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

Chapter 19

The fourth year, a thing arrived at the Hall that Meg had assumed would never come.

A letter from the Assizes at York, by way of Sir Robert Ives, about the estate of Gideon Vaughn.

Vaughn had been convicted at the March Assizes of three years previous — forgery, and conspiracy, and bribery of Clerks in the matter of the deed — and had been sentenced to a fine he could not pay and seven years’ transportation, and had gone, in the summer of that year, on a ship out of London. His lands, being entailed and encumbered, had been sold off in parcels to his creditors over the three years following, and the process had wound through the courts the way such things do, entirely out of sight of Halloway, because it was not Halloway’s.

But the old river road was one of the parcels.

And the man administering the sale had written to Sir Robert, who had written to Elias, who now laid the letter in front of his wife at the breakfast table in April and said, “Tell me what you think.”

Meg read it twice.

“He is offering you the road,” she said.

“He is offering the right of first refusal on a parcel that abuts my boundary, for four thousand pounds, which is about two thirds of what it is worth, because the alternative is that it goes to auction in York and is bought by a speculator who will charge tolls on it and make the valley’s life difficult for thirty years.”

Meg looked at him.

“You are not asking me whether to buy it.”

“No.”

“You are asking me something else.”

“I am asking you whether this is a thing I would be doing because it is right,” Elias said, “or because it is finished, and I have never once in my life had the two be the same thing, and I do not entirely trust it.”

Meg set the letter down.

“Then let us find out,” she said. “What happens to the four farms on it if you buy it?”

“They stay tenanted. They are tenanted now.”

“And what happens if you do not buy it?”

“Whoever buys it can raise the tolls at the bend, which will make the mill at Wrenford uneconomic, which will make three of those farms uneconomic within a decade, and eleven families on the river will move to York to find work, and their children will vanish into that city the way children do, and in twenty years there will be a man in London who owns the road and a hundred acres and does not know the name of a single person living on it.”

“And if you buy it?”

“I can hold the tolls at what they are,” Elias said, “and put the road in the estate accounts, and lose about eighty pounds a year on it for the rest of my life.”

Meg looked at him for a long moment.

“Then you should buy it,” she said, “and you should stop pretending that you are doing it for the tenants, and admit to yourself that you are also doing it because it will vex the memory of a man who put his hand on the gate of your house.”

Elias did not answer for a while.

“I did not say that.”

“You did not have to. I have lived with you for four years.” She picked up her cup. “I do not think it matters. If you buy it and hold the tolls, eleven families stay, and you may feel as superior as you like about it, and the superior feeling will cost nobody anything. That is the whole of what most virtue is, and I have never seen the point in being squeamish about the motive.”

Elias bought the road in June, for four thousand and ninety pounds, at auction, in the long room of the York Tavern, against a speculator from Leeds who had expected no opposition and who was extremely bad-tempered about it for eleven years, and who told everyone who would listen that the Duke of Halloway had overpaid.

The tolls were not raised.

They were not raised in the following year either, and at some point in the following decade, the road stopped being a matter of any interest to anyone, which was the whole object of the exercise.

The fifth year, Meg went back to the cottage at Farrow.

She went because it had stood empty for four years and because the tenant who had taken it had gone to York, and because the agent had written to ask whether it should be let again or pulled down, and because Meg had discovered that she could not answer the question without seeing it.

Elias offered to come. She said no, and then said that she would like him to come, and then said that she wanted to walk down the lane alone and would meet him there, and he agreed, and did not ask why, and went to Farrow by the long road so that she could have the lane.

She walked it in an hour and ten minutes. It was six weeks off her last visit.

The cottage was smaller than she remembered. That was the first thing. In four years she had built it up in her mind to the size of a house, and it was two rooms and a scullery, and the door was low, and the window in the front room was nine panes and two of them had gone cloudy.

The second thing was the step.

Hugh had put that step in. She had forgotten it entirely until she saw it — three courses of stone, laid dry, with the middle one set a fraction proud of the others because he had done it in the rain and had never come back to finish it, and she had stepped over that proud stone twice a day for five years and had never once noticed it in all that time.

She stood in the lane for a while and looked at three courses of stone laid dry by a man who had been dead for seven years.

Then she went in and looked at the two rooms, and looked at the mark on the plaster where the shelf had been, and stood in the scullery for a minute or two.

When she came out, Elias was sitting on the low wall at the end of the lane with his coat over his arm and his horse tied to the gate post, waiting, not reading anything, not doing anything, just sitting there in the sun.

Meg walked down the lane to him and sat down on the wall beside him.

“Well?” he said.

“It should be let,” she said. “To a family. There is a man at Wrenford — he has four children and a wife expecting, and he is in two rooms at his mother’s, and the roof is sound.”

“Then I will have the agent write to him.”

“Do not make it a gift. He will not take it as a gift.” She looked out at the field beyond the wall. “Charge him what it is worth and let him earn the repair himself. Then it is his.”

Elias nodded, and wrote something in the small notebook he now carried, which was a habit he had acquired from her, and which Mr. Ashworth believed was a mistake in a man of his position and had been obliged to concede was not.

They sat on the wall for a while.

“There is something I would like to tell you,” Meg said.

“Then tell me.”

“Hugh was a very good man,” she said, “and I have spent seven years being careful never to say that to you, because I thought it would be unkind.”

Elias looked at her.

“And I have spent four years wishing you would,” he said.

Meg laughed, once, shortly, and then told him four things about Hugh Hollis: that he had a laugh that started in his chest and came out at the wrong moment in church; that he had been unable to remember anybody’s birthday including his own, which had caused him enormous trouble twice a year; that he had been afraid of nothing except deep water, and had once walked four miles to avoid crossing the Wren at the ford, which was not something a man could live down; and that on the day he had proposed to her, he had done it badly, in a field, holding a stick.

Elias listened to all four.

At the end of it he said, “He sounds like a man I would have liked.”

“You would have been terrible together. He could not be serious about anything for more than a quarter of an hour.”

“Then we would have got along famously,” said the Duke of Halloway, and Meg Hollis — who had been Meg Hollis for five years and would be Meg Thornbury for the rest of her life and had never quite stopped thinking of herself by her first name — put her head on his shoulder on a low wall in a lane at Farrow in the June sun, and cried for about ninety seconds, and then stopped, and blew her nose, and told him it was time to go.