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

Chapter 2

The fever came on the sixth of November, and with it the slow, miserable news that Blackmere had answered nothing.

Clara had sent the first letter on the Tuesday and a second on the Thursday, both carried by the eel man, who was honest, and both handed over at the kitchen door at Blackmere, where a shilling had been pressed into his palm and he had been told to speak of it to no one. He told Clara within the hour. A shilling for silence, he said, was the sort of thing a fen man turned over in his mind for a week.

Edmund lay in a sweat that soaked through the blankets, and learned, in the way of powerful men, that fear made him petty. He ordered her to write again. She refused.

“I will not spend another sixpence of my own on paper to please you, Your Grace,” she said, wringing the cloth over the basin.

He wanted to be furious. The strength for it had gone into the fever.