She Called the Cold Duke “An Insufferable Bore” — What Happened Next Stunned London

Chapter 3

“I didn’t come for you.” She was amazed at how steady her voice was, how much it sounded like a woman who had rehearsed this in the dark for six years. “I came from the agency. I need work. I need — money, if you want it plainly. I didn’t know the name until I was already in the car. And I stayed because I have nowhere else, and because — ”

“Because the girl.”

The kitchen clock ticked. Nora’s hands were shaking, so she put them behind her back.

“I didn’t know about the girl,” she said. “I didn’t know there was a girl.”

Something crossed his face then — quick, ugly, gone. He crossed the room, and she stepped back, and her back came up against the counter, and he stopped an arm’s length away and looked at her the way a man looks at a fire that has already burned his house down once.

“You didn’t know,” he repeated. “You didn’t know. That’s the sentence you’re going with. You, of all people, standing in my kitchen at midnight — ”

“I was told she died.”

The clock kept ticking. Adrian didn’t move at all.

“They put her in my arms for six minutes,” Nora said, and her voice did break then, in the middle of the word six, and she kept going anyway, because the only way through this was through. “Six minutes. She was too small, and she was blue around the mouth, and they said her heart never — they said it stopped. A nurse took her out of my arms. Your mother came into the room and told me to be sensible, that I was twenty years old, that you had a life you were never going to give up for a maid, that there was money for me if I was quiet and nothing for me if I wasn’t. And I believed every word of it, because I was twenty, and poor, and in love, and I had just been told my daughter was dead.”

She was crying by the end. It was the first time in six years she had said the sentence all the way to the end in front of another human being.

Adrian’s jaw worked. When he spoke, his voice was a stranger’s.

“You wrote me a note.”

“What?”

“A note, Nora. In your handwriting. I can’t do this. I’m not a mother. Don’t look for me. You left it on my desk.” He said it slowly, like words being pulled out of him with pliers. “And you took the money.”

Nora stared at him.

“There was no note,” she said.

“There is a note. I have it.”

“I never wrote you a note in my life. I wrote you—” She stopped, and pressed her mouth shut, because that was a door she was not going to open at midnight in his kitchen. “There was no money. I left that hospital with a paper bag of my own clothes and thirty-eight dollars, and I have never in six years had three hundred thousand dollars or any part of it.”

“Then how did my daughter come home to this house with no mother and no record of a birth?”

“I don’t know,” Nora said. “You’re the one who lives here. You tell me.”

Above them, from somewhere in the black heart of the house, came a small sound — the thin, unmistakable sound of a child crying.

Both of them went still.

The crying stopped as quickly as it had started, swallowed back, the way a child cries in a house where crying has been made expensive. Adrian closed his eyes for a moment and then, without another word to Nora, walked out.

She stood alone in the kitchen for a long time, in the smell of rain and cedar, and then she did the only thing left to do, which was what any reasonable woman with nothing would have done.

She went upstairs and she did her job.

The child’s room was at the end of the west corridor, and the light was on — a small, brave lamp shaped like a bear. Lily sat up in bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, and did not look surprised to see her, only tired.

“Bad dream,” she said.

“I know.”

Nora sat on the edge of the bed, still keeping her hands in sight, and Lily, without warning, leaned over and put her head against Nora’s arm. That was all. Just her head, against the sleeve of a stranger, as if she had been waiting five days to see whether this particular stranger could be leaned on.

Nora held absolutely still.

“Sing,” Lily said.

“I don’t know any songs.”

“Then hum.”

So Nora hummed — nothing, a shape of breath, the tune of no song at all — and after a while the child’s breathing evened out, and Nora eased her down onto the pillow, and in the dark, close to the lamp’s little glow, she brushed the hair back from the girl’s ear.

She saw it then.

Behind Lily’s left ear, small and pale brown, was a crescent moon.

Nora had seen that mark exactly once before, six years earlier, on a face that never opened its eyes.