15. Chapter 15
My banishment after that wretched dinner has blessedly excluded me from the house party, and on the third day, I manage to give Sally the slip.
There's so much to distract, so very much to draw the heart in and tangle it up—but how quickly it all melts into the background with one quick shift of focus. The only time I see the world rightly, I believe, is when it falls into my peripheral vision as I walk the coastline because I’m looking up.
I take the hidden path to my secret cottage, and though it’s early when I knock, Simon Balfour cracks the door and blinks at me. “Yes?”
“Are you going to let me in?” I say, crossing my arms. What is he hiding in my cottage?
He hesitates, then nudges the door open further, and immediately I register a remarkable change.
It’s unexpectedly fresh and wide open. I push inside the neglected place that is suddenly more fully itself.
It’s warmer. Cleaner. Almost as if a family had brought their cozy presence and settled in it. “You’ve…”
“It was meant to be your Christmas gift, but… well, I wasn’t expecting you yet.”
“You’ve transformed my cottage.”
“You’re so keen on making old things new.”
“Am I?” I turn, breathless, in the center of a room that feels like home.
The walls are limewashed, and glow from the fireplace radiates off the fresh whiteness.
Years of dust thick as wool blankets have been scrubbed away, revealing the enchanting cottage of my childhood days.
Somehow it seems… familiar. Delightfully sweet. “It’s lovely.”
He shrugs one shoulder. “It’s a start. There are leaks to patch and furniture to place and… this.” He points to the lettering carved into the far wall, near the ceiling. “I can sand it out if you like. It doesn’t say anything.”
“Doesn’t it?” I smile wistfully.
“Not anything anyone understands.”
“It’s Cornish. I deciphered it years ago with old books. It says My a’th leys yn klyves an garrek. ‘I will put thee in the cleft of the rock.’”
He frowns. “Does that mean something to you?”
I smile and hum the song that always seems to surface in my soul when I escape to this old cottage. He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock… “When you sand that beam, would you carve that in its place for me? Please?”
He studies the etching. “I suppose.”
With a slow puff of skirts, I seat myself in the center of the wide-open room and open the basket. “Now come, join me for breakfast.”
“Miss Snow!” Sally’s distant voice cuts through the peace. “Miss Snow!”
His expression falls. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“She won’t find me down here. No one will see the cottage unless they know the footpath.”
“If she does, it could—”
“I don’t care a whit. Uncle has sentenced me to a week of exile and I shall spend it how I please, even if it ruins his precious plans.” I smooth out the blanket. “He wouldn’t like the way we spent Boxing Day either, but I wouldn’t change that for anything.”
“Kindness,” he says, “always begins where you are.”
“Right now I’m here. And I’m being perfectly kind to you.” I lay out the food. Men may be redeemed from poverty, from injustice—but greed? Arrogance? “Certain traits will always stir my temper, I’m afraid.”
He peels back the cheesecloth. “I’ve found that anger leaves a person little room for anything else.”
Love. That’s what he’s suggesting. I do not admit how unlikely it is that I shall ever feel kindly toward any self-important nobleman, for life has already showered them with more than a body should have.
“Your father saved a girl from prison once. A little pickpocket trying to feed her family.”
I breathe, hugging the ache in my chest. “Did he?”
“At first it made me angry. She stole from us, of all people. The last of our food.”
“What became of her?”
“He set her up in a position, I believe—in service somewhere, some fancy house. Penelope Pitt was her name. There were others he rescued, but you don’t forget that sort of name. I recall telling him to cast her out. I had high and mighty ideas back then.”
“Moral ones.”
He shrugs. “Your father had higher ones. Better ones. And eventually, they rubbed off on me.” He leans back.
I close my eyes, laying my hand on his arm. “Thank you, Mr. Balfour.”
He looks at me, his expression shadowed. “I don’t believe he vanished on his own.”
“Don’t you?”
“The week before he disappeared, he traded coats with me—insisted, actually, that I take his—and made me promise when I wear it to care for everyone under the bridge. Just as he’d done.”
“He knew.” I move closer. “Perhaps he chose to leave, then. What if he decided to come home to me?”
An odd look crosses his face. “What of those men?”
“You’re right. They must have been involved.” I sigh. “But what would anyone want with my father?”
“You’re aware of the mining accident, the way they blame—”
“Yes, of course.” I twist my gown between my fingers. “Were the men… did they look like miners? Who were they?”
