Chapter 1
Part 2
Her heart was beating so hard that she could feel it in her throat because she knew that voice. She had not heard it in 12 years. But she had heard it every night in her dreams until she had taught herself, by long and painful practice, to stop dreaming.
Now, to understand why a duke would say such a thing at a stranger’s dinner table, and why a woman of 30 would sit frozen at the bottom of that table, unable to raise her eyes, we must go back.
Back 12 years to a summer in a small stone vicarage in the village of Little Hartwell, where the roses grew wild over the garden wall, and a girl of 18 first fell in love.
Eleanor’s father, the Reverend Thomas Whitmore, had been a scholar before he was a clergyman. He read Greek for pleasure and Latin for comfort, and the vicarage at Little Hartwell was so full of books that they were stacked on the stairs and under the beds, and even on one memorable occasion in the oven. His wife had died when Eleanor was eight, and so father and daughter had grown up together, in a way.
He taught her everything he knew. She kept his house, mended his coats, and corrected his sermons when they ran too long. To supplement his small income, the Reverend took pupils, young gentlemen whose families wished them to be polished before university or before entering a profession.
And in the summer of 1804, the pupil who came to stay at the vicarage was Mr. Alexander Thorne. He was 22 then, the second son of the Duke of Ashford, which meant he would inherit nothing but a small allowance and a famous name. His commission was already purchased and he was to join his regiment in the autumn. His father had sent him for one last summer of study because, as the old Duke wrote,
“The boy reads too much poetry and not enough history.”
Eleanor had expected to dislike him. She had imagined a proud, careless young lord who would leave his boots in the hall and complain about the plain cooking. Instead, on the first evening, she found him in her father’s study, sitting on the floor because every chair was covered in books, reading a battered copy of Cowper with such absorption that he did not notice her standing in the doorway.
“You’ll ruin your eyes,” she had said. “There’s not enough light.”
He had looked up and smiled, and that was the beginning.
It was a summer made of small things, walks along the river, arguments about poetry that lasted until the candles burned down, the afternoon he carried a basket of bread to old Mrs. Tolliver’s cottage and stayed an hour to mend her broken gate, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and the evening in July when a thunderstorm caught them in the orchard, and they took shelter under the old apple tree, laughing, soaked to the skin, and he looked at her as though he had never seen anything so lovely in all his life. He did not kiss her that night. He was too honorable for that with her father’s roof so near. But he took her hand and held it and said,
“Eleanor, I have nothing. I have a commission and a name and a younger son’s allowance. I don’t know where the army will send me or for how long or whether I’ll come back. I have no right to ask you anything.”
May you like
“Then don’t ask,” she had said softly. “Just tell me.”
And he had told her that he loved her. That he had loved her since the first night when she had scolded him for reading in the dark. That he would write to her from wherever he was sent every week without fail. And that when he came home with a captain’s rank and enough saved to keep a wife, he would come straight to the vicarage at Little Hartwell and ask her father for her hand.
