They Shaved Her Head and Branded Her a Thief Before the Duke Chose His Bride — But When He Reached for Her Bonnet Before Everyone, the Copper Stubble Beneath Revealed the Daughter He Had Spent Years Searching For

PART 9

The hunt broke his heart one village at a time.

He was searching for a girl no one had reason to remember. A servant walking in rain keeps her head down and speaks to no one and buys nothing. At the first tollgate, nothing. At the crossroads, nothing. And where there was something, it was worse than nothing, because Agnes’s letters had run ahead of him faster than any horse. A shaved-headed thief, dangerous, plausible, sent packing from a good house. Watch your spoons if she begs at your door.

At Marsh Priory, he found the innkeeper’s widow, a square, sharp-eyed woman named Mrs. Pettibone, who gave him the first honest account in forty miles.

“She was here two nights. Best worker I ever had through that door. Thanked me for soup like it was a feast. Then yesterday morning, a fine letter reaches the vicar’s wife about a thieving bald-pated girl. And by noon, three of my regulars won’t drink while she’s in my kitchen. I gave her bread and a shilling and my man’s old cap. She asked the road to King’sbridge. The hiring office. The ships that take workers north to the mills. They take anyone.”

He rode. He nearly killed the horse doing it.

King’sbridge at dusk. The harbor smell. The hiring office over a chandlery. A clerk who ran his finger down a greasy ledger by lamplight.

“Shaved head, burned hand—signed articles yesterday. Domestic and mill intake. Passage north on the Providence. Loads tonight. Sails on the dawn tide.”

The east quay at night was chaos. Lanterns and cargo and a dark hull swallowing a line of boxes and people. Nathaniel went down the line of huddled passengers like a man possessed, lantern borrowed from a stevedore, looking into face after face after face.

He found the ship’s mate at the head of the gangway.

“Sinclair. A young woman. Clara Sinclair. Signed yesterday for the mills.”

The mate ran his light down the board and turned it so the Duke could see. An entry. And through it—a single line of ink struck out.

“Came to the steps this evening and gave her place up. Widow woman further down the line had a sick lad and no passage money. Your girl walks up cool as church and puts her ticket in the woman’s hand and walks off the quay. Never seen the like.”

“Walked off where? Which way?”

The mate scratched his beard. “Said something to the widow as she went. Didn’t catch the whole of it. Something about going to say goodbye to her mother first. While she still could.”

Her mother. Seventeen years dead.

Nathaniel turned the sentence over a hundred times on the black ride home. And by the time the lights of Asheford Hall rose out of the dark, he had wrung one certainty from it.

You do not say goodbye to a memory. You say goodbye to a place. A grave.

Rosalind’s grave.

And it was not at Thornfield.

He rode through his own gates at two in the morning. The great house blazed with light—it was now the day before the grand ball, and thirty guests’ worth of preparation had rolled on without him. His steward met him in the hall with a list of arrivals.

Mr. Josiah Pedifer of Pedifer and Sons, Gray’s Inn, come up from London with a locked document case.

And Mrs. Agnes Thornfield and Miss Beatrice Thornfield, confirmed by note that very evening, delighted to attend the grand ball—in his own carriage, which he had ordered sent from the road.

Let them believe it. Safe things stand still.

Mrs. Hodge, sitting forgotten in the corner with her mending untouched on her lap, lifted her head slowly.

“Ashenden St. Mary,” she said. “Dr. Farweather’s village. Her father’s. She used to talk of it summers when we were girls. The crooked spire. The walnut tree in the churchyard her grandfather planted.”

She looked up at the Duke.

“She said to me once: ‘Margaret, when I die, I don’t want to lie anywhere grand. Put me under the walnut tree with Papa. Where the nuts come down in October and the children come scrumping for them. Where there will always be laughing in the churchyard.'”

Nathaniel was already moving.

He took the coast road through what remained of the night and the whole of the gray morning. Changing horses at King’sbridge. The day before the ball burned away behind him mile by mile.

And it was late golden afternoon when he came at last around a fold of hills and saw it below him. A huddle of cottages. A stream. A squat stone church with a spire that leaned like an old man listening.

Ashenden St. Mary.

He left the blown horse at the lychgate and went into the churchyard on foot. Found the walnut tree at once—huge and green and older than any grave beneath it. And under its shade, a modest stone, clean of moss where every neighbor stone was furred with it. Tended.

Rosalind Sinclair. Beloved wife and mother.

And beside it, older: Dr. Jonah Farweather of this parish.

Laid against the base of the stone, so fresh they had not yet wilted—blue field scabious and white campion, tied with a strip of gray wool torn from the hem of a dress.

She had been here. Within hours.

Nathaniel stood beneath the walnut tree, the tightness in his chest turning over into something like prayer.

“Clara,” he called into the evening. “Clara Sinclair.”

A wood pigeon clattered up out of the walnut leaves. Nothing else moved.

He called again. And then, from behind the yew by the wall, a voice came back at him. Quiet and rough at the edges from days of weather and silence.

“You should not shout in a churchyard.”

She stepped out from the shadow of the tree into the last of the gold light. A man’s old cap over her shorn head. The gray dress stained to the knee with road mud. One hem torn where the wool had gone to tie flowers. The bandage on her hand gray and unraveling.

She stood with her back straight and her chin level and her eyes wary. And she watched the Duke of Asheford across her mother’s grave and did not curtsy.

“I heard the horse,” she said. “I thought it was someone come from her.”

Her eyes went over his mud-crusted boots, his ruined coat, the two days of beard.

“You look worse than I do, Your Grace.”