The Maid’s Little Girl Found the Duke Asleep—What She Did Changed Him Forever

Chapter 10

The promise was tested sooner than either of them expected.

Three nights later, a fire started in the hay store beside the western stable.

It was small and it was deliberate. A bundle of straw had been soaked with lamp oil and pushed under the bottom door, and the door had been left ajar to draw, and if it had been left another twenty minutes the whole range would have gone up. As it was it caught the lintel and burned a black hand up the timber, and it took nine men and four buckets each and three of the grooms’ shirts to put it out.

At almost the same hour, someone came into Halloway Hall through the rear servants’ door using a copied key.

The intruder went up the back stairs. He did not go into the strong room, though it was two doors from the top of the flight and unlocked. He did not take silver or plate or the small strongbox in the still room, which was a matter of common knowledge in the household and which he passed within four feet of.

He went to the east corridor.

Mr. Reed saw him on the landing — a man in a dark coat, moving quickly, unhurried in the way of someone who knew where he was going — and Mr. Reed, who had a bad knee, did not catch him. By the time the footman came up the front stairs with the news of the fire, the man had gone back through the servant’s passage and out through the dairy door, which was found standing open onto the yard.

What he left behind mattered more than anything he could have taken.

On the desk in the east room, beside Posy’s drawing of three figures and a yellow sun, lay a folded paper.

Elias found it himself, at midnight, before anyone else had been allowed into the room.

One sentence, in a hand he did not recognise.

You have found something to lose.

He read it once.

Then he read it again.

And the room changed.

The man who had spent three afternoons a week listening to a three-year-old explain why the star could not find its way home went out of his face the way water goes out of a cracked pot, and what was left behind was the Duke the county had learned to be careful around.

“Mr. Sallow.”

The butler was at the door in four seconds.

“Find Mr. Ashworth.” His steward, who was asleep in the north wing. “Now. Then close every gate on the estate, including the Wrenford track and the lower river path. No one leaves — not tenants, not carters, not the post boy — until they have been spoken to. I want every key in this house counted, every one accounted for, and I want the count brought to me in writing. I want every servant who was not in this building this evening to be found and questioned tonight.”

He paused.

“Where is the child?”

“With Mrs. Cottrell, your grace, in her rooms. Two footmen outside.”

“Four.”

“Four.”

“Wake Mrs. Hollis. She is to be brought here, and if she wishes to go to her daughter, she is to be taken to her daughter with an escort.”

Elias took his coat off the stand by the door and pulled it on.

Mr. Sallow hesitated, which he had not done in eleven years.

“Your grace.”

“What?”

“Your gloves.”

Elias looked down at the gloves on the side table and did not take them.

“Where are you going?” Meg said from the doorway.

She was in her shawl with her hair down and she was wide awake, and she had clearly been awake since the shouts in the stable yard.

“Vaughn has crossed a line.”

“That does not answer me.”

“I am ending this.”

“How?”

He did not answer, and his silence answered anyway.

Meg crossed the room and stood between him and the door.

“You told me once that you stayed angry because anger gave you something to do.” Her voice was steady and low. “Do you remember saying that?”

His eyes hardened.

“Move.”

“No.”

The word was quiet. It was also, Elias realised, one of the very few times in his adult life that anyone had said it to him while standing that close.

Her hands were trembling. She did not move.

“You are frightened,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then why are you blocking the door?”

“Because Posy is upstairs in Mrs. Cottrell’s room with four footmen and she is three years old and she does not know why there is a fire.” Meg’s voice did not rise. “Because someone came into this house tonight to leave a note that says you have something to lose, which means they wanted you to read it and then do exactly what you are about to do. If you ride out now, angry, in the dark, at midnight, with no proof and no witness — then they are making your decision. They will have made your decision for you, and you will have handed it to them.”

His jaw worked.

“You expect me to sit here.”

“I expect you to be more intelligent than the man who is provoking you.”

The insult should have enraged him. He had dismissed men for less, and had done it calmly, which was worse.

Instead it reached him. It got through the coat and the anger both, and landed where the true things landed.

Meg’s voice softened — not into coaxing, which he would have recognised and refused. Into something plainer.

“You have spent years believing that strength means nobody can reach you. Perhaps strength is staying in the room when somebody is trying to pull you out of it.”

Elias closed his eyes for the length of one breath.

Then he took his gloves off the side table, put them down again, and unbuttoned his coat.

“Mr. Ashworth,” he said, as the steward came through the door with his coat half on and his hair wild. “Send riders quietly. Two to Wrenford, one to Farrow, one to the London road. I want to know who paid for the copy of that key and who bought the oil for that straw. I want a list of every man Vaughan has hired in the last six months. Nobody is beaten, nobody is dragged, nobody is frightened for the pleasure of it. Everyone who was in this house tonight accounts for where they were tonight, in writing.”

He turned to look at Meg.

“And if they fail,” he said, “then we decide together what happens next.”

