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

Chapter 13

The weeks that followed were quieter than any weeks Meg Hollis had ever spent.

A shelf of children’s books appeared in the east room — not the handful that Posy carried back and forth, but a shelf of them, properly furnished, with a wooden horse that had both its ears and a box of chalks that got refilled when it ran out. Meg no longer waited in the corridor. She sat inside, mending by the window, and sometimes offering Elias the plain answers that no steward or lawyer in England would have dared to give him.

Because that was the arrangement, in the end, and it was never written down and never discussed.

He would say a thing out loud — about the mill at Wrenford, about a tenant’s rent, about a letter from his man of business in London that had made him angry — and she would say what she actually thought. Once, on a question of the boundary fence, she told him that he was being stupid, and then went back to her mending, and he sat in silence for a full minute and then crossed out the letter he had been writing and wrote a different one.

The Duke of Halloway had not become soft. He was still exacting. He was still capable of a silence that emptied a room, and he still used it, and used it well. But he had begun to understand — slowly, and with many relapses — that strength did not require everyone around him to become smaller.

The servants noticed. Servants always notice.

Mr. Sallow noticed, and said nothing, and quietly moved the second teacup onto the tray every afternoon without being asked. Mrs. Cottrell noticed, and said nothing, and began sending down two portions of everything at supper. Samuel Rudd’s replacement noticed, three weeks in, and was told by an older footman that the Duke was a hard master and a fair one and that he should keep his mouth shut about either.

Posy noticed only that he smiled more often, and informed him of this, and was told that this was an unverifiable claim, and informed him that it was not.

One winter afternoon, Posy delivered herself of a new conclusion.

“Snowmen,” she announced, “are a serious ducal responsibility.”

Elias was reading. “Are they.”

“All the houses have them. Ned’s house has two. We have none.”

“Who is Ned?”

“The one with the ribbon.”

“That was an extortion attempt and I am told you lost.”

Posy ignored this. “You have to make a snowman. It is your job.”

Ten minutes later, the four housemaids, the two kitchen boys, Mr. Sallow, and Mrs. Cottrell all found urgent reasons to be at the windows of the south front, from which they could observe the Duke of Halloway standing in eleven inches of snow in his shirtsleeves without his coat, holding a carrot, while a three-year-old in three layers of wool directed operations with the authority of a field marshal.

The snowman was built. It had one arm much longer than the other because Posy had decided so, and a hat that was not a hat but a bucket, and a face that was mostly coal.

“It is the best one in England,” Posy said.

“It is the only one on this estate.”

“That is why.”

Elias looked down at her, standing in the snow with her nose red and her gloves wet through and a piece of coal clutched in one fist, and felt something happen in his chest that he did not have a word for, and had not had a word for in a long time.

He put the bucket back on the snowman’s head.

“Mrs. Hollis,” he said, without turning around, “you are to inform your daughter that this is a one-time arrangement.”

“She will not believe me.”

“No.”

By spring, he had asked them to move into the Hall.

He asked, rather than ordered. He did it in the east room on an evening in March, with Posy asleep in the adjoining sitting room and the fire going, and he asked it in the plainest way he knew how: that there was a quiet wing on the south side, four rooms, with a kitchen of its own and a small garden, that it was further from the road and closer to everything, and that he would like them to take it.

Meg did not answer immediately. She had been sleeping in a room two doors from the child for five months and had been paying rent, still, on the cottage at Farrow, because she had wanted a place to go that was not this.

She looked at him for a long moment.

“Not as a servant,” she said.

“No.”

“I will still work.”

“Yes.” He did not argue with her about it, which she appreciated more than she could say. “If you want to. If you want to do less of it, that is arranged. If you want to do none of it, that is also arranged.”

“And if I want to go back to the cottage in six months?”

Elias was quiet for a moment.

“Then I will have the rooms cleaned and the door left unlocked,” he said, “and I will not ask you again.”

Meg agreed.

And both of them understood exactly why the asking had mattered, and neither of them explained it to anyone, including each other.

Then one evening in May, he asked her to walk with him in the south garden.

It was the garden he had once planned to have cleared. There had been a period, eleven years ago, before the lawyer in York had drawn up the papers, when he had walked the south garden with a man from the nursery at York and discussed what would grow well between the wall and the old pear tree, and whether a child would want a swing, and where a small person could be got out of doors without being seen from the house.

The nurseryman had written it all down. Elias had kept the paper in a drawer for two years and had never thrown it away.

No one had ever played in it. The flowers that covered the paths now were Mrs. Cottrell’s doing, three years ago, without instruction and without comment, because the housekeeper of Halloway Hall had opinions about what a dead garden did to a household.

Posy was with Mrs. Cottrell that evening, being read to. Snowdrop followed the two of them at a distance, as she had followed everything in that house for twenty years, and then sat down in the middle of the path and refused to be involved.

Elias stopped beneath the pear tree.

Meg looked at him.

“You are unusually quiet.”

“I am attempting not to ruin something.”

“That is reassuring.”

He reached into his coat.

