“None of Them Will Be My Mother!” the Duke’s Son Declared — Until the Cook Brought an Apple Pie
Chapter 20
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They were married in the village church at Ashborne in the last week of June, after the banns had been read three times, because the Duke refused a special license on the grounds that he had nothing whatever to hide. The church was so full that the vicar's wife stood on a hassock. Hannah came from Porlock with her three children in new boots and sat in the front pew with her handkerchief to her mouth; Mrs. Hollis wept steadily from the first hymn; and Ned, in a velvet jacket and shoes that pinched, walked his new mother up the aisle with his chin high, because he had informed the Duke that he would do it himself, thank you, and had no intention of being left out.When the vicar asked who gave this woman, the boy said in a clear voice that carried to the rafters: "I do." And a man in the third pew began to laugh and had to be hushed.Time moved on, as it does, and the house learned how to be a home.Rosamund became the Duchess of Ashborne, and she did not stop being a cook: she walked into the village in her plain gray cloak and opened a kitchen at the school, where 30 girls a year learned to read a ledger and to roll a crust; and she wrote every one of them a character in her own cook's hand.Lady Honoria wrote once from Cumberland: the letter was four lines long and contained the word regret exactly once, which the Duke declared a personal victory and framed.On the second Thursday in October, two years to the day since a boy had screamed beneath a table, the vaulted kitchen at Ashborne Park smelled of apples and cinnamon and honey. Ned, 12 years old and taller by a head, sat at the great oak table with flour to the elbow, writing something carefully in a worn, stained book that had once belonged to his mother. A baby girl named Eleanor, six months old, sat in the Duke's lap and ate the corner of a wooden spoon with enormous determination.There were 33 copper pans on the wall now: the newest had been a gift from a ten-year-old with a very particular sense of the number.Rosamund drew the pie from the oven, golden and glossy, with the steam curling up through a small star in the crust. She set it in the middle of the table, and no one left the room.She looked at the faces around her: the boy who had chosen her first, the man who had learned to be on time, the child who would never know a house without this smell in it. She did not count anything at all. She sat down in the chair that had become hers, and she took the very last piece, and she ate it slowly, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted.For a house is not made of windows, or titles, or family names; and neither is love. It is made of a table set again and again with patience, until someone finally believes that they are allowed to stay.