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

Chapter 3

It was on the fifth day, when his mind would hold two thoughts at once, that he noticed the trestles. The door he lay on was a bed. It had been Clara Hollis’s bed, and she had been sleeping in the chair by the fire since the night of the crash, because there was nowhere else on the ground floor to keep a man who could not be carried up the ladder.

He was disagreeable about it.

“You should have told me.”

“To what end.” She was scouring the basin with sand. “You cannot climb, Your Grace, and I cannot carry you. It is a chair. It is not a hardship.”

“You have been up every night—”

“I have been up with my father, who has been up with your leg. I only carried the water. If you are obliged to anyone, be obliged to the man who did the work.”

From the hearth came Gideon’s voice, calm as a man shelling peas. “Don’t be obliged to anyone yet, sir. Obligation is for men who have reached the far edge of the wood.”

“Am I in the wood?”

“You are in the middle of it,” said the old man, “and it is a wood that lasts a fortnight. I have known better men than you fall down in it on the eleventh day, for no reason at all.”

That night, with the fire sunk to a red eye and the rain a constant whisper on the roof, Edmund asked the question he had been carrying since the third.

“Why have you not put me in a cart?”

She had been asleep, or pretending to be. She answered without opening her eyes.

“Because it would kill you.”

“That is not the whole of it.”

“No,” she agreed. “It is not.”

She rose, rebuilt the fire, and told him, in a voice without complaint in any corner of it, exactly what his lying on her door was worth. The toll house took eleven pounds in a good year and less in a bad one, and there had been three bad ones running. Sir Reginald Ashcombe had ridden out in October with a printed paper about a drainage scheme that would stop up the drove as a public way and carry the traffic round by the weekend bank. And when a road is stopped, she said, there are no tolls. And when there are no tolls, there is no toll keeper. And no toll house.

“And the parish will take us in,” she finished. “My father on the men’s side and me on the women’s. He will not last a year of it, and he knows he will not, and neither of us has said it out loud in this house until tonight.”

The fire ticked. He said the next thing to be cruel, and he knew he was being cruel, and he said it anyway.

“So you are keeping me alive for a toll house.”

She considered it.

“If I were,” she said, “it would be a very good reason, and I should not be ashamed of it. But no.” She took his wrist without asking and counted his pulse, her eyes on the fire. “There is a better one, and I am not going to tell it to you tonight, because you would make something ugly of it before morning, and I have not the linen to spare.” She set his wrist down. “Ninety-six. It was a hundred and twenty on Tuesday. Go to sleep.”

She had one more thing to say, and she said it at the door with the candle in her hand, because she was an honest woman and had thought it through to the bottom.

“Sir Reginald said something else before he rode off. He said that when a gentleman dies in a lonely place with money on him, people ask what he was given, and by whom.” She held the candle perfectly still. “There was no money on you. But there is a coroner at Heatheridge, and there is an unmarried woman in this house, and there is a physician who has written mortification in his book with the day and the hour beside it. So if you die on that door, Your Grace, I do not lose a toll house. I lose my name, and my father with it, and there is no toll that will buy either one back. I have known it since the third of November, and I have gone on washing that leg every four hours all the same. Make of it what you will.”

She blew out the candle.

He lay in the dark with the counting running through his head where she had put it, one to twenty, twenty to one, and understood, with a steadiness that surprised him, that he had been placed in the care of a kind of courage he had never once been asked to have. He had been duke for eight years. No one in that time had told him a hard truth to his face, except this woman, twice, in one week.

He did not sleep well. He had begun, without quite noticing, to listen for her voice in the dark.