The Duke Fell in Love With His Best Friend’s Little Sister the Moment They Met—Then Promised to Be Nothing More Than Her Friend, Carrying That Secret Beside a Silver Medallion for Two Long Years

PART 10

Corbett came up from the cottage on the morning of the last day in his best coat, with his hat in his hand.

He came into the room quite alone, at Harriet’s summons, and stood by the bed a moment, and said, “Your grace” — in the same expressionless voice he had used the afternoon he had shown Miss Harriet Vain into the drawing room at Havering.

Then he did a thing he had never in his life done before.

He knelt down beside the bed, slowly, on the bad knee that had in fact been the reason he had come off active service. And he took Ashendon’s hand.

“Your grace, I saw you the first afternoon. I told Miss Harriet that evening you would do.”

Ashendon faintly laughed. “You told her, did you?”

“Yes, your grace. She said I was impertinent.”

“She was right.”

“I was right also.”

“You were both right.”

“Yes, your grace.”

Corbett got up. He bowed. He went out, and did not — at Harriet’s request — come back that day. He waited at the cottage in his best coat and had a cup of tea that Harriet sent down to him with the boy, and he did not weep, because a man of his temper did not; but he sat a long while looking at the fire.

On what turned out to be the last evening — mild for winter, with the window of the room open a hand’s breadth onto the terrace, and the early dusk coming grey outside — Harriet sat in the chair by the bed with her mending set aside at last on the small table.

The children, grown people now, all four, had been up in ones and twos, and the small grandchildren had been brought in and taken away again, and the house was quiet. There was only the small fire in the grate, and the low lamp on the table, and Harriet by the bed.

He said her name. “Harriet.”

“Yes, my love.”

“Give me your hand.”

She gave him her hand.

“The other,” he said. “Into the pocket.”

She put her hand into the inner pocket of the coat on the chair — the good grey coat he had worn on the road up from the town this last winter — and she brought out the small round silver medallion, no bigger than a shilling, worn smoother now than it had been nine-and-thirty years past. She brought it to the bed. She put it into his palm.

He closed his hand around it. He looked at her.

“The first thing I ever saw,” he said, “was you in the drawing room, standing at the window with your hand on the back of the chair. Do you know that?”

“I know.”

“I have carried this since before I knew you existed. I have carried it because your brother gave it to me in a bad hour, and then I carried it because I met you, and I put my hand to it that first afternoon, and I did not in the end ever put it back in the drawer.”

“I know, my love.”

“I want your brother to have it back.”

“Not now.”

“No. Not now. You shall keep it a while.” His thumb moved across the worn silver. “When you are done with it, one day let it go back to Havering. Let it be given to Nicholas the younger, who is his uncle’s boy. Let it be told to him whose it was, and by whom, and why.”

“Will you arrange that?”

“I will arrange it.”

“Harriet.”

“Yes.”

“Come here.”

She bent down and put her forehead against his forehead in the small warm space between them, and she said, quite softly:

“Still there, my love. Still there.”

“Always still there.”

He did not answer in words. He turned his face the small distance he could still turn it, into the palm of her hand — the hand which had come up without her thinking to his cheek, because it had been going there for a great many years.

And he stayed like that a little while, with the medallion warm in his own palm.

Then his breathing changed, in the way she had known it would change, from a long practice of knowing him. And in the quiet of his own room, in his own house, with his wife’s hand against his face and a small silver medallion in his palm, the Duke of Ashendon — Colonel Marchant, who had held the line at Salamanca, and who had five-and-thirty years earlier held a plainer line in a drawing room in October — was gone.

She sat with him a long while. She did not call the children up at once. She took the medallion very gently out of his hand, and she closed his fingers again, and she put the medallion herself on the small chain about her own neck, where she wore her mother’s cross. And she sat by him one hour, quietly, in the dark that came, before she rang the bell.

She lived some years after him.

She lived to see her son Nicholas married and settled at Havering — the little estate had come to him at his uncle’s death, as they had all always known it would — and to see her first grandchild, a small serious girl named after Ashendon’s mother, put into her arms.

She wore the medallion at her throat every day of those years. When she was asked, she said that it had been her husband’s; she did not always add that it had been her brother’s first. She said once to her daughter Mary, who noticed everything and asked bluntly:

“It is the first thing he ever did about me, and the last thing he ever gave me back, and I mean to wear it until it is time to send it home to Havering.”

On her own last evening — mild spring, the window of her own room open on the orchard at Havering, for she had gone to Havering at the end, because she said she wanted to go where the beginning had been — she called Mary, who had come up to sit with her, and she took the medallion from about her neck and put it into Mary’s hand.

“Take it to your brother Nicholas at the house. Tell him to give it to his son, who is his uncle’s boy. Tell him his father carried it five-and-thirty years for me, and his uncle carried it four years before that for his mother, and it is time to let it rest at Havering, where it began. Will you tell him?”

“I will tell him, Mama.”

“Good.”

Mary sat holding her mother’s hand. After a little while, Harriet, without opening her eyes, said quite softly:

“Your father is telling me still there. He has been telling me so all week. I have been meaning to answer him.”

“Answer him, Mama.”

“Yes,” said Harriet, Duchess of Ashendon. “Yes, my love. Still there.”

She lay quietly with her daughter’s hand around her hand, and after a little while she was gone, too — easily, without any fuss, in the plain good way she had done most things.

And outside the open window at Havering, the orchard — she had known since she was a child — was in first leaf.

And inside her daughter’s hand, the small silver medallion was warm, and it was, in the plain full sense, home.

THE END.