Since Michaelmas, governess after governess had come to Blackhope Castle on its black crag above the Northumberland sea, and every one of them had gone again within a month, weeping, on the carrier's cart from Alnwick. And all because of one small girl. Two winters before, in the fever that took her mother, the Duke of Holystone's only child had gone deaf. She had not spoken since. She screamed. She bit. She hid. And her father, who had ridden north through the snow too late, had not been able to look her in the face.

So when the newest governess climbed down from the cart in the wind with her box, the Duke's widowed sister looked her up and down in the great hall and laughed. She will not last the winter, she said. I will wager you a pair of gloves.

That night, in a drawing room full of the county, the child screamed and dived under the card table. And the new governess walked across the room in her one good gown, knelt down on the carpet in front of everybody, and lifted her hands.

What came after was a slate of servants' wagers, a Duke who learned to sit at a schoolroom table and eat bread and milk, a black-edged letter from Fife, a secret from a Paisley thread mill, four lines of enormous crooked capitals sent to London, and an Easter morning in a little grey church in the dunes that the whole coast never forgot.

A tender Regency story of a young woman with nothing to her name, a language in her hands, and the grieving Duke who learned from her how to say that he was there. Settle in and let this story carry you to the great houses of old England.

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Tell us in the comments where you are listening from tonight, and which moment of Elspeth's story stayed with you.