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

Chapter 4

The blanket had been folded on the arm of the sofa for three years. Its creases were still in it. When Posy dragged it down, it came away with a soft sound and left a clean pale square of upholstery behind where the dust had not been able to settle.

It was far too big for her. She got one corner halfway across the floor and had to step on it and haul, which is how a three-year-old solves most engineering problems. She was breathing hard by the time she reached the chair.

She climbed up on the footstool, which wobbled, and then on the arm, which did not, and pitched the wool over the sleeping man as carefully as her mother covered her at night — tucked at the shoulder, smoothed once across the chest, the way it was done in their cottage when the fire had gone low and the frost was on the inside of the glass.

Snowdrop watched from the sofa with her mismatched eyes. She did not interfere. Cats do not.

Satisfied, Posy climbed back down, sat cross-legged on the carpet a little way off, opened her book, and began whispering the story she knew nearly by heart.

It was about a lonely dragon.

That was the whole title, in large red letters, and it was the whole point of the book. The dragon in the story lived in a cave in a mountain and every knight who came to the mountain came to kill him, and every village below the mountain bolted its doors when the smoke rose, and everybody agreed the dragon was a terror and a scourge and a plague upon the land.

Nobody in the book ever asked the dragon anything.

Nobody ever asked why.

Posy turned the pages slowly and told each one out loud in a whisper, because the man was sleeping and her mother had said do not shout and she was a girl of her word. “…and the knight came up the mountain with his sword, and he did not knock, because knights do not knock…”

Behind her, the Duke’s breathing changed.

Elias Thornbury had slept badly for two nights. A dispute over timber rights had eaten the whole of the morning — two landowners, one boundary, nine hours of talk — and it had left him with the particular headache that comes from being the only reasonable man in a room of reasonable men behaving badly. There was also an unopened letter from Lord Gideon Vaughn lying among the papers on his desk, the fourth in as many months, again asserting an old family claim to the river road.

He had dismissed it as bluster and given it to his steward. He was not, that afternoon, thinking about Vaughn at all.

He had come into the east room for the first time in three years because he was too tired to keep lying to himself about it. He had told himself, for three years, that there was no reason to open the door. There was every reason. He simply did not want to.

Memory frightened him more than any living rival had ever managed.

He had unlocked the door, walked in, stood in the middle of the room, and looked at her cup on the shelf, at her portrait face down on the desk, at the blanket folded on the sofa arm.

Then he had sat down to close his eyes for a minute. That was all. He had not meant to sleep.

The boy in the story had just reached the mouth of the cave.

Elias’s eyes opened.

For several seconds he did not move at all. His training was very good and it had kept him alive through two winters of bad roads and one very bad week in London, and his training told him first that something in the room was different, and second that the thing was small.

A child was sitting on the carpet of a room nobody had entered in three years.

Snowdrop was curled at the end of the sofa, six inches from his boot, entirely unbothered.

And the blanket that had come from London in a paper parcel, the one he had never once used, was lying across his chest.

Elias’s first coherent thought was that he had finally gone strange, the way some men did. His second was that he was awake, and the child was real, and he could hear her whispering.

The girl looked up.

“Hello,” she whispered.

He did not answer.

“I gave you the blanket because you looked cold.”

Elias looked at her. Then at the blanket. Then at the cat. Then back at her. He had not been addressed like that by anyone since Rosalind died, and Rosalind had been dead three years, and he found that he could not immediately remember how to produce a sentence in response.

“Who are you?”

His voice came out rough. It had been asleep. It was not, generally, a voice that people made small talk at.

“Posy.”

He waited. The child did not continue.

“Posy,” he repeated.

“Posy Bennett.” She tilted her head. “You are supposed to tell me your name too.”

Elias Thornbury, Duke of Halloway, master of four farms and two villages and a river crossing worth more than either of them, sat in a chair with a dead woman’s blanket on his chest and obeyed a three-year-old.

“Elias.”

She tried it carefully, the way she tried new foods. “Eli-as.”

“Close enough.”

She smiled at him.

Adults approached Elias for one of five reasons. They were frightened of him, or they wanted something from him, or they owed him money, or they hoped to obtain his favour, or they were trying to avoid his displeasure — and usually it was two or three of the five at once. He had not had a single conversation in three years that was not, in some way, a transaction.

This child had covered him with a blanket because sleeping people should not be cold.

That was the entire account of her interest in him. That was the whole of it.

She studied him for a moment longer. Then she asked, “Are you very sad?”

The question went in cleanly, like a well-made knife into a joint, and Elias felt it land somewhere no insult had ever reached.

“What?”

She touched her own chest with one finger. “You look sad here.”

Nobody had asked him that in three years.

People asked whether he was angry. They asked whether he approved. They asked whether a tenant should be forgiven, whether a debt should be delayed, whether a contract should be signed, whether a servant should be dismissed, whether a road should be metalled, whether a tithe should be collected in kind or in coin. Sadness was not a word that existed in his presence. Grief had hardened into reputation so long ago that even he had begun to mistake the one for the other.

He could have told her she was mistaken. He had told better men than her, on worse evidence, that they were mistaken, and he had done it without raising his voice.

Instead — perhaps because he was too tired to rebuild every wall at once, and perhaps because the room had not heard a child’s voice in it since before it was shut — he said, “Yes.”

Posy nodded solemnly. “Mama gets sad too.”

Something must have moved in his face, because she kept going.

“Sometimes she cries when she thinks I am sleeping. I do not tell her I hear.”

“Why not?”

“Because maybe crying is something she needs.”

Elias looked away, out the window, at nothing.

That was not a sentence he had expected from a child in a crooked dress with a ribbon tied wrong in her hair and a charcoal smudge on her chin. He had expected nonsense about dragons. He had not expected to be instructed in the nature of grief by someone who had been alive for three years.

“How old are you?”

“Three.”

“That explains several things.”

“What things?”

“Never mind.”

Posy reopened the book. “Do you want the rest? The dragon gets nicer later.”

He should have sent her away. He should have stood up, and rung for the housekeeper, and had the child removed from the east corridor and returned to whoever had lost her, and then he should have walked down to his study and closed the door and gone back to being what the county expected.

He heard himself ask instead: “Why is the dragon angry?”

Posy considered it, one finger marking her place.

“He thinks everyone wants to take his cave.”

Elias looked slowly around the room he had kept sealed from the world for three years — the books, the dead woman’s cup, the portrait on its face, the blanket that was no longer folded.

“I see,” he said.

Posy smiled, pleased to have been understood, and turned the page.