On Christmas morning, a small parcel arrived for her at Lady Agatha's house. There was no return address. Inside, wrapped in plain brown paper, was a single ribbon of dark blue silk and a card with a few words written in a neat, steady hand:
*I forgive you. I hope one day you can forgive yourself. —C.H.*
Cecilia stared at that card for a long, long time. Then she sat down on the floor of her cold little room holding the blue ribbon, and wept as she had never wept in her whole life.
Some say that forgiveness is the sweetest revenge of all. Perhaps Lady Cecilia Marlowe finally understood that.
The servants of Ravenshire Hall had not forgotten Clara—not one of them. When she first returned to the great house in the autumn, wearing a fine new dress—the Duke's guest and not his maid—every servant lined up in the great hall to greet her: the same two long lines on the same cold marble floor beneath the same grand staircase.
But this time, when Clara walked in, nobody looked away.
Betsy burst into tears and ran out of the line to hug her, and Mrs. Dobbs was too busy dabbing her own eyes to scold her. The footman who had once smirked at Clara's ruined hair went bright red and stared at his boots. The kitchen girls clapped, and old Mr. Grant, the butler, who never showed any feeling at all, bowed lower than he had ever bowed to anyone.
Clara went down the lines, one by one, and thanked each of them. She remembered every penny and every crust of bread they had pressed into her hands that rainy night; she had written it all down, and each of them, the next morning, found a little envelope under their pillow with ten times what they had given her.
Hannah never went back to Lady Cecilia. She became Clara's own lady's maid with good wages, a warm room of her own, and a little cottage in the village for her old mother. She still blushed and stammered when anyone mentioned the bracelet, but she smiled now; she smiled a great deal.
Mrs. Dobbs retired that winter to live with her sister by the sea, and there was only one person in the whole house fit to take her place: old Mrs. Pike became the new housekeeper of Ravenshire Hall. She wore the great ring of keys on her belt with enormous pride, running that house like a general runs an army. And every night, without fail, she still made a cup of hot milk and honey and left it on the kitchen table, just in case.
"Old habits," she would say gruffly if anyone asked. "The old Duke liked it. Somebody ought to remember him."
But there was one person at Ravenshire Hall who did not find it easy to welcome Clara home: the Dowager Duchess.