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

Chapter 5

Meg knew her daughter was missing before she found the empty room.

She had been carrying folded linen toward the west rooms when a tightness crossed her chest, sudden and specific, the way it does when your body has done the arithmetic faster than your mind. She set the linen down on the window seat — she would remember that, later, the linen left folded on the seat, the one orderly thing in the whole afternoon — and went down the back stairs at a speed that would have earned her a reprimand if Mrs. Cottrell had seen it.

The old dairy door stood open.

The apple slices were on the bench. Three of them. The wooden horse and the wooden dog had been placed face to face, nose to nose, as though mid-conversation. The charcoal was on the stool, in its bag.

The book was gone.

“Posy.”

She checked the passage. She checked the pantry and the still room and the kitchen, where two scullions looked up at her and did not know anything. She checked the laundry and the courtyard and the boot room and the coal cellar, which she would not have gone into if she had been thinking clearly, because it was eight steps down and no child goes down on purpose.

Nothing.

Mrs. Cottrell came out of the still room with vinegar on her hands and asked, once, what was the matter, and then did not ask again. Within a quarter of an hour there were four of them searching, and within half an hour there were nine, and Mrs. Cottrell had stopped correcting anybody’s tone of voice, which was how Meg knew that caution had become something else.

Then the housekeeper stopped at the foot of the narrow back staircase.

“I saw the cat up here earlier,” she said. “The white one.”

Meg looked up.

She had told her daughter about the forbidden door because she thought fear would work. That was the arithmetic she had done that morning: a dark door, a raised eyebrow, a story about his grace, and the certainty that a three-year-old would keep her distance.

She understood her mistake now, and she understood it completely, standing at the bottom of fourteen stairs.

Telling a three-year-old that one door mattered more than every other door in the house had not made it dangerous. It had made it unforgettable.

She went up.

At the top, the corridor was empty, and the carpet had been walked on recently — she could see the small scuffs. She came around the corner by the tall window, and she stopped, because she could not make her legs go further for one whole second.

The oak door stood open.

Only a little. Only eight inches, perhaps. But open.

And from somewhere beyond it came her daughter’s voice, clear and unhurried, floating out into the corridor of the Duke of Halloway’s private wing:

“—and then the dragon burned his own breakfast, because he sneezed.”

Meg crossed the corridor. She put her hand flat on the door, which was warm from the afternoon, and pushed it wider.

The sight inside was so absurd that fear briefly gave way to plain disbelief.

Posy was sitting cross-legged on the carpet with the book open across her knees, mid-sentence, one finger raised to make a point. Snowdrop was curled at one end of the sofa, eyes half closed. And at the other end of the sofa — upright now, awake, the woolen blanket across his lap in folds he had clearly not made himself — sat the Duke of Halloway, listening, with an expression on his face that Meg Hollis had never seen on it and would not have believed if anyone had described it to her.

He was listening to a story about a dragon’s breakfast.

He looked up first.

Whatever softness had been there went out of his face in the time it took him to see her, and something else came in behind it — sharpened, closed, entirely correct. The Duke returned in a single breath. Meg had spent two years learning to read that face at a distance; she had never expected to see it reassemble itself from three feet away.

Posy followed his gaze and lit up.

“Mama.”

Meg stepped into the room.

“Your grace. I am sorry.”

Silence. The Duke said nothing at all, and the silence was worse than anger would have been, because anger at least tells you what you are dealing with.

She crossed to her daughter and put one hand on her shoulder, and then she made herself stop touching her, because she wanted her hands steady and they were not.

“Mrs. Cawley became ill this morning. She watches Posy while I work, and she could not, and I have no one within twenty miles, and I could not lose the day.” She heard her own voice doing what it did when she was frightened, which was to become very plain and very careful. “I made the decision to bring her here. That was my decision. Not hers.”

“You brought a child into my house without permission.”

“Yes.”

“You concealed her downstairs.”

“Yes.”

“And she ended up here.”

Meg swallowed. “Yes.”

A small hand went up. “Snowdrop brought me.”

Meg closed her eyes for half a second. “Posy, please.”

The cat, from the sofa, declined to accept any responsibility whatsoever, and did not so much as lift her head.

Meg took another breath and made herself look at him again. “I told her not to wander. I specifically told her not to come near this room. I should have found another solution and I did not, and if there is to be a consequence for it, the consequence is mine.” Her voice shook on the last word and she did not lower her eyes. “She is three. Please do not frighten her for something I caused.”

