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

Chapter 11

The next days tightened the whole household like a rope drawn through a block.

Lily understood only pieces of it, and Meg let her have only pieces. She knew that strangers were not allowed near her. She knew that the gate on the Farrow road was shut at dusk instead of left on the latch. She knew, because Mrs. Cottrell told her, that Snowdrop had acquired the important duty of sleeping across the foot of her bed, which the cat performed with the gravity of a sentry and the reliability of a cat.

And she knew that Elias came down the corridor too often.

He did it in a way he believed was unobtrusive. He walked the east passage on his way to nothing in particular. He came down at nine, and at half past ten, and once at midnight, and each time he stopped outside the door of the small north room, listened for a moment to the sound of his household’s child breathing, and went away again.

The third night, the door opened while he was standing there.

Posy stood in the gap in a nightdress that came down past her feet, holding the carved dog, her hair on one side.

“Are you scared?” she said.

Elias could have denied it. He had denied larger things to more dangerous people.

“A little,” he said.

Posy nodded, as though this were an acceptable amount of anything.

“You can sit here.”

She pointed at the chair beside her bed — the one Mrs. Cottrell had put there because the room was large and narrow and had a chair’s worth of space at the end.

“I have work.”

“You can work tomorrow.”

Elias looked back up the corridor, where Meg was standing at the turn with a candle in her hand, having followed him without his hearing her, which he would think about later.

Meg hid a smile. She did not help him. He had noticed that she never helped him when he was being asked to do something he wanted to do and needed to be pushed into, and that she had noticed that he noticed, and that neither of them was going to say anything about it.

The Duke of Halloway sat down in the chair beside a three-year-old’s bed.

Posy told him the rest of the story. She got the order of the pages wrong, as she always did. She reached the part where the girl in the lighthouse finally lit the lamp, and she slowed, and her words became shapeless, and then stopped.

Elias stayed several minutes longer than was necessary. He watched her the way a man watches something that has cost him more than he can account for. Then he stood, and pulled the blanket up once over her shoulder, and went out, and closed the door quietly behind him.

Mr. Ashworth came back from York two days later with a face like a wet coat.

The deed was forged. That had been half expected. What had not been expected was the scale of it. Lord Gideon Vaughn had paid two clerks and a surveyor to attest to it. There were payments, dated and initialled, and one of the clerks had kept a memorandum of the arrangement because he did not trust his employer, and the surveyor, when pressed, had given a written statement within four hours and then asked whether he would be required to appear in court, and had seemed relieved when the answer was yes.

Elias read the whole bundle in his study with the fire lit and Meg in the chair across from him, which was where she sat now when there was business, because they had both stopped pretending that she would not need to know.

“So it was never about the road,” she said.

“It was about the road.” He turned a page. “The road is the prize. But the road alone he could have argued for a year in the courts and lost slowly, and he knew it.”

“Then why?”

Elias set the papers down.

“Because a man who cannot win a case can still win a scandal.”

He explained it to her, steady, in the order a lawyer would have explained it. If Vaughn could provoke the Duke of Halloway into attacking him without proof — into sending men to his house, into roughing up his servants, into anything that could be described in a courtroom as violence — then the land claim would stop being about a deed of 1698 and start being about the character of the Duke of Halloway. There were men in London who would have paid very well to see that character tested in public. There was a faction in the county that had wanted Halloway’s tolls for twenty years. There were creditors of Vaughn’s who would have been delighted to have him come into the road and start paying them.

Provoking Elias Thornbury into a mistake was not a crime. It was a strategy.

“And the note,” Meg said. “You have found something to lose.”

“To make me ride out.”

“To make you ride out at midnight with a horse and a temper and eleven years of being obeyed behind you.” She folded her arms. “And if you had, what would he have had?”

“A dozen witnesses in Farrow who would swear the Duke came in the dark with riders, and one very useful incident at a mill with no one present but his own men and no one’s word against theirs.”

Meg was quiet for a moment.

“You would not have come back the same,” she said.

“No.”

She looked at the fire and said nothing else, because there was nothing else to say that would not have been sentimental, and neither of them did sentimental.

Then Mr. Sallow brought in a letter on a silver tray, and the room went cold.

The seal bore no crest.

Elias broke it with his thumb and read it standing up, and then read it a second time, and then laid it flat on the desk so that Meg could read it too.

Twelve words.

Come alone to the old river mill if you want this ended.

Mr. Ashworth, who had come in behind the butler, read it over Meg’s shoulder and straightened.

“He wants you to go.”

“Yes.”

“Then you will not go.”

Elias did not answer him. Mr. Ashworth looked at Meg, which was itself a measure of how much had changed in that house over one autumn.

Meg read the letter twice before she spoke. Then she laid it down and looked at the Duke of Halloway.

“He needs you to go,” she said.

Elias turned his head.

“That is what Mr. Ashworth just said.”

“No. He said Vaughn expects you. I am saying Vaughn needs you.” She tapped the paper once with one finger. “Look at the shape of it. The rider who asked Posy’s name. The men on the lane. The fire in the straw. The key copied from a boot-boy. And now this. Every one of them was designed to make you react. He is not trying to hurt you. He is trying to move you.”

Mr. Ashworth’s face changed, slowly, the way a man’s face changes when a thing he had been holding in one hand is put down.

“He wants you angry,” Meg said, “in a place he controls, at an hour he chooses, with no witness but his own. That is the entire plan. Everything else is decoration.”

Elias’s hand tightened on the letter.

“The old version of me would have gone,” he said.

“Yes.”

He looked toward the ceiling of the study, which was the room below the east room, and which had a ceiling he had stared at for eleven years, and thought about a small person asleep in a bed two floors above with a cat on her feet.

For three years he had made his decisions as a man with nothing to lose, and there had been a terrible freedom in it. He had noticed, more than once, that other men hesitated where he did not, and had assumed it was because they were weaker.

They had been hesitating because they had something to come back to. He had understood that intellectually. He had not understood it in his body until this week.

He folded the letter.

“I am not going,” he said.

Mr. Ashworth blinked. Meg did not.

“Instead,” said Elias Thornbury, “I am going to use the power he expects me to waste.”