He stares at the floor and eventually shrugs. “I paid the men no mind when they were there. Had no idea what was to come. But no, they did not look like miners. They wore dark suits and didn’t belong among the vagrants. I wish I could remember more.”
“You must try. Please. It’ll only take some time.”
His expression falters. “I’m afraid I don’t have much of that.”
Panic tightens. “Must you go soon?”
“I’ve lingered long enough. I should leave tomorrow before the snowstorm that seems to be brewing.”
“Please stay. Only a little longer. We’re so close.”
His jaw works back and forth. “How long?”
“After the storm. No sense going out in it. If you haven’t recalled anything else by then, I shall personally escort you back to Exeter.”
He blanches.
“Or… wherever else you wish to go. I’ll be traveling to London myself after Twelfth Night. I shall pay for your passage all the way to town if you wish it.”
He frowns, silent for a moment. “All right, Twelfth Night. Then I leave.”
And my hope will depart with him.
“No more dinners.”
“Of course not. Only a ball.”
His attention sharpens. “Are you not banished?”
I grin. “It’s a costume ball. Who’s to know?”
“Why would you even wish me to go?”
“Because we’ve invited nearly everyone we know. Simon, one of those men might come. Or someone you recognize.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Snow.” He runs his long fingers over his jaw. “It isn’t worth the risk. I’m not likely to recognize any of the men who came to Exeter, even if one does attend the ball.”
I lean forward. “But what if you do?” It’s my last hope.
But he will not look at me.
While I make over an old suit and cape, a costume I secretly hope Simon Balfour uses for Twelfth Night, I probe into his background—which turns out to be a lifetime in theater.
“An actor. So you truly meant that you have been Tiny Tim?”
He smiles. “In five productions in my sixth year and eight my seventh. After that I grew too tall to be convincing, so I did whatever tasks needed doing about the theater. Mostly painted the sets and backdrops, especially after a few visiting artists took pity on the actress’ son and taught him technique. ”
“They recognized your talent and wished to improve it. I doubt anyone could pity you.”
He raises one eyebrow, leaning casually onto his knees. “You did. That’s how I came to be here.”
I lift my gaze to him. “You did not illicit my pity, sir, but my respect.”
His expression gentles. “Then why change me at all?”
I haven’t a good answer for that, so I nibble on the crimped edge of a pasty. “How did you go from the theater to living beneath the bridge?”
“The theater closed. We both lost our work, my mother and I. My mother fell ill, and that’s where I found myself.”
“Haven’t you at least more sturdy clothing from the theater, after all that time there?”
“I had a coat,” he says, leaning back. “Dark blue cutaway with imitation brass buttons.”
“You sold it?”
“Traded.” He levels a look of significance my way. “Someone feigned intense interest in it so I would take his heavier frock coat in exchange… and the role that came with it.”
After I fold up the meal and stow the sewing projects, he falls quiet, staring again into the fire, but seeing something as vast as the ocean.
I lean against the wall by the hearth and name what I see in his face. “You miss someone, don’t you? That’s what’s eating you. It’s a heavy loss. Has it been long?”
“A year and a half.” He doesn’t look at me. “And it’s my mother.”
“What of your father? He must be grieving as—”
“No.” His face shutters into that haunted expression I’d witnessed on the bridge.
My stomach drops. What are you running from, Simon Balfour? What is it?
I cover his hand with mine. “Then you must honor her memory with your life. Please, don’t leave here and return to life under that bridge. You’ve far too much talent for that.”
“I serve the people who need it most. I wear Silas Snow’s coat for a reason.” He looks into the fire, jaw flinching, as he strokes the whiskers now growing back in. It reminds me that soon he’ll leave this place. “Why struggle to rise? My circumstances suit me just fine.”
“You might have better ones without much effort, though.”
“Not everyone wishes to be wealthy. I’ve nothing to prove.” After a long moment, he adds, “I did everything for her. Now she’s gone, I’ve no cause to try.”
“Perhaps you simply need to find your reason.”
“Reasons,” he says carefully, “are dangerous. I don’t keep them around.”
I spend each day carefully, watching and listening to every word—and even words he does not say.
In that time, the cottage is made over—walls brightened, floors scrubbed, and spirits lifted.
By the fourth day it has transformed from the filthy, forgotten hiding place I once cherished into a homey cottage.
