She Called the Cold Duke “An Insufferable Bore” — What Happened Next Stunned London

Chapter 8

Before the sun came up, Nora took the twenty-minute walk up the hill with a bunch of white asters from the garden shed, because that was what she had always brought, all six years of her life in the city, twice a year like a woman keeping an appointment with nobody.

The cemetery was two fields back from the harbor, up a slope where the wind turned and the salt stopped. Third row, forty paces in from the cedar, under a stone so small that grass kept trying to eat it.

BABY REYES. ASLEEP.

No date of birth. Only a date of burial, six years old, which was the only date the world had ever given her daughter.

Nora knelt. She had stopped crying here sometime in the third year, which felt, when it happened, like a kind of failure — as if grief were a fire you were supposed to keep burning and she had let hers go down to coals. But this morning she put the asters down on the wet grass, and this morning she found she had something new to say, and it came out of her very quietly, the way you speak to someone asleep.

“If you’re here, tell me and I’ll stop,” she said. “If you’re not — then I’m going to make a very large amount of noise in a very old house, and I want you to know I’m not doing it to punish anyone, and I’m not doing it for money, and it isn’t going to be neat.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “I brought a brush with me. I’m going to take it to a lab. And if I’m mad, then I’ll come back here on Sunday and apologize to a stone, and that will be the end of it.”

The wind moved up the hill and lay down in the grass.

When she got back to the manor, breakfast had started and the house was awake and Lily was at the table in the kitchen in a big shirt of her father’s, eating toast with the crusts cut off, alive in the ordinary noisy way of a child who had spent two nights in a hospital and had decided to be well out of spite.

“You smell like outside,” Lily said.

“I went for a walk.”

“Where?”

“Up the hill.”

“Did you see anybody?”

“Nobody at all.”

“Good.” The girl bit into her toast and spoke around it, in the private, confiding way she had started using with Nora — the way of a child who has decided you belong to her, which is a much more total thing than deciding she belongs to you. “I don’t want anybody to see you. If Grandmother’s friends see you, they’ll be nice and then you’ll go away.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“That’s exactly how it works,” Lily said, and went back to her toast.

Nora took the brush out of her pocket that evening when everyone was at dinner. It was the child’s own hairbrush from the nursery shelf, with four or five strands wound in the bristles, and she put it in a clean envelope, and she put the envelope in her coat pocket, and the next day, on her afternoon off, she took the bus to the town and mailed it to a laboratory in Boston with a letter that took her nine tries to write:

I believe there is a possibility that this child is my daughter. She is six. I have no legal right to test her and I am asking anyway. Please tell me what that would cost and whether you can do it. I will pay whatever it is.

Six days later the telephone in the butler’s pantry rang at four in the afternoon.

Nora happened to be in the corridor outside it with a basket of linen. She was not a woman who listened at doors. She was, however, at that point in her life, a woman with nothing left to lose, and the house was quiet, and the door was thin.

“—Reyes? Nora Reyes.” A man’s voice, careful and puzzled. “We received a mail-in request under that name, regarding a minor child. Our policy requires the consent of a legal guardian for any test on a minor, so I’m calling the number listed for the child’s residence on the intake form to confirm—”

The line did not so much as crackle. Nora stood in the corridor with her hands full of somebody else’s tablecloths and heard Helena Ashford’s voice come down the telephone with the calm of a woman putting the meat into the pan.

“Yes,” the old woman said. “This is the child’s guardian’s household. How kind of you to call. That request was sent by a member of my staff who has been unwell for some weeks — a fixation, I’m afraid; the doctors are involved. You’ll forgive me for saying so, but these accusations are quite painful for our family.”

“Then you’d like the sample destroyed.”

“I would be very grateful. We’ll cover the courier fee.” A pause, and the sound of a chair. “And I’d like the name of the person who signed in your file. Yes. Her. Thank you so much — no, we’ll handle it internally. We won’t be needing anything from your laboratory.”

The telephone went down.

Nora turned.

Helena Ashford was standing in the pantry doorway with the handset still warm in her hand, and she did not look surprised. She looked busy. She looked like a woman who had just swept a room and found that the dust had come back as a person.

“You heard,” she said.

“Every word.”

“Good.” Helena set the handset on its cradle, precisely, the way she did everything. “Then you’ll understand that the lab in Boston will never answer you again, the police in this town have known my family for three generations, and on Friday morning you will be gone.” She tilted her head, studying Nora with a terrible, sincere sort of interest. “I want you to remember, when this is over, that I offered you the easy door twice.”

She went back down the corridor, and her heels went down the stone like a nail going into wood.