Thrown Out on Christmas Eve, She Took Shelter in an Empty House — Unaware the Duke Was Coming Home
Chapter 20
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"I can see him," said Hannah."Then I'd like him to ask you," said Edmund, "if you would marry him. Not tomorrow—not until you're ready, and Sam is ready, and the shop is in good hands. In the spring, perhaps, when the roads are open and the bees are working again. But I would like this house to have its light back for good. And I find I don't want any light in it but yours."Hannah looked at him for a very long time—long enough that the candle flame between them bent and steadied once, twice, in some small draft from the window."My father," she said, "would have liked you. He would have said you were very slow and very stubborn, and that you dipped like a man stirring porridge.""That's fair.""And then," said Hannah, "he would have told you to sit down at the table, and he would have taught you properly, because he never turned anyone away who wanted to learn." Her voice wavered, and she let it. "Yes. In the spring.""Yes."Edmund did not say anything at all: he only lifted her hand and held it against his cheek, the way a man holds something he has been very afraid of dropping.And in the doorway behind them, Sam Lowe, who had been listening the whole time with the gray cat in his arms, let out a whoop that could be heard all the way down in the village.They were married on the 20th of April in the little church at Lower Ashmere, with every window of the church lit by Lowe & Daughter's best beeswax, though it was broad daylight and quite unnecessary. Mr. Rudd weighed every candle; Sir Henry Dalby gave the bride away; Mrs. Tibbs baked the cake and wept into the icing and said it was the steam; and Sam, who was to start at the grammar school in Kendal that autumn at the Duke's expense, carried the ring on a cushion, and only dropped it once.The shop on Church Lane stayed open: Hannah trained the eldest Dawson girl to dip, and went down to the shop three mornings a week for the rest of her life.And every Christmas Eve, the Duchess of Ashmere made one candle with her own hands: pure beeswax, honey-colored, with a thin ring of red wax a third of the way down. She lit it in the window of the small sitting room on the first floor where it could be seen from the whole valley, and she and her husband sat up beside it together, talking quietly until it burned down to the red ring. Then they put it out and saved the rest for next year.Because there was always going to be a next year now. And the house on the hill was never dark again.