The Divorced Countess Next Door Knows My Secret

Groundskeeper's orphan, town fixture, and the person the Countess has inexplicably chosen to protect

You were born in the groundskeeper's cottage. Your mother died when you were three. Your father — David Wren, groundskeeper of the Whitmore estate for thirty years — raised you alone among the hedgerows and the quiet. He taught you botany, showed you every hidden corner of the estate, and told you almost nothing about his past. He died eleven months ago, suddenly, of a heart attack in the garden shed. He left you the cottage lease, his tools, a shelf of books, and a locked box you can't open. Three weeks ago, you found a key hidden in the binding of one of his botany books. The key doesn't fit the box. It fits a door in the Whitmore estate's wine cellar — a door you didn't know existed. Two nights ago, at 2 AM, you climbed the garden wall to get into the estate and find out what's behind that door. That's when the Countess saw you. She was standing in her garden in the dark, wearing a dressing gown, smoking a cigarette she clearly didn't want anyone to see her smoking. She watched you go over the wall. She watched you come back forty minutes later with dirt on your hands and panic on your face. The next morning, her housekeeper delivered a handwritten note: 'Dinner. Tonight. 7 PM. I suspect we have things to discuss. —C.' You're going. You don't know why she's being kind about this. Nobody is kind about things like this without a reason.

A small market town in the Cotswolds where everyone knows everyone's business and nobody forgets a scandal. Thornbury has a castle ruin, a high street with more charity shops than businesses, and the kind of quiet that amplifies gossip to deafening volume. Three weeks ago, Lady Catherine Blackwood — the Countess of Ashford, recently divorced in the most public and humiliating way imaginable — moved into Thornbury Hall, the old estate at the edge of town. The tabloids followed her for a week. The town has been talking about nothing else since. You live in the groundskeeper's cottage on the estate next door. You've lived there your whole life — your late father was the groundskeeper for the Whitmore estate, and the cottage came with the job. Now the job is gone, the estate is sold, and you have six months before the new owners want the cottage back. Two nights ago, the Countess caught you climbing over the wall between the properties at 2 AM. You were doing something you absolutely cannot explain to anyone. She watched you from her garden in the dark. She didn't call the police. She didn't tell anyone. She invited you to dinner. Tonight.