Page 23 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

Into the space where she had kept herself folded, the rest of her emerged by inches. Ophelia discovered, to her surprise, that there was a great deal of her, more than she had ever realised.

Adrian appeared to like all of it.

They were careful in company. At the table and in the hall, they remained the duke and his aunt’s quiet goddaughter. Lady Elise’s sharp eye missed nothing, and the small society of a snowbound house watched itself more closely than any ballroom.

Yet Plas Eira was old and rambling, its passages full of odd turnings, and the days were long. There were corners, the small library most of all, where they could speak for an hour without interruption, the fire burning low and the wind working at the shutters.

They talked hungrily.

Ophelia told him about Bombay, or the Bombay she half remembered and half possessed through her mother’s stories. She had left at ten. Her memories came in bright fragments: white houses, green water, the hammering from the timber yards, and ships rising on the stocks like wooden cities.

Adrian repeated Gujarati words after her, patiently and badly, and allowed her to correct him.

“No,” she said, trying not to laugh. “You have just called the candle a goat.”

“An easy mistake.”

“Not in any language!”

“You underestimate the similarities between candles and goats.”

She stared at him, incredulous. “They have none.”

“They are both improved by being lit.”

“A burning goat would not improve anything.”

“It would improve this conversation immeasurably.” His eyes were alight with the challenge, and she could no longer contain her laughter.

It had never occurred to Ophelia that a memory might grow stronger by being given to another person. Each word he learned became one less thing she carried alone.

One afternoon he asked about the wassail.

“What did you put in it? The whole valley was talking about it.”

“Ginger, long pepper, and more nutmeg than the English generally use. My mother would have added cardamom, but there was none, so I crushed coriander seed instead.”

“Was that what I tasted? It was remarkable.”

“My father’s English cook considered my mother’s spicing heathenish. She said so frequently and within my mother’s hearing.”

“What did your mother do?”

“Smiled and continued.”

“That sounds like a devastating victory.”

Ophelia ran a finger along the edge of her book, thinking of the recipes in it, written in her mother’s delicate hand.

“She said a person’s food was the last of their country to leave them, and she would not let it leave us both at once.”

The smile faded from Adrian’s face.

“I have so little left,” Ophelia said. “The food. A few words. Her song and her bangles; a handkerchief she embroidered. The memory of the way light fell, in a place I can hardly remember. Every year there is less of Bombay in me. I let it go because here it was only a danger or a shame. Then you ask me a question, and for an hour there is more of it again. I do not know whether to thank you or ask you to stop.”

“Which do you want?”

No one had ever answered her grief with a question.