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

Chapter 4

The eleventh day was the bad one, as Gideon had said it would be.

Edmund remembered almost nothing of it afterward except that at some point he was certain he was on the causeway again with the rail giving way beneath the wheels, and that somebody had hold of both his hands and would not let go, no matter how hard he pulled.

On the twelfth he woke thin and clear and hungry, and the old man laughed out loud when he heard him ask for food.

“There. Out of the wood, sir. Now you may be obliged to somebody.”

On the night of the thirteenth of November, the rain that had been falling on three counties for nine days came down in one enormous load, and the bank at Galt gave way at two in the morning with a noise like a wall coming down. The water came over the drove and under the door of the toll house and across the brick floor to the depth of a hand before Edmund was even awake.

He woke to the cold of it and a lantern swinging at the window and men shouting on the drove.

“Maud—”

No. Not Maud. Clara. The man at the door called her by the name the whole parish used, and the mistake mattered nothing now.

“Clara.” A man’s voice, urgent, at the door. “Bank’s gone at Galt and it’ll go at Sedge Halt inside the hour, and there’s four foot coming down this drove behind me. We’ve got Wick End Chapel dry, and there’s room in the punt for you and old Gideon and no more. Come away, girl, now.”

Edmund lay on the door in eight inches of black fen water, unable to sit up, and listened for her answer.

“I’ll not leave him.”

“Clara, you have heard me.”

“Take my father.”

“I am blind,” said Gideon Hollis, standing in the water in his shirt with his hands out for the table’s edge. “Not useless. I have been in worse water than this, with a ship under me.”

“You are blind and you are one-and-seventy,” said Clara, “and I want you alive on Thursday. Get in the punt, Father, or I shall put you in it myself. There are three men here who will help me, and you will not enjoy being carried, and I shall enjoy it even less. There is room for one, and it is not going to be me.”

They took him. It took the three of them, and it was not dignified, and no one in that kitchen ever spoke of it again.

At the wall the old man got hold of the doorpost and turned his white-eyed face back into the room. “Four hours on that leg, girl. Whatever else the night does.” A pause. “And keep his feet out of the water. Wet feet will finish him quicker than the flood.” He was quiet a moment. “And, Clara. You are a fool, and I have never in my life been prouder of anybody.”

The lantern went off along the drove, and the shouting went with it, and then there was nothing in the world but black water going past the door in the dark.

“Go after them,” Edmund said. “You can be on that punt in a minute.”

“Be quiet, Your Grace. I am thinking, and you are a great deal heavier than you look.”

What she did next, by the light of one candle stuck in a bottle on the mantel, he thought about on and off for the rest of his life. She could not lift him. She had known that before she started, so she did not try. She dragged the kitchen table over until it fetched against the trestles, half of it floating. Then she got the long ash plank they used for a gate bar, and a nail keg, and levered the head of the door up six inches at a time—wedging it with the keg, then a stool, then the flour bin—working from one end and then the other, so that the door and the man on it went up like a coffin lid being raised, until at last she slid the whole of it across onto the tabletop, four feet above the brick, his splinted leg never once out of line with his hip.

It took her the better part of an hour. She said nothing at all while she did it, except once, when the flour bin slipped, and what she said then was no, flatly, to the bin.

Then she lifted the candles and the tinder and her father’s chest up onto the dresser, and stood in the black water in the dark to the knee, and took stock of her kitchen.

“Well,” she said. “You are dry.”

“Miss Hollis, come up onto the table.”

“There is no room, and it would not hold us both.”

“Then sit on the dresser.”

“I shall want the dresser at four, to stand on when I do your leg.”

She took the shawl off her own shoulders and laid it over his chest, waded across, and sat down on the stair to the loft with her feet in the water and her arms around her knees, and stayed there.

It was six hours until light. Somewhere in the middle of them he said, “You should have gone.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you not?”

“You are the third person to ask me that this week,” she said out of the dark, “and it is beginning to be tiresome. Ask me in the spring.”

He lay listening to the water slide past beneath him. “Your father called you a fool.”

“He did.”

“Was he wrong?”

“He is never wrong about anything,” said Clara, “which is a great trial to live with. Go to sleep, Your Grace.”

“I cannot.”

“Then talk, if you must. Only do not sit up.”

So he talked. He had not the smallest notion afterward what about—a horse he had owned at nineteen, his mother’s glasshouse, a quantity of nonsense—and every so often, out of the dark, a voice said yes, or well, that was foolish, all along. And somewhere toward four in the morning he understood that she was doing exactly what she had done with the counting on the first night, and had been doing it for six hours, sitting in cold water on a staircase, and would deny it flatly if he put it to her.

He did not put it to her.

The water stood a foot deep until four in the morning and was gone by nine, leaving behind a floor of gray silt an inch thick that smelled of the bottom of the fen. Clara Hollis spent the whole of that day on her knees with a shovel, a pail, and a scrubbing brush. At three in the afternoon a punt came back up the drove with her father in it, and three men who would not take anything for their trouble, and had to be given eel and beer, which they took.

Edmund lay on the kitchen table and watched the parish of Wick End put a house back together, and was not consulted about any of it.

But late that night, when he woke, she was standing at the window with the lamp down, staring out at the causeway where the rail had given way. He did not call out to her.

He lay still, and watched her watch the place where he had almost died, and began to ask himself a new question: who had let that rail rot, and why had no one at Blackmere, in eight years of his rule, ever told him it was dangerous.