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

Chapter 17

In the second winter, Meg Hollis did a thing she had not planned and could not afterwards explain.

She began keeping a list.

It started in November, in the east room, at the bottom of a sheet of paper she had been using to write down the items from the kitchens book that still had not been done. There were four of them. She wrote them out, and then underneath she wrote something that had been said at the tenants’ assembly, and then, because it was the same piece of paper, she wrote down the name of a woman who had asked her for something.

By the spring the paper was two sheets.

By the following autumn there were nine, tied with a piece of string, in the drawer of the desk in the east room, and Meg knew exactly what was in them without looking, and had begun to understand that she was doing something that mattered.

She was not writing down grievances, particularly. Most of what was on the lists was smaller than a grievance. An old man at Wrenford who had asked, twice, whether there was any way for a boy of thirteen to learn to read without being sent away to a school he could not reach. A widow on the Farrow road whose roof needed four pounds of work. A woman who had come to the Hall in the rain in February and had stood at the servants’ door rather than the front door, and had asked, very quietly, whether there was any work, and had cried when she was told that Mrs. Cottrell had nothing, and had gone away apologizing.

That one was on the list twice.

The list was, in the end, the thing that turned the second winter into something other than a long grey wait.

In January, Elias found her at the desk with the sheets in front of her and a pen in her hand, and asked her what she was doing.

She told him.

He sat down and read them.

He read them for a long time, in the way he read a boundary report — properly, in order, without moving, with his thumb pressed against the edge of the page.

At the end of it he put the sheets down and said, “The boy at Wrenford.”

“What about him?”

“There is a man at Farrow who keeps a school for eleven children in a room over a wheelwright. He takes boys for three pounds a year and he takes them in the evening if they work. I did not know about him until last week, when Mr. Ashworth mentioned it.” He paused. “I have been duke here for eleven years, and I did not know there was a school over the wheelwright’s at Farrow, which is four miles from my own front door.”

“You know now.”

“I do.” He looked at the list. “How many of these can be done this month?”

“Three. Four if you will let me spend your money without asking.”

“Then do it.”

She did it.

She did more of it, over the years, than she had ever intended. By the fifth year there was a schoolroom at Wrenford, in a building that had been a granary and was now a room with a stove and a slate roof and thirty-two children in it at a time, and there was a woman named Miss Oakley who taught in it and who was paid out of the estate and who had been, twelve years before, the daughter of a tenant on the Farrow road who had been sent to York to be a housemaid and had come home.

By the ninth year, the list had become a book, and the book had become a habit, and the habit had become the ordinary way the estate at Halloway was run — by a duke who read, and a duchess who wrote things down, and a steward who had learned, over some initial resistance, that the two of them together were going to ask him about the things he had previously been able to leave in a book.

But that was all later.

In the second winter, what mattered was six items on two sheets of paper and a husband who read them properly. And what mattered after that was a fire, and a book, and a girl who was learning to read the difficult words without help.

Posy was four in the second winter, and then five, and at five she could read most of the dragon book on her own, and had begun to demand a new one every fortnight, and had begun — which was worse — to try to write.

She wrote on everything. She wrote on the back of her mother’s lists, which caused a crisis in February. She wrote in the margins of the boundary report. She wrote her own name, which she had worked out herself, eleven times in a row, in the front of the dragon book, which Elias discovered one evening and did not mention to anyone for two days, and then mentioned to Meg, and then mentioned to Mr. Sallow, who mentioned it to Mrs. Cottrell, who mentioned it to the two kitchen boys, who by the following week had told every servant in the house, and by the end of the month it was generally known that her grace’s daughter had written her own name in the front of his grace’s book and that his grace had said nothing about it, which everybody understood to mean that he was pleased.