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

Chapter 6

At three o’clock the following afternoon, Meg Hollis stood in the east corridor with her daughter beside her and wondered whether coming back had been the single greatest mistake of her life.

Posy wore the same yellow dress under a knitted shawl, because she had decided on it first thing that morning and had defended the decision twice. She carried the book she had promised — The Star That Lost Its Way, which she had never actually finished — and, in her other hand, a folded drawing that she refused to explain.

Meg lifted her hand to knock.

The door opened before her knuckles touched the wood.

Elias stood on the other side. He had been standing there, she realised, and had heard her coming down the corridor, which meant that the Duke of Halloway had been waiting by his own door like a footman.

“You are late.”

Meg looked past him, down the corridor to the long case clock at the far end, whose face was the size of a dinner plate.

“It is precisely three.”

Elias took out his pocket watch, looked at it, and looked at the clock.

Posy smiled up at him.

“Maybe your watch is nervous.”

For the smallest moment, something that might have been amusement entered his eyes. Then it was gone, tucked back wherever he kept such things.

Posy stepped toward the room, stopped, and looked back at her mother.

And that — Meg would think later, turning it over the way she turned over the small good things — was the thing that decided her. Yesterday the child had forgotten every warning she had ever been given. Today she remembered that permission mattered, and she stood in the doorway and waited for it.

Meg nodded. “One hour.”

Elias moved aside. “You may remain.”

Meg had expected to be told to leave. She had prepared for it, in fact, and had already arranged three separate things she could say about it. “I thought you wanted Posy.”

“I said she could return.” He returned to the desk. “I did not say you were forbidden.”

Meg stood near the doorway with her mending basket in her lap and did not sit down, because there was no chair to sit on, and because she wanted to understand this before she made herself comfortable in it.

Posy went straight to the same patch of carpet, sat down on it as though it belonged to her, and opened the book.

“This one is about a star that gets lost.”

“Indeed.”

“She thinks nobody can see her. But they can. They are just not looking properly.”

Elias did not reply. He had letters in front of him, and a rent order he had been avoiding, and a boundary report that had been on that desk in a pile for eleven days.

For ten minutes, he pretended that the child’s presence had no effect on him whatsoever. He read two letters. He signed the rent order. He wrote a note to his steward about the mill at Wrenford and underlined two words in it.

Posy continued reading, inventing words whenever the printed ones defeated her, which was often. At one point she held the book up in the air and turned it around so he could see the illustration.

“This is where the star thinks nobody can see her.”

Elias made a small sound, which he intended as acknowledgement and which came out as something closer to a laugh.

Posy lowered the book.

“You have to look at it or it does not count.”

His pen stopped on the page.

Meg, from the doorway, very nearly intervened. It was the sort of sentence a servant’s child could get scolded for in half the houses she had worked in, and she had already opened her mouth to smooth it over when Elias slowly raised his eyes from his letter.

He looked at the illustration. A night sky, badly printed, with a small star at the bottom corner that had been drawn with a face.

“I see,” he said.

“Good.” Posy turned the page.

Twenty minutes later she stopped again.

“Do you have honey biscuits?”

Elias stared at her. “Why would I have honey biscuits?”

“Grown people keep food in drawers.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mama.”

At the door, Meg closed her eyes and thought about the twenty-seven years of her life that had led to this.

Elias glanced over at her. “Your mother has damaged my reputation.”

Meg did not dignify that with an answer. She did not need to. Something in the set of his shoulders had changed, and she was a woman who noticed things about shoulders, because six years of marriage to a man who worked with stone had taught her that a body tells you the truth faster than a face does.

The following afternoon, a small parcel of honey biscuits appeared in the bottom drawer of the desk in the east room.

Elias maintained that they had always been there.

Posy did not believe him, and said so, and said it every time she opened the drawer for a week, which was eleven times.

The hour became a pattern, and the pattern became a habit, and habits in great houses become customs whether or not anyone has authorised them.

Posy read. She drew. She asked questions that no one else in England would have dreamed of asking, and she gradually left pieces of herself in the east room the way a child leaves stones in a pocket — a ribbon on the windowsill, a wooden horse under the sofa, a charcoal mark on the carpet edge that Meg scrubbed at for six minutes before giving up and pretending she had not seen it.

The curtains were opened every morning now. That was Mrs. Cottrell’s doing, and Mrs. Cottrell never explained her reasoning to anyone, and the whole household understood what it meant anyway.

The door stayed unlocked in the afternoons.

A child-sized chair appeared in the corner, which Elias insisted had been made by mistake and which had, in fact, been made specifically, by the same carpenter who had set aside walnut twenty years earlier and who had never once been asked what he thought of any of it. The carpenter was sixty-one now and said nothing still, and would have said nothing for a bishop.

