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

Chapter 7

A week later, Posy arrived at the east room in a state of outrage.

There had been a serious village dispute. It involved a wooden hoop, a missing blue ribbon, and a boy named Ned whose understanding of ownership was flexible in the way that only a six-year-old’s can be. Posy had pursued the matter with the thoroughness of a magistrate and the vocabulary of a three-year-old, and she had lost, and she had been told to sit down, and she had not sat down.

She was exhausted. She insisted she was not.

She yawned through the first page of her book. She yawned through the second. She got up and inspected the globe, which she had inspected before, and asked whether the blue bits were jam, which she had asked before. Elias, who had begun to develop a tolerance for questions he could not usefully answer, told her that they were not, and she accepted this without argument, which was in itself a sign that something was wrong.

She climbed onto the sofa beside him to show him an illustration. She did this most afternoons now, and he had stopped noticing that he had stopped minding.

“This,” she said, “is the girl who is not allowed to swim.”

“Why is she not allowed?”

“Because of the seaweed.”

“That seems arbitrary.”

She did not answer, because she was halfway through explaining the seaweed when her words began to slow. Her head settled against his shoulder, considering the matter. Then it slipped lower, until her cheek was resting flat against his chest, over the coat, over the ribs.

One small hand stayed curled around the edge of his lapel.

Within a minute she was asleep.

Elias stopped moving entirely.

Snowdrop, who had been occupying the far end of the sofa, rearranged herself against Posy’s legs with the air of a housekeeper confirming that all was well, and then went to sleep too.

The Duke of Halloway — a man who could silence a dining room with a look, who had once stared a Yorkshire wool merchant out of his own argument, who had not been touched by anyone who was not a valet in three years — sat trapped under a sleeping three-year-old and was genuinely, sincerely afraid of breathing too deeply.

He had discovered something about children, which is that they weigh more than you expect and that this is not the difficulty. The difficulty was that she had chosen him. She had been awake and had options and had come and lain down on him anyway, and there was no version of him in the world, past or present, that had earned it.

Twenty minutes later, Meg came back with the linen she had gone to fetch, and stopped in the doorway.

Posy was asleep on the Duke’s chest. His right arm hovered around her without quite touching her back, held there in a curve like a parenthesis he had not finished.

“She fell asleep,” he whispered, as though Meg might not have noticed.

Meg covered her mouth with the back of her hand, and a laugh got out anyway.

“You look terrified.”

“I am not terrified.”

“You have not moved.”

“She is asleep. Children survive movement.”

“Your grace.”

Elias looked down at the top of Posy’s head, at the ribbon tied crooked in her hair, which it always was.

“What if she wakes?”

Meg folded her arms. “Then I imagine she will continue being three years old and exceptionally dangerous.”

The laugh that came out of her then was the first unguarded sound Elias had ever heard her make. It was not a housemaid’s laugh. It was not careful, and it was not quiet, and for one thoroughly disorienting moment he forgot to be offended by it — forgot, in fact, to be anything at all.

Meg stepped further into the room. “I should take her.”

Elias’s hand settled, finally, lightly, against Posy’s back.

“May I carry her?”

He asked it instead of announcing it. He heard the difference himself, and so did she.

Meg looked at him for a second longer than the question required.

“She wakes if you hold her too high.”

He gathered Posy up the way he had once gathered a colt that had broken its leg in a ditch — slowly, entirely focused, with the concentration of a man handling something that could not be replaced. She rearranged herself against his shoulder without opening her eyes and put two fingers in her mouth, which she had not done in months, and which Meg did not comment on.

He carried her down the corridor and along the narrow service passage to the small sitting room past the china pantry, where a bed had been made up for her with two blankets because the room was on the north side. He laid her down with a care that Meg found difficult to watch.

When Meg pulled the blanket up over her daughter, neither of them seemed able to leave.

They went back to the east room almost by accident.

Without Posy’s voice in it, the room felt larger. Elias poured tea from the pot that Mrs. Cottrell had begun, three afternoons ago, sending up with two cups on the tray instead of one. He lifted the second cup in silent question, and Meg — after a moment — nodded, and took it.

For a while, only the clock spoke.

“That drawing she brought you,” Meg said finally. “The one with the sun.”

“Yes.”

“She drew it eleven days ago.” She turned the cup slowly in her hands. “She has been talking about it since. She wanted it to be right.”

Elias looked at the drawing on the desk.

“You told Posy stories about her father,” he said.

“Yes.”

“What was his name?”

“Hugh.”

He let the name sit. He did not ask the next question — and because he did not, because he simply waited, Meg found that she wanted to answer it.

“He was a stonemason. He was repairing the tower at St. Mary’s, over at Ashfield, three parishes away. They sent for him specially, because he was good.” She said it without pride and without bitterness; she had long ago worn the edges off it, or had come to a working arrangement with them. “A support gave way. Wet timber. It had been signed off twice.”

