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

Chapter 15

The first winter was the hardest, which nobody had warned her about and which she had not needed warning about.

Marrying a duke did not, it turned out, involve very much marriage. It involved a great deal of being looked at.

In November there was a dinner at a house eleven miles away, given by the family at Ravenscombe — an old name, a big house, a considerable name in the county — and Meg went to it, because Elias asked her whether she wanted to come and she decided that the answer was yes, and because she had already discovered that the alternative — staying behind and being discussed — was worse than being discussed in person.

She wore a dress of deep blue that had been made for her in York by a woman who had taken her measurements without comment and had then sent a bill that had made Meg laugh out loud in the study. Elias had asked her about the dress once and had accepted her answer, and had not asked again, and had gone out of the room when she was being fitted, and had visibly not asked a single question of Mrs. Cottrell about what she had chosen, which she considered one of his finer achievements of that year.

At the Ravenscombe dinner, she was seated between a baronet who talked about hunting and a woman named Lady Ashby who talked about nobody.

Meg had been in service, off and on, since she was fifteen.

She had worked in a house where the lady of the family had thrown a teacup at a maid for a scorched collar. She had worked in a house where the son had come into the kitchen drunk at two in the morning and had been humoured by everyone including his mother. She had waited at table in a house where fourteen people had discussed, at length, over three courses, the moral failings of a woman whose name she knew and who had once given her a pair of shoes.

She knew how gentry talked when they thought a room was empty, and she had listened to all of it for eight years, so she understood a great deal about how gentry talked when they thought a room was full.

So she had expected the dinner at Ravenscombe. She had expected the questions that were not questions, the small smiles, the second glance at her hands.

She had not expected how tired it would make her.

It began before the soup. Lady Ashby leaned in and asked, warmly, whether she had found the transition difficult, and whether the Halloway household was not terribly large, and whether she was not lonely in it.

Meg answered all three questions truthfully and pleasantly. Then Lady Ashby said, “And it must be a comfort to his grace to have someone — you know — practical about the place,” and smiled, and turned to her other neighbour, and Meg sat with that sentence for two hours and could not work out why it had gone in so deep.

It was not an insult. That was what made it unbearable. She turned it over and over on the drive home and could not find the wound in it, and yet she arrived at the Hall with her jaw aching from clenching it.

Elias asked her once, on the stairs, whether the evening had been tolerable.

“Tolerable,” she said, and went to bed.

The second thing nobody had warned her about was the letters.

They came from the second week. Letters from people she had never met, congratulating her. Letters from people she had met once asking her to be patron of things. Letters from a woman in Bath who had heard — evidently from a reliable source — that the new Duchess of Halloway had been in service, and who wrote, in a hand like a fencepost, that she hoped the transition had not been too difficult and that she herself had always thought there was a great deal to be said for people who understood how a house should be run.

Meg read that letter three times and then put it in the fire, and did not tell Elias, and went down to the kitchen and helped Mrs. Cottrell with the preserving for two hours, which she was not supposed to do any more and which she did anyway when the world became too loud.

Elias found her there at nine that night, up to her elbows in damsons.

He did not tell her she should not be. He pulled a stool up to the table, sat down, and began stoning fruit with a knife, badly.

“Do not comment on my technique,” he said.

“I was not going to.”

“You were.”

“I was going to be generous about it.”

Meg told him about the letter on the fourth damson, and he listened without interrupting, and at the end he said, “Write back.”

“Write back.”

“Politely. And tell her that her letter was received, and that you are grateful for her concern, and that it is worth pointing out that she is writing about a household that runs because nine people work in it, of whom she has heard of none, and that you are one of them, and that she may wish to consider what that says about her own.”

Meg stopped stoning damsons and looked at him.

“You have thought about this before,” she said.

“I have had a letter from that woman every year for eleven years,” Elias said. “She once described my sister as a lively girl who would have married well if she had been less particular.”

Meg was quiet for a moment.

“Why did you never say anything?”

“Because she has a great deal of money and a cousin in the Treasury, and because being angry with her cost me less than ignoring her.”

“And now?”

“Now,” he said, “I am not the only person she writes to.”

She did not write back. She thought about it for a fortnight, and then decided that the woman was not the point, and that anything she wrote would have had her thinking about that letter for another month.

But she remembered that he had sat down at a table covered in damsons with a knife he did not know how to hold and said it, and she remembered it in the years afterwards whenever someone asked her what it was like to be married to him.

The third thing was the tenants’ assembly.

It happened in December. The estate held one twice a year, in the great hall in wet weather and in the barns in fine, and Elias had held them for eleven years with his steward doing most of the talking and himself sitting at a table with a ledger and a face like weather.

Meg had gone to the first one in October, out of curiosity, and had sat at the back, and had said nothing.

She went to the December one and understood why she had said nothing.

It ran for four hours. Rent adjustments. A boundary dispute between two farms that had been going since before Elias was born. A complaint about the state of the road at Wrenford bend, which had been made eleven times and had been answered eleven times in terms that satisfied nobody. The miller’s grievance about the toll. A woman named Mrs. Ryde, a tenant’s widow, asking — carefully, and with every sign of a person who had rehearsed her own sentence for a week — whether the allowance for a widow with three sons could be reviewed, since two of the sons were now working and one was not, and the allowance had been set when none of them were.

Mr. Ashworth answered the question by opening a ledger.

Meg watched from the side of the room and saw exactly what happened, because she had spent eight years standing at the end of rooms like this with a jug in her hands and had learned to read the whole of it the way other people read the front page of a newspaper.

The steward was not lying to her. He was only answering a question that had been asked in the wrong shape. The allowance was correct. It had been correctly calculated, five years ago, according to a formula drawn up in 1752. Nobody in the room was doing anything wrong.

And the woman was going to go home with the same allowance, and had spent four months getting ready to ask.

Meg went up to the east room that night and said to her husband, in the plainest terms she had ever used with him, that his estate was being run correctly and that it had not been looked at properly in twenty years, and that correct and properly were not the same word.

Elias set down his pen.

“Explain it to me,” he said.

She explained it for forty minutes. She used the example of Mrs. Ryde. She used the example of the Wrenford road, which had been complained about eleven times and answered eleven times and was still a marsh. She used the example of the mill toll, which was calculated according to a scale drawn up when there had been two mills in the valley and now there was one, and which the miller had been quietly paying around for six years rather than raise it.

At the end of it he sat back and looked at her for a while.

“I require,” he said, “someone to do what you have just done. Twice a year. In this room, with the ledger, before the assembly, rather than after it.”

Meg looked at him.

“That is a position,” she said.

“It is.”

“I am your wife.”

“You are my wife,” he said. “That was never going to be a decorative post in this house, and if anyone in the county has been told otherwise, they will adjust.”

She took the position.

She was not paid for it — Elias offered, and she refused, on the grounds that she would have to give herself a wage out of her own household, which she considered ridiculous, and they compromised on her having an account of her own that she could spend on whatever she liked, which she did not use for eleven months and then used, all at once, on a set of boots for every child under ten on the estate.