Mrs. Cottrell nearly dropped a tray when she came into the study one afternoon and found the Duke of Halloway standing in the middle of it holding a box of coloured chalks, examining the back of the box as though it might contain instructions.

Meg saw the changes. She also refused to be comforted by them, which was not the same as being unkind.

He never asked to be alone with Posy. He never asked her to stay past the hour when she was tired. He never once treated a child’s disagreement as disobedience — and Meg, who had worked in four houses and had seen what happened to children who answered back in the wrong room, understood that those small choices meant more than any large gesture he could have made.

One afternoon, Posy brought him a drawing.

Three figures stood under a very large yellow sun. Meg wore blue, because blue was her colour. Posy had brown hair and a green dress she did not own. And Elias towered over both of them in black, twice their height, with his arms at his sides and his mouth a straight line.

Snowdrop floated above all of them, having been exempted from gravity by the artist.

Elias studied it for a long moment.

“Why am I twice the size of everyone?”

“Because you are very big.”

“That is not how perspective works.”

Posy shrugged. “It is my picture.”

Elias set the drawing beside his writing box, on top of the letters, where it could be seen from the door, and left it there.

Several days after that, in the middle of a story about a girl who lived in a lighthouse, Posy stopped in the middle of a sentence.

“Do you have a little girl?”

Elias was standing at the window with a cup of tea, watching rain come in over the wood. Meg, folding linen near the door, went still — not afraid, exactly, but careful.

“No,” he said.

“Did you ever?”

“No.”

Posy studied him the way she studied a page she could not read.

“Do you want one?”

The room tightened around him. It was not a rude question. It was not even, on the face of it, a difficult one, and any of the county families would have laughed it off in the time it took to lift a glass.

But Elias’s gaze had moved, on its own, to the little portrait on the shelf.

Two nights before, for the first time in three years, he had turned it upright. Rosalind smiled out of it in painted ivory, twenty-four years old, one hand resting across the front of her dress where the child had been.

Posy followed his eyes.

“Who is she?”

He could have changed the subject. He had changed the subject on matters far more important than this, at dinner tables, in front of men who held his debts and men who wanted his land, and he had done it smoothly enough that no one had ever noticed.

“My sister,” he said.

“Where is she?”

Meg stepped forward into the doorway, ready to stop it if it needed stopping — and he saw that, and he saw that she was leaving the decision with him, and he did not take the offer.

“She died.”

Posy’s face changed. Not into fear. Into recognition.

“Like my papa.”

“Yes.”

“Was there a baby?”

Elias’s throat closed, briefly and completely. He waited for it to open again.

“There was going to be.”

Posy waited with him. Then, when he did not continue: “My papa’s name was Hugh. I do not remember his voice.”

Meg looked down at her hands.

“Mama does,” Posy said. “Sometimes she tells me stories so I know him.”

Elias looked toward the door. The sentence had revealed far more than the child understood by it; she had handed him, without knowing, the whole architecture of Meg Hollis’s life. A widow who had kept a dead man alive for her daughter by talking about him. Who had made of a story a thing a child could hold.

He had done the opposite. He had spent three years making his sister into a silence, and had called it remembrance, and had believed it.

“You can tell me stories about her,” Posy said. “About your sister.”

He looked at the portrait. “Why?”

“So you do not forget things.”

He almost laughed at the impossibility of it. He did not forget. That was the entire difficulty. He remembered her stealing his chair and arguing with him about the flower beds and waving from the carriage window on the last morning he saw her alive — the messenger, the rain, the physician’s face at the farmhouse door. He had kept every memory of her, and had treated each one as a wound, because that was what they were.

Posy appeared to believe that memories were things you could hand to another person, and that handing them over was how you kept them from going out.

“Perhaps,” he said.

She went back to her carpet and continued her story about the lighthouse girl as though she had not just rearranged something inside him.

When the hour ended, Meg paused at the door with the mending basket under her arm.

“Thank you,” Elias said.

Meg frowned. “For what?”

“For not stopping her.” He looked at the child, who was collecting the wooden animals and narrating their journey home. “She was not trying to hurt me.”

“Most people do not need to try.”

Meg said it without any particular weight, and moved to go — and then stopped, because the room had gone quiet in a way that was not the old quiet, and he had looked at her as though she had said something he needed to write down.

“Posy likes you,” she said.

Elias’s expression closed a fraction. “She likes everyone.”

“No.” Meg shifted the basket. “She talks to everyone. That is different.”

And she left before he could answer, which he suspected — later, thinking about it — had been deliberate.