"Send the Plain One, He'll Reject Her," They Laughed — But the Duke Could Not Take His Eyes Off Her
Chapter 7
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"I say," he said to the Dowager, loudly enough for every guest to hear, "Harvest Sunday's next week. Nat will read the lesson, of course. Family tradition. The Duke of Halsingham has read the harvest lesson in St. Michael's for 200 years. The whole county comes to hear it. Be a dreadful shame if he didn't."The Dowager's eyes went to her son. "Of course he will read it.""Of course," said the Duke, without expression.Hester felt her heart drop like a stone into a well. The great Bible at St. Michael's was old, the print small, the church dim even at noon. He would stand at that lectern in front of 300 people and be unable to read a single line.That night, after the house had gone to bed, she found him in the library, sitting in the dark. He didn't need a candle anymore. Bramble lay across his feet."He knows," said the Duke quietly. "Or he's guessed. He wants it done in public. Once the county knows, no mother in England will give her daughter to a blind man. He'll have the estate in all but name."Hester lit a candle and sat down across from him."The harvest lesson is always the 65th Psalm," she said. "My grandfather read it every year. I know it by heart." She took a breath. "And so will you, by Sunday."He lifted his head."He used to say the trick isn't memorizing the words," she went on. "It's memorizing the pictures underneath them. Then the words come back on their own. Shall we begin?"And so, every night for six nights, after the house was asleep, Hester Larkin sat in the library at Halsingham and taught a duke the 65th Psalm line by line.She would read him the first line:"Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it.""Think of the rain coming over the hills," she would say. "Gray curtains of it sweeping across the hill, and then the sun behind it."Then the next line:"Thou crownest the year with thy goodness.""That's the beech avenue in October, Your Grace," she told him. "The copper pennies, the crown of the year."And then the line that always made her smile:"The little hills rejoice on every side.""That's the gardener's boy and the dairy maid," she said. And he laughed so hard that Bramble woke up and barked.On the fifth night, when he had said the whole psalm through without a single stumble, he went quiet.Then he said, "Miss Larkin, would you mind very much if I looked at you?"Her heart did something strange. "Looked at me?""I can see a face if it's close enough, in good light. I've been listening to yours for two weeks, and I have no idea what it looks like."She should have said no. Instead, she picked up the candle and moved her chair until she was sitting knee-to-knee with him, and she held the light beside her face and let him look.