgency requiring his presence. There was nothing that required anything of him at all, and he found that this was its own particular kind of suffering — the suffering of being unnecessary, of being surplus, of having no one who needed him.

He carried the letter William had sent to the front in his coat pocket, worn soft from handling. He did not know why he kept it. He simply could not bring himself to throw it away. It was the last thing he had from his old life, the last communication from the world he had lost. He read it sometimes, in the small hours of the morning, tracing the words that had destroyed him.

On an afternoon in November, he was riding in a hired carriage through a London street — a narrow street lined with shops and townhouses — when the carriage slowed for traffic. A delivery wagon had stopped ahead, blocking the way. Edward looked out the window, impatient, and saw the pavement.

On the pavement to his left, a woman was walking.

Copper-haired. Straight-backed. Moving with a particular purposeful stride that he would have known anywhere, in any city, in any country, in any life. She was holding the hand of a small boy beside her, a boy with serious eyes and a determined expression.

The carriage moved forward before he could be certain.

He told himself it was nothing. He knew what grief did to men. He had seen it at the front — grown men certain they heard their dead wives in the wind, saw their children’s faces in the faces of strangers. Men who went mad with loss and never came back. He was not going to become that.

But he could not stop thinking about it. The angle of her chin. The way she walked, slightly favoring her left foot — she had twisted that ankle years ago, falling from a horse. The precise shade of copper in her hair, catching the pale November light.

He hired a horse at the next coaching inn he passed. He rode north without stopping.

Fresh horses at Newcastle, the stable boy looking at him strangely as he threw down payment and mounted again. The last stretch in a hired carriage through the Northumberland dark, the roads frozen, the sky enormous with stars, the moorland black and silent on either side, stretching away into infinity. He told himself the entire journey that he was being irrational, that he was chasing a ghost, that he was a fool.

He did not stop. He could not stop. The image of that copper-haired woman had lodged itself in his chest like a bullet, and he had to know.

The journey took three days. He barely slept. He ate when he remembered to, chewing bread without tasting it. He rode through weather that would have stopped a sensible man, and he had stopped being a sensible man the moment he saw that woman on a London pavement.

Blackmore Hall appeared on the hill at ten o’clock on the third night, and every window in the west wing was burning with warm gold light.

Edward sat in the carriage at the gate for a full minute without moving. The light was wrong. The house was wrong. It should have been dark and empty and cold, a shell of a building, a monument to the dead. That was what he had been told. That was what he had built his grief around for two years. That was the foundation of everything he had become.

He told the driver to go through.

The gravel of the drive sounded exactly as it always had, the familiar crunch under the wheels. The yew trees lined both sides exactly as they always had, their dark shapes silhouetted against the moonlit sky. The smell of wood smoke drifted from the chimneys into the cold night air, rich and warm and alive.

Edward stepped down from the carriage and stood in the dark and breathed it in. His hands were shaking. He could not make them stop.

He took his own key from his coat pocket. The iron was cold in his palm. The lock turned smoothly.

The front door swung open.

And his entire world turned inside out.