The Duke Returned Unannounced to His Old House .. only to Find His long dead Duchess and Son Alive..

Chapter 7

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. Club dinners with men who tried to talk about the war and men who tried very hard not to. Invitations to country houses that he accepted and then sat through with the polite distance of someone whose mind was always somewhere else.

He drank moderately. He slept poorly. He existed without direction.

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 that required his presence. There was nothing that required anything of him at all, and he found that this was its own particular kind of suffering.

He carried the letter William had sent to the front in his coat pocket. He did not know why he kept it. He simply could not bring himself to throw it away.

On an afternoon in November, he was riding in a hired carriage through a London street when the carriage slowed for traffic. 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.

She was holding the hand of a small boy beside her.

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. He was not going to become that.

He hired a horse at the next coaching inn he passed.

He rode north without stopping.

Fresh horses at Newcastle. The last stretch in a hired carriage through the Northumberland dark. The roads frozen. The sky enormous with stars. The moors black and silent on either side. He told himself the entire journey that he was being irrational.

He did not stop.

Blackmore Hall appeared on the hill at ten o’clock, 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 house was supposed to be empty. The house was supposed to be a shell, a memory, a thing that existed only in the past tense. But the light was pouring from the windows like water, and smoke was rising from the chimneys, and the house was alive.

He told the driver to go through.

The gravel of the drive sounded exactly as it always had under the carriage wheels. The oak trees lined both sides exactly as they always had. The smell of wood smoke drifted from the chimneys into the cold night air. He stepped down from the carriage and stood in the dark and breathed it in.

He took his own key from his coat pocket.

The front door opened.

The entrance hall was exactly as he had left it nearly three years ago. The black and white marble floor. The great staircase. The portraits along the walls. The wolfhound’s empty basket by the morning room door. The wolfhound had been old when he left. It was gone now, but nobody had moved the basket.

He stood in the silence of his own house and felt something pull very tight in his chest.

Then a door opened off the main corridor.

And she walked out.