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She Knitted for the Orphans in Secret for Five Winters — Then an Earl Showed the Whole Town

She Knitted for the Orphans in Secret for Five Winters — Then an Earl Showed the Whole Town

Chapter 15

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Mrs. Pratt did not come. She had sold her big house that winter and gone to live with a cousin in Bath; people said she did not talk about good causes anymore.Cordelia stayed behind in Millbrook. Of all things, she began to come up to St. Anne's on Saturdays, quiet and shy, to teach the girls to sew. No one had ever asked her to be useful before; it turned out that she liked it.When the time came for the vows, the Earl did not say the words to the church. He said them to Lucy, as if there were no one else there at all. And when it was done, he took a small parcel from his coat and put it in her hands. Inside was the tiny gray mitten with the faded blue star. He had put it in a little frame of dark wood with glass in front."It belongs to you now," he said. "It always did."That summer, the Earl bought the empty house next door to St. Anne's, and the one next to that. By the next winter, the old home had twice the rooms, and big fires in every one, and a long kitchen that always smelled of bread.Lucy asked for only one thing: a name over the new door. It was not her name, and it was not his: Mary Ward House.The Earl stood under the sign on the day it went up, and he did not speak for a long time. Then he took his wife's hand. "She should have seen this," he said."She sees it," said Lucy. "Every time a child comes in from the cold."She never stopped knitting. Not when she became a countess, not when she had children of her own. Every night by the fire in the great house on the hill, the Countess of Wexley sat with her two needles and her cheap odd ends of wool, and the Earl sat beside her and read aloud, and the mittens piled up in a basket at her feet. And every one had a small blue star sewn inside the cuff: five points, one point a little longer than the others.She taught the stitch to her daughters. She taught it to the girls of St. Anne's. She even taught it to Sam, who said it was not a thing for boys, and then sat up half the night to get it right.Sam grew up. He grew tall and kind and clever. And many years later, when the Earl and the Countess were old and gray, it was Sam who ran Mary Ward House. And every Christmas Eve, he gave out the mittens himself.The children who grew up there say it still, even now: if you are ever lost or cold or alone, look for the long point of the star. It points home.The town of Millbrook had looked at Lucy Ward for five winters and seen only a girl from the hat shop, a girl with sore hands and an old brown coat. But one boy far away had been looking for her his whole life. And when he grew up, he came back and found her.
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She Knitted for the Orphans in Secret for Five Winters — Then an Earl Showed the Whole Town

15 Part