Clara heard about it all second-hand, through servant gossip and village talk. How handsome the young master was becoming. How refined. How he was sure to be a credit to the dukedom.
How he never once asked about the physician’s daughter.
Clara’s mother was taken suddenly of a fever when she was in her tender years. Her father, broken by grief, sent Clara to live with her aunt in Bath, unable to bear the reminder of his wife in his daughter's face.
The morning she left, Clara walked through the garden one last time. Their rose had grown into a magnificent tangle, wild and beautiful and abandoned. She picked a single bloom, pink edged with gold, exactly like that first flower and pressed it between the pages of the journal Gabriel had given her. The journal that was still mostly empty, because what was the point of recording extraordinary occurrences when the most extraordinary thing in her life had already ended?
The carriage pulled away from her childhood home, from the garden, from all those memories of a boy who'd promised to write and never held onto to his promise.
Clara didn't look back.
She couldn't know that Gabriel stood at his window in Ashbourne Hall, watching her carriage disappear down the road. That he had the pressed flower she'd given him on his desk, carefully preserved all these years despite himself. That he'd walked to the garden gate a dozen times over the holidays, only to turn back, convinced by his father's words: "You're too old for such childish friendships. It's beneath your station. The physician’s daughter must learn her place, as must you."
He couldn't know that she'd waited for him until hope turned to hurt, hurt to anger, and anger to a kind of hollow acceptance.
They were just children who'd played at grafting roses. Who would have believed that two different things could grow together into something beautiful?
But gardening, they'd both learned, was more complicated than they'd had ever imagined. Sometimes grafts didn't succeed. Sometimes they grew apart despite the most careful tending.
Sometimes they broke your heart.
The garden kept its secrets with their initials in the tree, slowly being covered by new bark. The bench where they'd sat together, weathering in the rain. And their rose, growing wildand magnificent and alone, proof that some things survived even when the gardeners walked away.
But the children who'd planted it? They were gone. In their place, a proper future duke and a physician's daughter learning to be alone, both carrying pressed flowers they'd never admit to keeping, both changed by a friendship that had bloomed too brief and beautiful to last.
The boy in the garden and the girl who'd waited for him they were just a memory now, sweet and distant as the scent of roses on the wind.
And neither of them would speak of it again.
At least, not for eight more years.
CHAPTER 2
Sussex, EnglandJanuary 1816
There were, Clara Whitfield reflected as she trudged through her fourth mile of sleet, more dignified ways to die than freezing to death while wearing one's former landlady's stolen boots. But dignity, much like food, warmth, and basic human kindness, had become something of a luxury she could no longer afford.
A truly appalling pair of brown leather boots that had perhaps been deemed stylish when His Majesty King George still enjoyed the full measure of his faculties. They were also two sizes too large, which meant Clara's feet slid about inside them like fish in a bucket, acquiring new blisters with admirable efficiency. But they were boots nonetheless, and when one was choosing between inappropriate footwear and frostbitten toes, fashion seemed rather beside the point.
She could not afford the liberty of creating a fuss for her footwear as she had borrowed them…without asking… from Mrs. Grimstead whilst she was sleeping off the third bottle of Gin.
The sleet had started as snow with pretty, delicate flakes that had made the world look like one of those sugar-work confections in the bakery windows she could no longer afford to look at. But the attractive snow soon changed into ugly sleet, which had turned to whatever this was, a vicious combination of ice and rain that seemed personally offended by her continued existence.
Only another mile,she told herself, the same lie she'd been telling herself for the past three miles.Only another mile to Ashbourne.
Ashbourne Hall.
The name sat in her throat like a stone, heavy with memories she'd spent eight years trying to forget everything that it was before, the garden with its roses…and the boy….the one who had shared his friendship with her. The boy who'd taught her about grafting and then grafted himself so thoroughly onto her heart that even now, even after everything, she could still feel the scar tissue where he'd been torn away.
No! I shall not ponder on that. Such gloomy observation led inevitably to an indulgence of feeling an urge to shed tears.
Shedding tears in the bitter cold air would only invite further calamity as they would only congeal upon her very countenance.
She soldiered on, defying the cold as she left Bath behind her.
Gabriel Hale, was now the Duke of Ashbourne, according to those very gazettes she had used to warm herself at the posting-houses. His Grace's father had been called to his final rest three years prior, a circumstance that rendered Gabriel one of the youngest Dukes in all England.
The papers had been brimming with the matter of his distinguished military service, his celebrated bravery at thebattle of Waterloo, and the terrible wound that had so nearly claimed his life.
