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

Chapter 9

The outside world came in with the autumn rain.

It began with a carriage.

Meg and Posy were coming back from Farrow market on a Tuesday, in a hired coach with a cracked window and a driver who did not talk. Posy had been given a paper twist of barley sugar for good behaviour and had eaten two pieces and hidden the rest in her shoe, which she believed was a secret.

She looked out of the small window near the crossroads and said, “That man is there again.”

Meg followed her gaze.

A rider in a brown cloak stood at the edge of the lane behind them, at the mouth of the track that ran back toward the Halloway woods. He was not moving. He was watching the coach.

“What man?”

“The one from yesterday.”

Meg’s body went cold from the neck down.

“What did he say to you?”

“Nothing today.”

“Yesterday.”

Posy picked at the paper twist. “Yesterday, he asked if I was Posy Bennett.”

Meg gripped the edge of the seat. The barley sugar was forgotten. Outside, the rider turned his horse down another lane and was gone, unhurried, as though he had finished an errand.

“Did you answer him?”

“I said yes.”

Meg did not sleep that night.

She lay in bed with her daughter beside her — Posy had taken to sleeping in her mother’s bed on the cold nights and Meg had stopped pretending to mind — and stared at the ceiling and went through it, over and over, in the order it had happened. The market. The crossroads. The lane behind them, which was not on the way to anything.

A stranger knew her daughter’s name.

The following morning, she went up to the east room before the hour and told Elias, and he reacted too quickly.

“What did he look like?”

She watched him.

“You are not surprised.”

“I am concerned. That is not the same.”

“That is not what I said.” She kept her voice level. “I said you are not surprised. I am looking at your face, and you are not.”

Elias looked away for half a second.

It was enough.

Meg’s suspicion sharpened, and she carried it with her all that day, turning it over between tasks. She dusted the morning room and thought about it. She took the tray up at four and watched him while he talked to Posy about the star book and thought about it.

Near the servants’ entrance, an hour before supper, she saw Mr. Reed.

Mr. Reed was one of the gamekeepers. He had worked the Halloway woods for nine years and he was a quiet man with a red face and a bad knee and a way of standing very still. He was not in the woods that evening. He was standing at the top of the lane, fifty yards from the gate, in the ordinary posture of a man waiting for someone.

Meg had seen him the evening before as well. Outside her cottage. Which was on the Farrow road, a mile from the woods, and was not anywhere a gamekeeper had business being.

She walked down the lane to him.

“Mr. Reed.”

He took his hat off. “Mrs. Hollis.”

“Why were you outside my cottage last night?”

He hesitated, and the hesitation answered before his mouth did.

“I think you should speak with his grace.”

“Mr. Reed.”

“I think,” he said, with the genuine discomfort of a man who had been given an order he did not much like, “you should speak with his grace.”

Meg walked straight back up the lane, through the door, up the back stairs, and along the east corridor without stopping to take off her shawl.

Posy was on the carpet telling Snowdrop a story. Elias stood at his desk with a letter in his hand.

“We need to speak,” Meg said.

He looked at her face. He understood immediately — she gave him that much — and he set the letter down and asked Posy, in an even voice, to take the cat into the adjoining sitting room and shut the door.

When the door closed, Meg turned on him.

“How long?”

“Meg—”

“How long have your men been watching us?”

“They are not watching you.”

“Do not change the word because you prefer how it sounds.”

His jaw tightened. “They are protecting you.”

“Without telling me.”

“There was no confirmed danger.”

“A stranger knew my daughter’s name. That is exactly why I ordered it.”

“Protection I did not know existed.” She took a step closer. “Would knowing have made you safer?”

His answer came too fast, and she saw the moment he heard how it sounded.

“Would knowing,” Meg said slowly, “have made me safer.”

Elias said nothing.

“That was the question, and you answered it. You do not get to decide whether I am too frightened to know the truth. You put men around my cottage and around my child and you call it kindness and I am supposed to be grateful, and I am not grateful, and you have not yet explained why a stranger is asking my daughter’s name at a crossroads.”

“I was trying to prevent you from being afraid over something I could manage.”

“There.” She pointed at the space between them. “That is the problem. You still believe you can manage it. And you still believe that because you can manage it, no one else requires a voice.”

Elias felt the old instinct rise — the one that ended arguments, not by winning them but by having the standing to stop them. This is my house. This is my estate. This is my protection, my arrangement, my decision.

He had used that instinct on better arguments than hers and had never once regretted it in the moment.

Then he remembered every afternoon in which a three-year-old had handed him back a chalk in the wrong colour and refused to be corrected. Every time Meg had stood her ground in a doorway while everyone else in the room bowed.

He forced himself to answer differently.

“You are right.”

Meg had prepared for resistance so thoroughly that the words left her with nothing to push against.

Elias went to the desk, opened the second drawer, and took out a bundle of papers tied with tape.

“You should have known from the beginning,” he said. “I told myself otherwise, and I was wrong.”

He laid it out for her on the desk — the whole of it, in order, the way he would have laid it out for a lawyer.

Lord Gideon Vaughn held land to the east, and debt out of proportion to it, and ambitions larger than both. For eight months he had been pressing a claim to the old river road that crossed a corner of Halloway land at the Wrenford bend. It was not a long road. It ran for two miles between two market towns and gave Halloway control of the crossing, and the crossing gave Halloway the tolls and the commerce and the influence over carriage traffic in the whole valley. Vaughn’s lawyers had produced a deed from 1698 granting his family partial rights of passage.

Elias’s lawyers thought the deed was a forgery. They could not yet prove it, because the men who could prove it were the men who had written it.

Elias had refused the claim. Twice, in writing. The second time he had used language his steward had advised against.

Vaughn’s anger had grown since.

And three weeks ago, people had begun asking questions about Meg Hollis and her daughter. A groom at an inn in Farrow had reported a brown-cloaked rider making enquiries about the household’s movements. A tenant had seen unfamiliar men walking the lane past Meg’s cottage, twice, without any business there. And one of the kitchen servants had been offered money — twice — for information about the Duke’s household schedule.

Meg listened without interrupting.

“This is because of you,” she said at the end.

It was not an accusation. It was a fact she needed spoken aloud, the way a person says the river is rising.

“Yes.”

Silence.

“Then no more decisions about us without us,” she said.

He nodded. “Agreed.”

“Say it properly.”

“No more decisions about you and Posy without you,” Elias said. “You will know what I know.”

She held his gaze for a moment longer than she needed to, and then sat down, uninvited, in the chair by the desk, which she had never done before.

“Then tell me the rest,” she said. “And I will tell you what I need.”