“None of Them Will Be My Mother!” the Duke’s Son Declared — Until the Cook Brought an Apple Pie
Chapter 11
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Christmas came to Ashborne with snow and a great deal of holly, and the house, which had not truly celebrated in two years, discovered that it remembered how. Rosamund baked for three days.On Christmas morning, she found a parcel on her kitchen table wrapped in brown paper and string, and inside it lay a copper pan: deep and heavy and bright, a proper stockpot of the very finest make. A card was tucked beneath the handle in a slanting hand:32. I find the number improves. — T.B.She hung it at the end of the row, and she stood back, and for the first time in her life, the counting did not steady her: it made her laugh aloud, alone in the empty kitchen, until she had to wipe her eyes.Master Edmund gave her nothing at all. But at the church door that morning, he stopped dead in the snow with his arms folded."I shall not go into the pew," he announced, "unless Rosamund sits with us."Mrs. Hollis drew a sharp breath; the vicar's wife on the steps behind stopped with her prayer book open. Servants sat at the back; it had always been so.The Duke looked at his son, and at the cook with her plain gray cloak and her flushed, apple-cheeked face, and he did not hesitate."Miss Vale," he said, and offered her his arm.She walked up the aisle of Ashborne Church on the arm of a duke, with the whole village watching, and sat in the Blackwood pew beside a boy who held her hand through the entire second lesson. She did not hear a word of the sermon: she heard the whispers, and she knew very well what they would become.Gossip is a living thing: it requires only warmth and a little darkness, and Ashborne parish had both in abundance that winter. By the middle of January, it was said in the village that the Duke took tea in his own kitchen; by February, it was said that the cook sat in the family pew; by the 1st of March, it was said in the confidential voices of ladies who had never met the woman in question that the Duke of Ashborne had lost his wits over a servant, and that the boy was running quite wild.Lady Honoria in Mayfair received four letters on the subject in six weeks. She read all four, and she said nothing at all, and she began with great patience to make her arrangements.He knew it on the 14th of February, which Theodore would afterward consider a gross abuse of the calendar. It was past midnight, and the library fire had burned to embers, and Rosamund had fallen asleep in the great wing chair with the home farm ledger open on her knee and a smudge of ink on her chin.She looked younger asleep: the careful composure had slipped from her face, and without it, she was only a tired woman with honey-brown hair coming loose and one hand curled against her cheek.