He held her gaze.

Meg exhaled, slowly, and let her arms come down.

He nodded, once, and went to write to the magistrate.

By morning, they had an answer.

A stable hand named Samuel Rudd had taken money from a man working for Lord Vaughn.

At first the requests had seemed harmless, or he had made them seem so to himself. When does his grace dine? Which doors are busiest? Which servant carries the keys to the west wing? Small things, idle things, things it cost nothing to answer.

Then Vaughn’s man had asked him for a wax impression of one servant’s key, and given him two guineas for it, and Samuel had done it, because by then he had already been paid eleven times for information and had spent the money and had told himself the story he needed to tell himself.

Then the man had asked whether Mrs. Hollis’s little girl came up to the house every day.

That was the question Samuel Rudd would remember for the rest of his life. He had stood in the tack room with the wax in his hand and understood, in one cold moment, exactly what he had been a part of. And he had said yes, because it had not yet become real, and by the time it became real he was already caught in it — by the money, by the shame, and by the fear of the Duke of Halloway’s displeasure, which was a thing every man in the county had an opinion about.

He came forward himself, at six in the morning, with his hands shaking, and told Elias Thornbury the whole of it.

Elias listened in silence.

Three years earlier, he would have destroyed the man for the example. He would have had him beaten, or thrown off the estate with his name spoken at every gate, or handed to the magistrate with a recommendation that would have emptied his future of every door in England. He had done exactly that to a kitchen girl who had left keys on the floor. He knew his own record.

Now he looked at Samuel Rudd and then he looked at Meg, who was standing at the end of the room with her arms folded — not for permission. For perspective.

“You will leave Halloway service,” he said. “Your wages will be paid to the end of the quarter and you will be gone by Friday. You will remain under guard in the east lodge until then, and you will give the magistrate a full statement regarding the money you accepted, the man who paid it, and the deed Lord Vaughn claims as evidence of his rights. You will name dates, sums, and places. If anything you say is false, I will know.”

“And then?”

“Then you will go and be somebody else somewhere else, and you will not come back.”

Samuel Rudd wept, which Elias did not need and did not enjoy, and Mr. Ashworth took him away.

Mr. Sallow brought the key count at noon. One key unaccounted for. The impression had been taken from a boot-boy’s key that opened the small door by the laundry — which opened onto a corridor, which opened onto a stair, which ran to the second floor.

Mr. Ashworth left that afternoon to verify every detail of Vaughn’s deed with a lawyer in York.

Late that evening, Elias stood alone in the east room.

Meg came in without knocking. She had stopped knocking some weeks ago, and neither of them had ever remarked on it.

“You wanted to hurt him,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you still?”

“Yes.”

She almost smiled. “That was honest.”

“I am learning.”

“So I see.”

He looked at Posy’s drawing, where it lay on the desk beside the note that had been left there the night before. The note was gone — burned, in the grate — but he could still see its shape on the desk’s leather.

“Someone stood where she sits,” he said.

Meg understood at once. “This room is not a grave any more.”

“No.”

“Then do not turn it into a fortress.”

His eyes came up to hers.

“I do not know how to protect you without becoming controlling,” he said. “I have never in my life had to do both at once. Every protection I know how to build is a wall, and every wall I have ever built, I built to keep people away from me, and I do not know the difference when I am frightened.”

“Then ask.”

He looked at her.

“Ask what?”

“Ask what I need. Ask what frightens me. Ask whether I want a man on the road. Ask whether I want to stay here until this is finished.” She stepped in further and closed the door behind her, which she had never done. “You are very good at deciding things for the people you owe nothing to. It is not the same skill.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“What do you want?”

Meg answered immediately, which he thought afterwards was the most useful thing she did that night, because it meant she had already thought it through and had simply been waiting to be asked.

“I want Posy safe.”

“That I can promise.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You can promise to try. That is what you can promise. Everything else is weather.”

He absorbed the correction.

“What else?”

“I want to know what you know. Not the version you decide I can bear. The actual thing.”

“Yes.”

“I want no one following us without my knowledge. If a man is watching my daughter, I want to know his name and where he stands.”

“Yes.”

“And until this is finished, I want Posy to remain here. At the Hall.”

He looked up.

Meg met his eyes. “You are surprised.”

“You said once that you would never bring her into this house.”

“That was before someone asked a stranger at a crossroads whether she was Posy Bennett.” She said it evenly. “There is a wall around this house and it is better guarded than my cottage door. I am not proud. I want her alive.”

“You are willing to stay.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Meg hesitated, and then told him the truth, which she had been deciding whether to do since the fire.

“Because in spite of every caution I have, I trust you more than I trust whatever is waiting outside these gates.”

Something in his expression softened, and he did not manage to catch it in time.

“Then you will stay.”

She raised an eyebrow.

He heard himself, and corrected it.

“Would you stay?”

Meg smiled. “Yes.”

He was still learning.

But he was learning.