She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…

Chapter 17

She wrote back.

She did not write to the old woman in the manner of a Duchess writing to a Marquess’s widow, because she did not know how, and had never learned. She wrote in the manner of Eleanor Vance, who had mended linens and poured milk before tea, and who had, in her life, been given very little that was not earned, and who had, therefore, a great deal of respect for anything that was given freely.

To the Dowager Marchioness of Halloway,

You have told me that you do not ask to see me, and that you do not ask to know me, and I will not presume upon either of those things. But you have asked one thing, and I think it is a fair thing, and I will answer it plainly.

I do not resent your daughter. I did not know her, and I cannot know her, and I do not think it is either my place or to my credit to stand in judgement of her. She was a woman who loved her sons as she was able, and I have seen, in the way her sons speak of her, that she loved them very much. They do not speak of her often. But when they do, they speak of her with a tenderness that no one, least of all a stranger who has taken her place, has any right to diminish.

I have not tried to replace her. I have tried, as best I could, to be useful, and I have tried, where I could, to be kind. Whether I have succeeded, I cannot say. But I can tell you this, and I think it is the truth.

Your grandsons are happy. I do not know if they would have been happy had their mother lived. I do not know if anyone can know such a thing. But they are happy now, and they love their father, and they love each other, and they are good boys, and I think your daughter, whatever else she was, would have been glad of it.

I will not resent her. She is her sons’ mother, and that is a thing I cannot be, and will not pretend to be. I will only be, as best I can, their stepmother, and I will try to be worthy of that name.

I do not ask anything of you. I am glad you wrote, and I will keep your letter. If you would like to know what your grandsons are doing, I am happy to tell you. If you would rather not, I will understand.

Yours, in the belief that grief is a bond rather than a barrier,

Eleanor, Duchess of Harwick

She sealed the letter and did not send it at once, because she wanted to be certain that it was not a letter written in haste and regret. She kept it for two days, and she read it again, and she found that she did not wish to change a word of it, and so she sent it.

It was three weeks before a reply came, and the reply was, to Eleanor’s astonishment, not a letter at all, but a bouquet.

There came, one morning, a coach to the door of Hartfield, and a footman, and a basket. The basket was not the sort of basket that comes with a bouquet from a duchess’s garden, all roses and orchids and arrangements that cost more than Eleanor had earned in the worst year of her mending. It was an old basket, and it held a wreath, and the wreath was made of winter-flowering heather and a few small, white flowers that Eleanor did not know the name of, and there was a card, in the same fine old-fashioned hand.

For Eleanor, Duchess of Harwick, from the Dowager Marchioness, who has learned, at great cost, that a woman who loves her stepmother’s sons is not a woman to be resented, but to be thanked.

I would like to see my grandsons. I will come when I am able, and I hope I will be welcome.

There was no signature, because there did not need to be.

Eleanor stood in the hall of a house that had once been cold and was cold no longer, and she held a basket of heather, and she wept, and she did not conceal it, because there was no one there to conceal it from, and because some things deserve to be wept over openly.