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

Chapter 3

Her husband had been called Hugh. He was a stonemason, and good at it, which was why they had sent for him from three counties away when the tower of St. Mary’s needed repointing. He had liked that job. He had come home with lime dust in his eyebrows and told her about the view from the scaffolding, which he said was the best in the parish, and which he had no intention of enjoying for long because he did not trust heights.

The tower was four days from finished when a support gave way on a wet Tuesday in March.

She had been six months pregnant with Posy when they brought him down the lane on a cart with a tarpaulin over him, and she had not been able to look, and she had been ashamed of that for three years.

There had been an inquiry. There had been a great deal of talk about whose scaffold it was, and whose timber, and who had signed for it, and then men with money had begun speaking to other men with money, and after that there was no one responsible at all. The curate who had driven the inquiry had come to her door with his hat in his hands and told her, very kindly, that the matter would not proceed, and she had thanked him for coming, and closed the door, and stood in her kitchen for eleven minutes without moving.

What she remembered most clearly was the morning of it. Hugh had left complaining that she had burned the bread. He had kissed the top of her head while saying it, which was how he always said it, and she had told him to eat it anyway and be glad of it.

Those were the last words that had passed between them, and they had been about bread.

Rent still came due. Her rent came due to the Halloway estate, in fact, in quarterly sums she could just manage if nothing ever went wrong. Bread still had to be bought. Posy still woke hungry before it was light, and had to be fed, and dressed, and kept warm, and taught not to put her fingers near the range. So Meg went back into service, and she learned to carry her grief the way she carried the coal scuttle — up the back stairs, quietly, at the hours when nobody was looking.

She was reliable. She was careful. She had never been late, never been drunk, never been dismissed, never been so much as scolded.

And she had made one rule for herself that she had never once broken.

She had never brought Posy into the Duke’s house.

Not for a fever, not for a broken shutter, not for the floods two springs ago when the Wren rose over its banks and half the cottages on the low road had water in the front rooms. She had walked four miles in the rain to leave Posy with her cousin in Farrow, and walked four miles back, and done her shift soaking wet, and never mentioned it to anyone.

Because children asked questions. Children wandered. Children put their hands on things that grown men had spent years learning not to touch.

And because the Duke of Halloway was not a man who forgave a mistake so that it would not happen again. He was a man who made a mistake memorable.

That October morning, the woman who usually watched Posy while Meg worked — Mrs. Cawley, who lived two doors down and had raised six of her own — woke with a fever so high that her daughter sent for the apothecary at dawn.

Meg had no family within twenty miles. She had no money to lose a day. And she had a Duke arriving back from the north that evening with papers that needed to be sorted and a study that needed to be dusted, and if she did not present herself at Halloway Hall by seven, she would be answering for it.

She stood in her own kitchen with her hands on the table and thought for a long moment.

Then she wrapped her daughter up, walked her up the lane, and hid her.

The room was small and half forgotten, down past the rear kitchens where the old dairy had once been, and nobody went there now except a cat. There was a stool, a bench, and a window too high for a child to climb through. Meg set down bread and apple slices, a bag of charcoal and two sticks of it for drawing, two carved wooden animals — a horse with one ear missing, a dog with a tail that had split — and Posy’s favourite book, the one with the dragon on the cover.

Then she crouched down until their faces were level.

“Three rules,” she said.

Posy held up three small fingers.

“You stay in this room. You do not go out for any reason, unless I come for you, or Mrs. Cottrell comes for you.”

“Mrs. Cawley’s sick,” Posy said.

“Mrs. Cawley is sick, yes. So Mrs. Cottrell will look in when she can.”

Posy folded one finger down. “Two rules.”

Meg almost smiled. “Do not wander. Do not shout.”

Posy folded the second finger.

“And if you somehow find yourself upstairs—” Meg stopped. Chose her words the way she chose them when Mrs. Cottrell was in a mood. “Never go near the dark door at the end of the east corridor.”

Posy’s eyes went round. “Is there a monster?”

“No.”

“A ghost?”

“No.”

“A dragon?”

“No dragons either.”

Posy considered this with the care of a magistrate. “Then why can I not go there?”

Meg looked up at the ceiling as though the room itself might be listening.

“Because it belongs to his grace. And there are places in this house that are not ours to enter.”

Posy nodded with grave seriousness. “I can be very quiet.”

Meg kissed her forehead and did not let herself hold on as long as she wanted to.

“Today,” she said, “I need you to be the quietest little girl in England.”

For several hours, Posy obeyed.

