A Very Small Cottage

Clara had never owned anything bigger than a hatbox before, so when the letter came saying she had inherited a whole entire cottage, she read it about five times to make sure it was real. It was real. Her great-aunt Bess, who Clara had only met twice, had left her a cottage in the country called Wren Cottage. Clara did not even know she had a great-aunt Bess until the letter came. But there it was, in proper lawyer writing, and there was a little key in the envelope, and Clara held the key in her hand and felt like her whole life had just changed. She packed her things that same week. There was not much to pack. Clara had been a companion to an old lady in the city for three years, reading to her and fetching her shawl, and the old lady had died in the spring, so really Clara had nowhere else to be anyway. Sometimes when you have nowhere else to be, a cottage in the country sounds like the best thing in the world. The journey took two days. When the coach finally stopped and the driver said "Wren Cottage, miss, down that lane," Clara grabbed her bag and almost ran. And then she saw it. And she stopped running. Wren Cottage was small. Clara had known it would be small, a cottage is meant to be small, that is the whole point of a cottage. But this was *very* small. It had a roof that sagged in the middle like a tired horse, and one of the windows was cracked, and the garden was just a lot of brambles having a fight with each other. Clara stood at the gate and felt her heart sink a little bit. But then she thought, no. No, Clara. This is yours. The cottage is yours and the brambles are yours and even the sad sagging roof is yours, and nobody can read to a dead old lady forever. So she lifted her chin and she opened the gate, which fell off in her hand, and she decided not to think about that too hard. That was when she noticed the other house. You could not really miss it, honestly. Right next to Clara's tiny crumbling cottage, just over a low stone wall, was the biggest house Clara had ever seen in her life. It had about a hundred windows. It had chimneys like a row of soldiers. It had a garden that was not having a fight with itself at all, it was all neat and clipped and behaving perfectly. Clara stared at it with her mouth a bit open. "You are trespassing," said a voice. Clara jumped about a foot in the air. There was a man standing on the other side of the low wall. He was tall, and he was wearing very expensive clothes, and he had dark hair and a frown that looked like it had been on his face so long it had got comfortable there. "I am NOT trespassing," said Clara, even though she had jumped. "This is my cottage. I just inherited it. Look, I have a key." She held up the key. It did not look very impressive, held up like that. It was quite a small key. The man looked at the key. Then he looked at Clara. Then he looked at the cottage, at the sagging roof and the brambles, with an expression like he had smelled something bad. "You are the niece," he said. It did not sound like a nice thing to be. "Old Mrs. Bess's relation. I wrote to her solicitor. I wish to purchase that land. The cottage is an eyesore and it sits against my boundary and I am prepared to offer a generous price for it so that it may be pulled down." Clara could not believe him. She had been the owner of a cottage for about ninety seconds and a stranger was already telling her to pull it down. "Well I am not selling," she said. "I only just got here. And who even are you?" The man drew himself up. He was already very tall so this was a lot of drawing up. "I," he said, "am the Duke of Harrowmere. That is my house. This is my land, all of it, except for that one ridiculous cottage, which I intend to make mine as well." "A Duke," said Clara. And then, because she was tired and her gate had fallen off and a Duke was being horrible to her on her first day, she said something she probably should not have said to a Duke. "A Duke. Right. Well, your grace, you can keep your generous price, because Wren Cottage is the only thing I have ever owned in my whole life, and I would not sell it to you if you offered me the moon." The Duke of Harrowmere stared at her. Clara got the feeling that not very many people said no to him. She got the feeling, actually, that nobody ever did. And then, as if the sky itself wanted to make everything worse, it started to snow.