The Duke's House Opened No Letters for Nine Years — Then the Binder's Daughter Cut Open the Spine

A bookbinder's shop in a Hampshire market town on a February night, one oil lamp making a circle of light the size of a tabletop, a one-eyed ginger cat on the warm end of the bench, and the smell of wheat paste and cloves. On the bench lies a small green morocco book that has waited on the shelf for nine years with its ticket still tied to the headband: Her Grace of Sherwell, rebound, to be called for. Nobody ever called for it. Every Michaelmas her father carried it up the lime drive to the great shuttered house where the Duke has let no letter, parcel or word through the door since the year his sister died, and every Michaelmas the lodge sent him down the hill again. Now her father is in the churchyard, the rent is owing, and Mercy Hale has noticed what only a binder would notice: laid open, the book does not sigh. The spine sits a hair too round and does not move at all. She takes her father's thin knife from the rack, lays it along the green leather, and cuts. Inside the hollow is a folded packet tied in her father's knot. Then the shop door opens without a knock, and a tall man with sleet on his shoulders and his hat in his hand crosses the floor in three steps and picks up his mother's book. He is nine years late collecting it, and she tells him so. What is under her hand is addressed to a woman who is dead, in a hand that should not have been able to write it, from a town it should never have been sent from, and she will not give it up until she knows whose it is. By morning the Duke of Sherwell is knocking on a doorpost for the first time in his life, and within the week a shut library is losing its dust sheets one at a time, a housekeeper is remembering a red hat box, a paper from Lisbon is being held up to a window, and a soft-voiced attorney with very clean cuffs is counting what an open door might cost him. There is a sewing frame with five taut cords, a family Bible with a leaf that was never sewn, a town hall with every bench full, and a bookbinder's daughter who asks nobody to believe her, only to hold paper up to the light. This is a dramatized fictional story. Names, places and events are fictional. #dukestories #regencyromance #historicalromance