She drew a green sun, because yellow ones were boring, and gave it eleven rays because she had run out of room. She ate her apple slices one at a time, in order of size, which is to say she ate the largest first and regretted it. She set the wooden horse and the wooden dog face to face on the bench so they could have a conversation, and then, because neither of them said anything, she had the conversation for them.

By midday, Meg had begun to believe that the impossible plan might actually hold. She carried folded linen up to the west rooms, her ears tuned to the back stairs the way a mother’s ears are always tuned, and heard nothing but the ordinary sound of a house doing its work.

Then the cat arrived.

Snowdrop had belonged to Lady Rosalind. She was white, with one blue eye and one green, and she had been a wedding gift from a cousin in Bath who had not asked whether anyone wanted a cat. She had never in her life answered to a name, come when called, or acknowledged that she was anyone’s property, and she had survived three years of an empty house by sleeping in the warm places and eating what the kitchen considered beneath its notice.

She slipped into the old dairy room through a gap under the door that nobody had ever bothered to fix.

She inspected Posy’s charcoal. She sniffed the apple cores. She sat down directly on the corner of the illustrated book, which is what cats do when they wish to be understood, and then she got up and walked into the corridor.

And she stopped. And she looked back.

Posy remembered her mother’s rule. Posy was three years old.

She also lasted roughly four seconds against the invitation of a mysterious cat.

She carried her book the way her mother carried linen — against her chest, both arms around it — and followed Snowdrop past the passage door that was never bolted, along the narrow servant’s corridor that ran behind the walls, and toward the back staircase that came up beside the china pantry.

“I am not supposed to go upstairs,” she whispered.

Snowdrop climbed anyway.

“You are a very bad cat,” said Posy, and followed her.

The stairs were fourteen steps and felt like forty. At the top was the second floor, and the second floor was a different house entirely — wide, carpeted, hung with portraits of Thornburys who looked, in Posy’s private opinion, as though none of them had ever been allowed pudding.

Snowdrop walked the corridor with the confidence of something that had been born in it. Past the tall window. Past a door that stood ajar onto a room full of white-sheeted furniture. Past a table with a bowl of dried petals on it, which she ignored.

Then she stopped, and sat down, and wrapped her tail around her feet.

Posy stopped too.

Before them stood the door.

It was oak, black with age, and so tall that its top disappeared into shadow. She knew it at once. Her mother had described it, and her mother never described anything by accident. Posy’s stomach went tight in a way it had never gone tight before.

“No,” she told Snowdrop.

The cat put one paw against the door.

The door moved.

Later, and for the rest of her life, Meg Hollis would try to work out how it had happened, and would always come back to the same answer. The Duke had closed the door that afternoon. He had not turned the key. His hand had been on the handle, and his mind had been somewhere else entirely, and he had pulled the door to out of habit and let the latch rest against the plate without engaging, which is the sort of small failure that changes everything downstream of it.

Snowdrop went through the gap.

Posy stared after her.

Nothing terrible happened. No monster came out. No dragon breathed fire. The corridor stayed exactly as quiet as it had been, and the cat did not come back.

Posy took one cautious step forward. Then another.

She put both hands flat against the wood and pushed.

The door swung in on silent hinges — the steward oiled every hinge in the house twice a year, including that one, because a squeal in that corridor would have been a subject of comment.

The room was not frightening.

That surprised her. She had been braced for something. Instead there was quiet, and dust, and afternoon light coming around the edges of the curtains and turning every floating speck of it into slow gold. Books covered two walls, floor to ceiling, with a ladder on a rail. Papers lay on a broad desk in two neat stacks, as though someone had stopped between one sheet and the next and meant to come back in an hour. A globe stood in the corner, and beside it a chair drawn up to nothing in particular.

It looked less like a forbidden place than a place that had stopped in the middle of a sentence.

Snowdrop had already claimed the sofa. She was kneading the cushion with both front paws, thoroughly at home.

And only then did Posy see the man.

He was asleep in the deep chair beneath the tall window, his head tipped against the wing of it, one hand resting loosely across his chest. He wore a dark coat, plain, well cut. Even asleep there was something stern in his face — a mouth used to giving instruction, lines between the brows worn in permanently — and something tired underneath it, as though the sternness had been built to hold the tiredness in.

Posy did not know who he was. She did not know that men twice her mother’s age bowed when he came into a room. She did not know that an entire village could change its plans because a note arrived with his seal on it, or that the steward at Wrenford mill had once lost a night’s sleep over the wording of a single line in a letter from him.

She knew only two things.

The room was cold. And the sleeping man had no blanket.