Elias’s jaw tightened. “Was anyone held responsible?”

Meg’s mouth did something that was not quite a smile.

“Everyone was responsible until men with money began speaking. After that, apparently nobody was.”

There was no bitterness in her voice, which was what made the sentence heavy. She said it the way a person states the height of a river — as a fact about the world, measured, unarguable.

“We had a physician from the next village. He was very good, they said. And a curate who was very kind.” She took a sip. “The curate came to my door afterwards with his hat in his hands and told me the matter would not proceed, and I thanked him for coming, and shut the door, and stood in my kitchen for a quarter of an hour without moving.”

“He left that morning complaining that I had burned the bread,” she added. “He kissed my head while he said it. That is what he did when he said it.”

She stopped, because she had not meant to say that part, and did not know why she had.

Elias looked toward the fire.

“I am sorry,” he said.

Meg nodded slowly.

She had heard those words a great many times in three years. From the curate, from the neighbours, from Mrs. Cottrell, from women at the market who meant it. They had all been sincere and they had all sounded, after a while, like the same words.

His did not sound automatic. She had to give him that. He had said it the way a man says a thing he has decided to be true.

“The worst part came later,” she said.

He looked at her, which was how she knew he wanted her to go on and was not going to make her.

“After the funeral, people stopped knowing what to say. So they stopped coming. That was the first winter.” She turned the cup once more. “But the rent did not stop knowing what to say. Neither did the price of coal. Posy kept needing shoes. She grew out of the last pair in eleven weeks and I had to ask my cousin for the money, and I have never in my life felt smaller than I did that afternoon.”

Elias said nothing.

“I used to envy people who could disappear after losing someone,” she said. “Go somewhere nobody knew them. Start again where nobody expected them to be sad. People like me could not do that. There was no one to do the bread and the rent and the shoes.”

“People like me,” she repeated, and met his eyes.

“Yes,” he said.

He took it without defence, which she had not expected either.

“I locked a room,” he said.

“You locked much more than a room.”

His mouth almost moved. Meg took another sip of tea and said the rest of it, because it was in her now and there was no use pretending it was not.

“You had enough money and enough servants to make your grief private. That is what money is for, in a way. It buys you a room nobody enters.” She set the cup down. “I did not have a room. I carried mine into kitchens, and along muddy roads, and through market days, and back home to a crying baby at eleven at night. There was nowhere to put it down.”

Elias looked at the portrait on the shelf.

“I thought if I stayed angry, I would not have to feel anything else,” he said.

“Did it work?”

“For a while.” He turned the cup. “And after that it became easier than stopping.”

Meg understood that. She understood it exactly, and the understanding was an odd kind of company — not comfort, precisely, but recognition. Their griefs were not equal and neither of them pretended they were. He had lost a sister and a niece and a version of his own future. She had lost a husband and a roof’s worth of security and the ability to be tired in her own house.

But exhaustion had made them legible to one another, and legibility was more than Meg had had in three years.

Snowdrop chose that moment to jump onto the desk and sit down in the middle of it, between the two cups, with her tail wrapped neatly over the Duke’s correspondence.

Meg looked at the cat.

“There,” she said. “The true ruler of Halloway Hall.”

Elias raised an eyebrow. “She enters every room, hears every secret, and answers no questions.”

“That is not—” Meg started, and then he laughed.

It was a real laugh. Low, brief, surprised out of him, and it stopped as soon as he noticed it, as though he had caught himself doing something improper in his own study.

Meg stared at him.

“What?”

“I have never heard you laugh.”

“Then clearly you have not been around me enough.”

The words came out before he had considered them, which was not a thing that happened to him. Their eyes met across the desk and neither of them moved, and the clock got through four whole ticks in the quiet.

“Mama.”

They both turned.

Posy stood in the doorway with her hair flattened on one side and a blanket dragging on the floor, her face still creased from the cushion.

Meg set her cup down and went to her. “What are you doing awake?”

“You were gone.”

“I am sorry.”

Posy looked at her mother. Then at the Duke. Then at the two cups on the desk, one of them halfway down, which was apparently a matter of significance.

“Were you talking without me?”

“Adults occasionally manage it,” Elias said.

Posy did not look convinced. She climbed onto the sofa beside Meg, arranged herself against her mother’s side, and considered the room.

“Do you eat supper alone?”

Elias paused. “Usually.”

“Why?”

“Because that is how I eat supper.”

Posy frowned at the unfairness of this, and then looked up at her mother.

“Why do we not eat supper with Elias?”

Meg’s hand stopped moving through her daughter’s hair.

Across the room, the Duke of Halloway became very still.

Nobody answered.