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

Chapter 8

The first thing Edward did, after the shock of the entrance hall had passed and Mrs. Peton had materialized to spirit Thomas back to bed and the tea had come and gone cold in the drawing room, was sit down and listen.

Charlotte told him everything.

She did not prepare what she was going to say. She simply started at the beginning and went to the end without stopping and left nothing out. The fire. The terrible days afterward. William arriving and taking charge of everything. The telegram that came three days later with the War Office seal and the official language and her husband’s name in black ink, stating he had been killed in action on the ninth of February.

How she had stood in this same entrance hall and read it and felt the floor move underneath her. The months that followed. Managing the estate. Raising Thomas. The grief that came in waves at unpredictable hours. The way she had learned to function around it because functioning was the only option available to her.

William’s presence through all of it. His consistency. His patience. The way he had made an impossible situation manageable every single day for nearly two years.

And then September. The drawing room. The fire. William saying words she had not been prepared for. Her response. Her silence. What she had said and what she had not said. What she had been turning over since.

She told Edward everything because the only thing worse than telling him was not telling him.

When she finished, the room was very quiet.

Edward reached into his coat pocket. He took out the letter — the one that had arrived at the front in March 1918, the one he had carried unopened for eight months and had finally read on a train platform in France the day after the war ended. He placed it on the table between them.

Charlotte picked it up. She read it.

The color left her face completely.

“He told me you were dead,” she said.

“He told me you were dead,” Edward said.

They looked at each other across the fireplace. The fire crackled. The wind moved across the roof.

“He told us both,” Charlotte said quietly.

Edward said nothing for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was completely level — the way some men’s voices go level when the emotion underneath is too large to allow any movement at all.

“How close were you to saying yes?”

Charlotte did not look away from him. “I had not decided. I want you to know that I had not decided.”

“I know. But how close?”

Charlotte held his gaze. “Close enough that I am telling you,” she said, “because I will not begin with anything hidden between us.”

Another long silence. The fire settled. A log shifted and sent a brief shower of sparks up the chimney. The wind moved across the roof.

Edward stood up. He walked to the window and stood with his back to the room, looking out at the November dark. Charlotte watched him. She did not go to him. She understood that he needed the distance.

He stood there for a long time.

Then he turned around. His face had the look of a man who had picked up something very heavy and decided to carry it rather than put it down.

“I am not going anywhere,” he said.

Charlotte let out a breath she had been holding since the moment she walked out of the corridor and found him standing in the hall.

“Neither am I,” she said.

They did not fall into each other’s arms. They did not make dramatic declarations. They sat back down on opposite sides of the fireplace and drank cold tea and talked until the candles burned low and the fire died down to embers and the November sky outside began to show the first gray suggestion of morning.

And upstairs, Thomas slept on, completely unbothered, having decided that the tall stranger in the hall was probably not dangerous and that whatever was happening could be investigated properly in the morning.