Something moved in Elias’s expression.

Most people apologized to him by making themselves smaller. They bowed lower, spoke softer, hedged, agreed with him before he had finished, and left the room diminished — and he had grown so used to it that he had stopped noticing it as a thing that happened.

Meg Hollis was terrified. He could see it plainly; her hands were not steady and her breathing was wrong. And she had still stepped between him and her child, and had not once used the child as an excuse, and had asked him for nothing except that he not punish the smaller party.

“Anyway,” Posy said.

She stood up, took her mother’s hand, and looked back at Elias with the frank assessment of a person who had known him twenty minutes.

“He did not scare me.” A pause. “He is my new friend.”

Elias went completely still.

Friend.

The word sounded ridiculous in that room. It sounded ridiculous in his mouth, and it sounded still more ridiculous in the mouth of a child in a house where he had once dismissed a kitchen girl before dawn for leaving keys on the floor. Men who had known him for twenty years did not use that word about him. His own steward did not use that word about him. He could not remember the last person who had.

Posy had known him for perhaps twenty minutes, and had apparently settled the matter without consulting him.

Meg bent to take the book from the carpet. “We will go. This will not happen again.”

“Wait.”

Her hand stopped. She straightened up slowly.

Elias removed the blanket from his lap and folded it once, along its old crease, and set it over the arm of the sofa where it had lived for three years.

He had spent three years making certain that nobody entered this room. A child had walked into it, ignored every rule attached to it, covered him with his dead sister’s blanket, filled the silence with a foolish story about a dragon, and asked him a question that no one else in England had dared ask him.

He should have wanted the room empty again. He should have wanted the door shut and the key turned and the silence back.

Instead the thought of the door closing behind her produced a sensation disturbingly close to disappointment, and he was too honest with himself — had always been too honest with himself, which was half his trouble — to pretend otherwise.

Posy solved the problem for him.

“Can I come back tomorrow?”

“No, sweetheart,” Meg said immediately.

Elias looked at Meg. “Tomorrow. Three o’clock.”

Meg stared at him.

“Your grace, I do not think that is a good idea.”

One dark eyebrow lifted. It might have been the first time in eleven years that a housemaid had told the Duke of Halloway that one of his ideas was poor, and done it inside his own house.

Meg continued before her courage had time to leave her.

“She is three. She does not understand who you are. And I cannot allow her to become part of something I do not understand.”

He could have ended it there. My house, my decision. The words rose automatically — he had said them or their equivalents a thousand times, to tenants, to lawyers, to his own family — and he did not speak them.

She was not challenging his authority for the pleasure of it. She was protecting her daughter. The distinction mattered more than the sentence did.

“What do you need to understand?” he asked.

Meg blinked. She had clearly come prepared for a different conversation.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want her to come back?” Her voice was low but level. “Yesterday she did not exist to you. Today she walked into a room no one is permitted to enter, and instead of dismissing me — instead of putting us both out of the gate — you are asking me to bring her here again.”

Elias looked at the child, who was watching them both with an interest that suggested she understood far more of it than she should.

He could not explain to Meg that her daughter’s voice had made the room feel less dead. He could not explain that being asked whether he was sad had hurt more than any accusation anyone had ever brought against him. He was a man who had spent three years constructing an answer to grief, and the answer had been walls, and a three-year-old had walked through them without noticing they existed.

So he gave her the only answer he had that was true and also sayable.

“Because I want to know how the story ends.”

Meg studied him for a long moment. Her caution did not disappear. It changed shape, which was better.

“One hour,” she said.

He nodded.

“I bring her. I collect her. If she does not want to come, she does not come.”

He was not accustomed to terms being presented to him by a woman standing in her work apron. He noticed that, too — and noticed, with some interest, that he did not mind it.

“Agreed.”

Posy’s whole face brightened. “And I can bring another book.”

“One problem at a time.”

“That means yes.”

Before he could answer, she had taken her mother’s hand and was heading for the door, dragging the book against her hip. At the threshold she turned around.

“Do not lose the blanket,” she said, and disappeared into the corridor.

And for the first time since he had walked into that room three years ago, Elias Thornbury found himself alone in it.

He stood by the sofa for a while, looking at the patch of carpet where the child had been sitting, where the pile was pressed flat in a small round shape.

For three years he had believed that silence was the only safe thing this room could contain.

He had discovered something worse that afternoon.

He missed the sound of her voice.