“He Has Hours Left,” the Doctor Said—Then Everyone Abandoned the Dying Duke, Unaware a Stranger Had Found Proof His Crash Was Deliberate

Chapter 10

They came home to the fen on a clear day in the middle of February, with the frost breaking and the ditches running.

The toll house was whole, and the door was unbarred, and Gideon Hollis was sitting on the step in the sun with his face turned up like a man drinking, and he stood when he heard the cart, and he put his hand out for his daughter’s face, and he said, “Well.”

“Father. We won.”

“I heard the whole of it,” said Gideon. “The rector came out from Sedge Halt on the hired horse and told me, word for word, twice, because he knows I like it.” He turned his white eyes toward Edmund. “And I hear you have got your estate back, Your Grace, and your mind, and your name, and an inch less of leg than you started with.”

“I have all of those things,” said Edmund.

“And what will you do with them?”

Edmund looked at the drove, and the water, and the low sky he had come, in fourteen weeks, to know better than the high rooms of Blackmere.

“The first thing,” he said, “is that the drainage goes round. I have already given the order. The drove stays open, and the toll house stays, and the Hollises of Saints Drove are not tenants at will of anything any longer.” He took a folded paper from his coat. “This is a deed. The house, the gate, and the land round about, in the name of Gideon and Clara Hollis, freehold, in perpetuity, for services which no money in the kingdom can properly repay.”

Gideon took it and held it to his eyes as though he could read it.

“For what, exactly?” he said.

“For the rail,” said Edmund. “For the bone. For the hour you spent on my leg with your hands cold and a fever coming on you. For every night at three o’clock, feeling the leg to see if it was still mine.”

“Your Grace,” said Clara, “that is far too much.”

“It is not near enough,” said Edmund. “And there is more, and it is for you, and you will not like it, and I am going to say it anyway.”

He looked at her, and the wind came off the fen, and for a moment neither of them moved.

“In the flood you told me to ask you in the spring,” he said. “It is spring. It is the nearest to spring this place will let us have, and I am asking.” He held out his hand. “Why did you stay, Clara Hollis? Why did you not take the money and the strongbox and the good opinion of the man who wanted to buy you, and leave a dying stranger to his fate?”

She looked at his hand for a long time.

“Because I could not have lived with it,” she said at last. “That is the whole of the better reason, and I am sorry I made you wait for it. I stayed because a man’s life is worth more than a toll house, and because there was no one else in the world who would do it, and because I would rather lose everything I had than be the woman who watched a man die on her floor for the sake of her own safety.”

“That is not a reason to be sorry for,” said Edmund. “It is the reason I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.”

He lowered himself carefully, one hand on the stick, until he was on one knee before her in the mud of the drove.

“Miss Hollis,” he said, “I was betrothed to a woman who rode away and laughed, and I never once in eight years had a single conversation with her that was not about furniture. I have had more truth from you in fourteen weeks than I have had from every drawing room in the county put together. I have loved you since the night you counted to twenty in a flooded kitchen and would not let me see it. Will you marry me?”

Clara looked down at him, at the Duke of Blackmere on one knee in the fen mud, and the tears that had been waiting since the sessions house came again, and she did not try to stop them.

“You will have to get used to being told no,” she said. “And to having your leg done by my father’s hands. And to eating eel.”

“I have got used to all of it,” said Edmund. “I got used to it in November.”

“Then,” said Clara, “you had better get up out of that mud, Your Grace, before the whole parish comes to look at you. Yes.”

He came up slow on the stick, and she took his arm, and they stood together on the causeway where the rail had given way, with the new rail beside them and the water running clean underneath.

Behind them, Gideon Hollis folded the deed into his shirt and went back into his kitchen, and built up the fire, and sat down in his chair with his hands folded, and listened to the two of them laughing out on the drove, and said, to no one in particular, well, there.

That night, in the toll house, Edmund asked her one last thing.

“What will you do with the strongbox?”

“The money is yours, Your Grace.”

“It was never mine,” said Edmund. “It belonged to a man who died on the third of November, on a rotten rail, in a lonely place, with his family riding away from him. That man is gone. The man who took his place is going to spend his life proving he deserved it.” He took her hand. “The money will rebuild the causeway. And the toll house will keep the account, and the account will keep the name of the woman who kept mine.”

He lay in the low room with the fire going down, and heard the horses on the drove going home at last, and for the first time in his life the sound of hooves did not mean anyone leaving.

He would hear them for the rest of his life, it was true. But they were coming home now. Coming home to the fen, to the toll house, to the counting, and to her.

She counted him to sleep that night, out of habit, one to twenty and back, and he stayed awake long past the counting, just to hear her do it.

In the spring, they were married at Wick End Chapel, in the same parish that had put the house back together after the flood, and the whole fen came, and the rector of Sedge Halt read the service, and the boy Tommie Jarrold, who had pointed at the man with the limp, was given the bell to ring, and he rang it until his arms hurt.

And on the causeway, where the rail had once been sawn through and tarred over, there was a new rail, sound and white in the sun, with a brass plate on the post at the near end, on which someone had caused to be written a line from a toll book, in a hand that was very like Clara’s own:

This gate is kept by the Hollis family of Saints Drove, whose daughter would not leave a dying man. The toll on this road is eleven pounds in a good year, and nothing at all for strangers in trouble.

— The Duke of Blackmere

The End