"Your Bells Were Badly Cast," They Told the Duke — She Had Cast Six of Them Herself
Wiltshire, 1817. A ring of eight bells hangs in the tower of Saint Botolph's at Nether Ashcote, cast in memory of a duchess who died before she could hear them. They have sounded wrong from the day they went up, and the whole county knows whose fault it is: the founder's daughter at Marlbrook, the woman who tuned six of them and ruined a ducal commission. Hester Kell has spent eleven months cleaning other men's names off tarnished silver in the plate room of Hallowdene Court, four miles from her own bells, and saying nothing at all. Then the great tenor cracks in front of two hundred people on the anniversary of the duchess's death — and Hester, standing at the back of the churchyard in a borrowed coat, hears something in that ugly broken note that nobody else in England can hear. A worn soundbow. A bell that has been rung for a very long time. What she finds when a sleepless duke finally hands her the key of the tower is not a badly cast bell. It is a hundred and twenty years of her family's craft ground off the waist of her own work with a graver, an inscription that was cut instead of cast, and a crown stopped with tallow to hide a founder's mark and a date that should not exist. The proof is not luck. It is metal, water, arithmetic and a hundred-and-twenty-year-old book of numbers — laid out in a great house forecourt in front of the whole parish, a magistrate and the man who took everything from her. A restrained Regency story of quiet endurance, real craft, and a vindication that could not be argued with. Written and narrated as a single continuous listen. Best with headphones. #RegencyRomance #HistoricalFiction #CleanRomance #PeriodDrama #Vindication #DukeRomance #Bellfounding #EnglishHistory #AudioStory #SlowBurn #HistoricalRomance #RegencyEngland #Bedtimestory #Storytime #QuietStrength
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