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

Chapter 20

The fifth year also brought the thing that nobody had prepared her for.

In the September of that year, Meg woke at four in the morning with a headache and a certainty, and by the following Tuesday she was certain, and by the end of October it was generally known in the house that her grace was expecting.

It was a bad winter.

She was ill for four months, worse than she had been with Posy, and for eleven weeks she could not go down to the school, and could not get through a page of a letter, and could not bear the smell of the fire in the east room. The two kitchen boys took to leaving her tea outside her door with a spoon of honey in it because Mrs. Cottrell had decided that this was the appropriate treatment and had not told anybody she had decided it.

Elias did not sleep much that winter either.

He did not say anything about it, because he had learned by then that there was a category of human concern that could not be improved by talking and could in fact be made worse, and he had also learned — expensively, over four years — that the correct response to his wife’s illness was not to take over the management of her life, nor to send for three doctors, nor to sit in the corner of the room looking stricken.

What he did was smaller.

He had a chair moved into the morning room, so that she could be downstairs where the light was, since she could not come to the east room. He read to her, badly, from whatever she asked for, which was usually the lists. He took the lists down to the school himself, three times, and sat at the back of the room with the carter’s wife and eight boys while Mrs. Pemberton heard the reading, because Meg could not go and could not bear it not to happen.

Twice he did something that nobody in the county would have believed, which was to carry a tray up four flights of stairs himself at ten at night rather than ring the bell, because the bell woke her.

And once, in January, when it was at its worst and she was lying in the dark, he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Tell me what you want and I will get it,” in a voice that shook, and Meg, who had spent four months being very careful not to be frightened in front of him, heard the fear in his voice and understood that he had been holding it since September and had only just put it down.

“I want you to stop looking at me like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like I am already gone.”

He was silent for a moment.

“I will try,” he said.

“Do better than try.”

“I will do better than try.”

The child was born in March, in the east-facing room, on a wet Thursday, after eleven hours, and it was a boy, and they named him Thomas, after a man who had died under a scaffold on a wet Tuesday in March seven years before, and no one in England thought it was odd except Lady Ilsingham, who thought it was extremely odd, and said so, and was told by three separate people at three separate dinners that she had mistaken the matter.

Elias held his son for the first time at four in the morning with his shirt unbuttoned and his hands wet from being washed and a look on his face that Meg Hollis had seen exactly once before, in the east room, in the first October, when a three-year-old had given him a blanket.

She never told him what she had seen. It was not the sort of thing that could be told.

Posy met her brother the same morning. She was seven, and she came in with her hair brushed and her Sunday dress on because she had decided this was an occasion, and she looked into the cradle for a long time.

“He is very red,” she said.

“Everyone is,” Meg said.

“Why?”

“Because he has been in the dark for nine months and is annoyed about it.”

Posy considered this.

“Does he have a book?”

“Not yet.”

“I will give him the dragon one,” said Posy, and did, when he was four, and read it to him with the voices, badly, the way it had been read to her — including the page with the baker’s hat, which she skipped, exactly as she had always skipped it, until Thomas discovered at six that there was a page with a hat on it and made her go back.

It is worth recording what Halloway Hall was like in those years, because houses are not happy in the way that marriages are happy; they are happy the way weather is, in aggregate, and mostly in retrospect.

There were eleven people in the household by the seventh year who had been there before Meg came and were still there after. Mrs. Cottrell, who had died and been replaced by a woman named Mrs. Rudd whom she had personally trained, would not have recognised the kitchen, which now had a door onto the yard and a second range and a book in which anybody could write anything, including complaints. Mr. Sallow, who had given notice twice and withdrawn it twice, retired in the ninth year with a pension that was larger than his wage, and was replaced by a very serious young man named Mr. Peake who had been terrified of the house for a fortnight and then stopped.

Mr. Ashworth lived to be seventy and died at his desk, in the steward’s room, at eleven in the morning, having been difficult about a hedge the day before and having been right about it.

There were two hundred and eleven people living on the estate at Halloway by the tenth year, which was forty more than there had been in the first October, and the reason for that was not births, or not mostly; it was that the eleven families on the river stayed, and three more came, and the school produced two girls who went away to be bookkeepers and came back to marry and stay, and a man named Ned who had been the boy with the hoop and the flexible understanding of ownership came back from York at twenty-three with a trade and a wife and asked whether there was room on the estate for a wheelwright, and there was.

The east room was the study by then. Nobody called it anything else.

There was a fire laid in it every morning. There was a small table under the window with a chair on either side of it, and a low shelf of books that were Posy’s and then were Thomas’s and then were both, and on top of the shelf, for a period of about two years, there was a wooden horse with both ears and a carved dog with a split tail.

The cup stayed on the shelf. The portrait stayed upright on the desk, where it could be seen from the door.

And the wool blanket stayed on the sofa, in its unravelling state, having been washed in the eighth year because a four-year-old had been sick on it, which had caused a genuinely alarming afternoon in the household until Meg had said, in front of six people, that the blanket was for using and that if it could not be used it should go in a museum, and that it could be used.

It was used.