Meg’s breath caught, and she was immediately irritated with herself for it, and then stopped being irritated, because there was no one there to see it.

He held out a small ring set with a pale blue stone. It was not a ducal ring. It was nothing that would have been worn at a London dinner. It was a plain band with a sapphire the size of a pea, and it looked, Meg thought, unmistakably like something a man had chosen alone in a shop in York and had been quietly worried about for days.

But he did not kneel.

He stood under the pear tree with the ring in his open palm and looked at her, and she understood that he was not going to do it until he had said the whole of it.

“I am not asking because we survived Gideon Vaughn,” he said. “I have thought about that, and it would be a bad reason, and I do not want to give you a bad reason wrapped in a good one.”

Meg stayed still.

“I am not asking because Posy has spent five months rearranging our futures without permission.” A smile touched her mouth; his did not. “Though she has.”

“I am asking because when you disagree with me, I become better at listening. Not because it is pleasant. Because it is true, and because I would not have known it if you had not stood in my doorway and told me that one of my ideas was poor.”

His voice roughened, and he did not stop it, which was the thing Meg noticed most.

“I am asking because when you leave a room, I notice. And when you come back, the room changes.” He took a breath. “I am asking because I loved my sister, and I locked her in a room for three years so that I would not have to feel it, and a child I had never met walked through that door and gave me back the whole of it in an afternoon. And I am not going to spend the rest of my life building walls around the people I would rather die for.”

Then he knelt down in the wet grass, in the south garden of Halloway Hall, in front of a servant.

“Meg Hollis.” He held the ring up. “Would you choose me? Not belong to me. Not become mine. Choose me.”

Meg Hollis’s eyes filled and she did not wipe them, because she had spent three years not letting herself cry in front of anyone and had decided, some time in the last half hour, that she was finished with that as well.

“Yes,” she said.

Elias exhaled, and something in his shoulders let go.

Then Meg added: “But you still do not control how many honey biscuits Posy eats.”

He looked up at her.

“I had hoped marriage might improve my authority.”

“It will not.”

“Then I accept the terms.”

He put the ring on her finger, and it fitted, which meant he had measured it somehow, which she would spend the next week working out and which he would never explain.

Snowdrop, watching from the path, stood up and walked away, having formed a negative opinion of the entire proceeding.

Posy learned the news five minutes later, because Snowdrop led her into the garden before anyone could stop her.

She came around the corner of the wall in her nightdress at a dead run and stopped short in front of them, and looked at her mother’s hand, and then at the Duke of Halloway, who was still on one knee in the wet grass with his own handwriting on the back of his face.

“You are going to be my papa?”

The question silenced everything. Even the bees. Even Snowdrop’s tail.

Elias did not stand up. He crouched until he was level with her, which he had learned to do without thinking about it.

“I would like to be,” he said.

Posy’s expression became serious, in the way that small children’s faces become serious when they are about to negotiate.

“But I already have a papa.”

Elias glanced at Meg, and then back at the child.

“I would never take his place,” he said. “That is not what I am asking for.”

Posy listened, with her head on one side.

“Your father is part of you,” Elias said. “Your mother tells you stories about him, and you carry him with you, and nothing that happens in the future will change that. If you choose me as well, I can be the man who is here now.”

Posy considered this for a long moment.

“What would you do?”

His voice softened, and Meg Hollis, standing two feet away with a ring on her hand and wet grass on her skirt, would remember the next thirty seconds for the rest of her life.

“I can teach you to ride, when you are old enough.” He counted them off without hurrying. “I can come when you are frightened. I can listen when you are angry, even when you are angry with me, which is the difficult one. I can worry when you are ill. And I can read the dragon story even when you insist that I have missed a page.”

“You do miss pages.”

“I dispute that.”

“And you have to come to boring things.”

“What boring things?”

“Everything.”

Elias looked up at Meg. She folded her arms and did not help him.

“Apparently,” he said, “I agree.”

Posy nodded once, decisively, and then wrapped both arms around his neck.

Then you can be my papa too.

Elias Thornbury closed his eyes.

For several seconds he did not say anything at all, and Meg, who had seen him take the news of Vaughn’s arrest without a change of expression, stood very still and watched a man be undone by four words and a pair of small arms.

When he finally spoke, his voice was rough.

“Thank you.”

Posy pulled back and looked at him severely.

“But you have to promise one thing.”

“What?”

“Do not lose the first blanket.”

Elias looked over the wall, up at the tall windows of the east room, where the woolen blanket that had come from London in a paper parcel twenty-two years ago was folded on the arm of a sofa in a room with a fire laid in it.

“I will not promise,” he said.

Posy’s face began to close.

“I mean that I do not need to promise,” he said. “You will see to it. I have seen how you are with blankets.”

Posy considered this, decided it was a compliment, and accepted it.

They went inside. Snowdrop got there first, which was inevitable. And in the east room the fire was lit, and the curtains were clean, and a girl’s green sun was pinned above a broad desk, and nobody in Halloway Hall avoided that corridor any more.