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

Chapter 16

The county adjusted, which surprised her less than it surprised him.

It adjusted because Mrs. Ryde’s allowance was reviewed in January and went up by nine pounds a year, and because the road at Wrenford bend was metalled in March, and because when the miller’s toll came up at the spring assembly, the Duke of Halloway looked at his steward, and his wife looked at the ledger, and the toll was recalculated in the room in eleven minutes, which eleven witnesses mentioned to eleven other people over the following fortnight.

And it adjusted because of a thing that happened at the spring assembly itself, which nobody had planned.

The assembly was in the great barn, because the hall was having its roof redone. There were sixty people in it.

The boundary dispute came up again — the one between the two farms, which had been running since before Elias was born — and Elias, who had heard it eleven times, was halfway through a sentence about the 1748 award when Meg said, quite clearly, from the table at his side:

“Ask them what the fence actually does.”

The room went quiet.

Elias turned his head.

“Ask them what the fence is for,” Meg said. “Because they have argued about where it goes for thirty years and I do not think either of them has ever told this room what it does.”

Elias looked at the two farmers — old Mr. Cade and his cousin’s son, John, who had not spoken to each other in eleven years — and then looked back at his wife, and then, in front of sixty people, asked them the question she had put in his mouth.

It turned out that the fence kept Mr. Cade’s cattle out of a spring that fed John Cade’s lower field.

It turned out that they both knew that.

It turned out that neither of them had ever said it out loud in a room, because saying it out loud would have meant saying that the fence was necessary, and neither of them had been willing to give the other that.

The dispute was settled in forty minutes with a stone and a new ditch and two signatures, and old Mr. Cade shook his cousin’s son’s hand in front of the whole assembly, and then went outside and sat on a wall and cried.

Half the room looked at the Duchess of Halloway with an expression she recognised, because she had seen it on tenants’ faces for eight years when a landlord’s wife walked past: she had done something, and they did not know what to make of it, and they were going to talk about it on the way home.

The other half looked at the Duke of Halloway, to see what he made of it.

What he made of it was that he reached for the next item on the list.

That summer, she went back to work in the kitchens for six weeks, and it caused a small scandal, which she had known it would, and which was not the reason she did it.

The reason she did it was that she had discovered, in May, that she missed it.

She missed the noise. She missed Mrs. Cottrell’s opinions about pastry and the two kitchen boys’ feud about the boot room and the particular satisfaction of getting a dinner up for thirty people under difficult circumstances with people she had known for two years. She missed being one of nine people who all knew exactly what everyone else was doing.

The scandal was that she went down in the mornings in an apron and worked the morning shift at the range for six weeks in July and August, and that word of it got out, and that a woman in London wrote to a woman in York about it, and that the woman in York wrote back that she had heard the new Duchess of Halloway was odd, and that the woman in London wrote back that she had heard she was kind, and that these two letters between them contained the entire range of public opinion on the subject for the next decade.

Elias, hearing of it from Mr. Sallow, who was not gossiping but merely reporting a fact of the household, said nothing to his wife about it at all.

He came down to the kitchen on the fourth evening of the six weeks, at half past eight, sat at the long table at the end, and was given a plate of stew by Mrs. Cottrell without being asked whether he wanted one.

He ate it. He asked Mrs. Cottrell a question about the chimney in the north range, which had been smoking. He was told, in considerable detail, that the chimney in the north range had been smoking because the flue had been built wrong in 1731 and had never been put right, and that it had been reported by three successive cooks and had been entered in a book.

“Which book?”

Mrs. Cottrell produced the book.

Elias read the book for eleven minutes while his stew went cold, and found eleven items in it, four of which he had never heard of, and one of which concerned the roof of the stables, which he had also never heard of, and which was the reason the east bay had been leaking for six years.

He looked up.

“Why,” he said, “was this not brought to me?”

“It was brought to Mr. Ashworth,” Mrs. Cottrell said. “Twice. And to the house steward before Mr. Ashworth, and to the house steward before that.”

“And?”

“And it was entered in the book.”

Elias closed the book. Meg, from her end of the table, watched him do it, and recognised the expression on his face, having seen it once before, in the east room, at the moment he had decided to have the curtains washed.

The chimney was rebuilt in October. The stable roof was done in November. The book was photocopied — copied by a clerk, in a hand that took four days — and a copy was placed on the table in the east room, where the Duke of Halloway could see it, and where he looked at it, in fact, roughly once a fortnight for the rest of his life.