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

Chapter 8

That evening, Elias stood in the small dining room at the end of the west corridor and looked at the table.

Three places had been set.

He had given the order himself, twenty minutes earlier, without preamble and without explanation, and his butler — a man of thirty years’ service named Mr. Sallow, who had survived two dukes and one collapsed roof and had never once asked his employer a personal question — had simply said, “Yes, your grace,” and gone to arrange it.

Elias did not entirely know why he had done it. He knew only that he had been standing at the window in his study when the bell rang for the servants’ supper, and that the household had gone quiet in that particular way it went quiet when everyone had somewhere to be, and that he had discovered he did not want the evening to be like the others.

Meg had intended to take Posy home. Posy had reminded her, twice, that nobody had answered the question about supper.

“You may stay,” Elias said.

Meg looked at him.

“For supper,” he clarified.

“I understood.”

She glanced down at Posy, who was pretending very hard not to be listening and who had arranged her face into the expression of a person examining an interesting section of skirting board.

“One supper,” Meg said. “And tomorrow I am still your servant.”

“Of course.”

“Then we will stay.”

The meal began awkwardly, which was inevitable. Mr. Sallow stood at the sideboard with the expression of a man watching his employer walk along a narrow ledge. Mrs. Cottrell had produced a soup she had clearly not planned to produce and a joint of mutton that had been intended for Wednesday. Meg ate the way she ate everything, carefully, with her back straight, and Posy ate the way a three-year-old eats, which is to say she investigated the soup by means of her fingers before deciding it was acceptable.

Then Posy dropped a pea.

She dropped it on purpose, with the technique of someone who had been practising. It bounced off the table edge, rolled under the chair, and disappeared.

“Henry,” she said.

Meg stopped chewing. “Posy.”

“He is hiding.”

Elias looked down at the floor. Then at the child. Then at Meg, who had closed her eyes.

“We will find him after,” he said.

They did. All three of them, on their knees in the small dining room at half past seven in the evening — the Duke of Halloway with his coat off and his sleeve cuff in the soup spoon — while Posy narrated the journey of a runaway pea with considerable literary ambition. Mr. Sallow stood at the door and chose, with the wisdom of thirty years, to see nothing.

By dessert, Posy had moved on to arguing that honey cakes were superior to plum pudding in every respect.

Elias disagreed. He disagreed at length, on the grounds of texture, of season, of the proper order of things.

Posy overruled him.

He quietly accepted a second honey cake.

Supper happened again after that. Not often — perhaps once a fortnight at first, then once a week, then without any particular accounting. It was never announced as a custom. It simply accumulated, the way the child’s belongings had accumulated in the east room.

And the meals did their work in the way that ordinary things do.

Meg learned that Elias added sugar to his tea only when he was exhausted, and that he denied doing so whenever it was noticed, and that the denial got less convincing the more exhausted he became.

Elias learned that Meg hummed when she concentrated. She did it under her breath — three notes, over and over, a tune from somewhere he could not place — and it happened most often when she was mending by the window in the east room, and he found after some weeks that he had begun to arrange his afternoons so that it would happen.

Nothing was said about any of it.

Their closeness came from those small accumulated things rather than from anything either of them could have pointed to. It came from the pea under the chair and the second cup of tea and the fact that she had stopped standing in the doorway and had started to sit down.

Posy, meanwhile, was reaching conclusions of her own.

One afternoon in the east room, she closed her book, set it on the carpet, and delivered herself of a question.

“Why do you not have a wife?”

Meg, who was threading a needle, very nearly dropped it.

“Posy. That is personal.”

Posy ignored this and looked at Elias, who had paused with his pen above the page.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Elias glanced at Meg, in the manner of a man looking for a rope that had been thrown to him. Meg, who was discovering that she had an unsuspected capacity for enjoying the misfortunes of dukes, did not throw one.

“It is complicated,” he said.

Posy sighed. “Adults say that when they do not want to explain.”

“Sometimes things are complicated.”

“Mama does not have a husband either.”

Meg closed her eyes. “Posy—”

“She does not,” Posy said, in case anyone was confused.

Elias’s mouth threatened to do something. He got it under control.

Posy continued, warming to her theme.

“Mama makes good bread. You have too many rooms. Mama worries about money. You worry about everything else.” She counted these on her fingers with the confidence of an auditor. “You both drink tea. And you were lonely before us.”

The smile went off Meg’s face.

Elias looked at the child for a moment. “What makes you think I was lonely?”

“You always ate supper alone.”

Children could be merciless without the slightest intention of cruelty, and Elias Thornbury, who had been wounded by professionals, discovered that this was a different kind of wound entirely. It did not sting. It simply arrived, and stayed, and could not be argued with.

Posy looked at her mother.

“Mama gets lonely too,” she said. “But she says being lonely is better than being with someone unkind.”

Meg looked at the floor.

Posy brightened, as though a puzzle had resolved itself.

“So you could marry mama,” she announced. “But only if you are not unkind.”

“That is enough matchmaking for today,” Meg said.

Posy frowned. “What is matchmaking?”

Elias leaned back in his chair.

“A profession you are too young to enter.”

For once, Meg was grateful for him.

And yet something had shifted in the room, and neither of them mentioned it, and both of them knew it. It lay under the afternoons from then on, quiet and unexamined, the way a paid-out rope lies under the water.