Part of the warmth, I must admit, is the tall stranger who occupies it.
Can’t I keep you?
How cold everything in my real life is in comparison. I did not realize how frozen I had become… until something began to thaw me. I lean the broom against a wall. “Thank you, Mr. Balfour, for what you’ve made of this place. You’ve no idea what it means to me.”
Simon shrugs from across the room. “Have to earn my keep.”
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another. That’s also Dickens.”
Simon leans on the stick he’s been using to stoke the fire. “It’s because he wrote about the poor. That’s why you memorize his books, isn’t it? And because you see traces of your father in his stories.”
“There is another reason.” I bite my lip, considering how much to trust him.
“I suppose I could show you.” I motion, and he follows me up the narrow staircase, then up the ladder into the attic.
On the far wall I move aside a tarp and lead him through a crumbling hole in the wall into the tower’s winding staircase to my favorite part—the top bedroom with leaded glass windows so ancient the glass appears melted within the diamond-shaped panes.
Sunset glows through, giving the room a golden hue.
Lifting a loose floorboard, I extract the box with the secret letters—ones penned by the master storyteller himself.
“It began when I was small—likely no more than seven or eight. I sent Mr. Dickens a rather pleading letter, asking him to help me locate my father. I suppose I believed he knew every homeless man in England.”
“And did he help you?”
I shake my head slowly. “Though he did give me something else.” I slide those precious pages across the rough floor, those letters densely packed with sharp wit and good humor and intelligence.
“I suppose he filled a void. Not entirely, of course, but… enough to get by. For a time, that is.” I plead with my eyes for him to help me—to subject himself to Twelfth Night and the ball.
He skims the pages, eyebrows expressing everything he does not say. “I understand why this is a treasure.”
“I haven’t dared tell Uncle. He’d throw them away.”
“Mmm.” He frowns, handing them back to me.
“I’ve always harbored a secret hope that one day I might show these letters to my father.”
“He reads Dickens as well?”
I smile softly. “Who do you think taught me to love his stories? He used to read The Old Curiosity Shop to me from Household Words whenever he found an installment in the papers. He seldom sat still, but when he came by a copy of that story, all the world paused until we absorbed every word.” I hug them to me, then carefully fold them and replace them in the box.
“He was known for his letter writing,” he says hesitantly. “Though not to children.”
I meet his gaze. “I’m aware that I’ve found favor in life, Mr. Balfour.
Too much to believe. But I’ve also endured a poverty of sorts.
My mother died when I was born and my father…
he has been missing longer than he’s been here.
These letters seemed a recompense directly from God.
But none of it makes up for what I desperately need back. ”
“Did you respond to him? Dickens, that is.”
“We corresponded on and off for years.” I do not admit that I have kept up a one-sided correspondence with the late author since his death. Simon Balfour’s practical mind would never understand such frivolities. “His words made my fatherless years more bearable.”
“I’m certain Mr. Dickens would have been gratified to know that.” He holds out his arm to help me rise, and he guides me back into the attic and down to the front room. “He seldom made time for anyone, actually. Rarely spoke a wasted word.”
I pause on the step. “Were you acquainted with the man?”
“Only a little. He wouldn’t have known me, but I ran errands for him. He spent a great deal of time at the theater when his plays were being produced. So, yes. I was his errand boy.”
“A grand honor for any lad,” I whisper with an ache of longing. My gaze lingers. “But not,” I add in a whisper, “for a future duke.” I scan him. “You’re not the Duke of Ashbourne’s son, are you?”
“I am, actually.” His breath tickles my cheek. “But… not that one.”
I frown. “He only has one son.”
“No, his wife only has one.”
My mouth opens, but no sound comes out. My face heats painfully as my mind peels back the layers of truth.
“So there you have it, Miss Snow. You’ve brought home the illegitimate son of a duke.” His smile peeks out. “What will you do with me?”
Illegitimate. The word should surface something in me—disgust, perhaps. Caution at least. Instead, it only sharpens my view of him. What will I do with this singular man?
I touch his arm and whisper, “Can I keep you a little longer?”
Something shadowed passes over his face, but he reaches for my hand, twining our fingers together and staring at them.
There’s a new familiarity between us, as if a curtain has lifted, allowing us to stand closer to one another.
He releases them with a gentle brush of fingers and stands.
“Come. I’ve something you’ll want to see. ”