She Fed the Workhouse Children in Secret for Three Winters, Then an Earl Chose Her Over Every Lad...
Chapter 12
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"I am a printer's widow who keeps accounts," she said. "I am not unusual at all. There are thousands like me.""There are not," he said with the particular certainty of a man who has looked. "I have been everywhere in this county. I have never found another one."She did not argue. She had learned that there were moments when he was right, and arguing was simply the long way around to agreeing, and this was one of them.Pip had come out of the school behind them and was looking up at the sign with a solemn expression he wore when he was deciding something important."Frances," he read carefully, sounding out each letter. "Is that a lady?""It was," the Earl said.Pip considered this. "Was she good?"A pause. Cecilia felt the Earl's hand tighten on hers just slightly."She was," he said. "She deserved better than she got."Pip absorbed this with the seriousness of a boy who knows something about deserving better than you get."Well," he said with the finality of a seven-year-old who has resolved a philosophical question, "now she's got a school. That's better."And Cecilia laughed againβthe real laugh, the startling oneβand the Earl laughed too, which was a rarer thing. And Pip looked between them with great satisfaction.And the snow that had been threatening all morning began to come down, soft and clean on the lane outside the Frances School: on the sign that bore a dead girl's name, on a man and a woman standing close enough that their shoulders touched, on a small, serious boy who had come to a gate with nothing but a cough and a scrap of paper, and had been given, in the end, everything that mattered.The world had looked straight through all three of them once. It simply hadn't known what it was looking for.