Three Sisters Were Presented for the Duke to Marry — He Chose the Quiet Woman Pouring the Tea

Chapter 2

Seven years earlier, Diana Cranidge had come into that house carrying one small trunk, and she remembered every article in it, because she had packed it herself at seventeen, in a cold house in the country, while her father’s coffin was still upstairs.

Her mother had died in the bad winter. Her father, a scholar with more books than money, had followed her six months later, the way some men do — not of any illness a doctor could name, but of the plain arithmetic of a life with the middle taken out of it. He had held on long enough to sell everything: the house at Elverley, the furniture, the horse, her mother’s pianoforte. He had refused to sell three things. Three books. One was a fat, battered Georgics with his own hand crowded into the margins. One was a small volume of Ovid. One was a Greek testament he could no longer read, toward the end, but liked to keep on the table, the way a man keeps a photograph.

Diana had carried all three in the trunk, along with one black gown, one other gown, one comb, one pair of shoes, and — folded very small — a single sheet of paper.