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

Chapter 5

He began to get better after that, which was when he became truly insufferable, and he knew it at the time, and could not seem to stop. He wanted his own linen. He wanted his own coffee. He wanted a barber.

On the eighteenth he told Clara that when he was back at Blackmere he would send out a proper nurse from Heatheridge, and that she might consider herself discharged with a year’s wages. Clara went on scouring the pot.

“Very good, Your Grace,” she said, in a voice that took the skin off him from the ankle up.

The letter from Blackmere came on the twenty-second, brought by the eel man on a borrowed horse in the dark, and it was not from Sir Reginald. It was four lines from the steward, written small and shaken.

Your grace, I have this hour had your grace’s second letter, the first not having been shown me. Sir Reginald returned on the fourth and gave out that your grace died upon the causeway. The household is in black. The hatchment went up over the door on Tuesday sennight. I am ordered to answer no letters. I do not know what to do, and there is no one here I dare ask.

Clara read it twice, aloud, in a voice that stayed flat all the way through.

“God help me,” Edmund said. “They have buried me.”

“Not yet, Your Grace.”

“They have put the house in mourning. They have hung my arms up over my own door.”

“Then they will have to take the black down,” she said, “and I should very much like to see the man who tells them to.”

It took four evenings to get six letters out of the toll house at Saints Drove—to the steward, to his attorney at Heatheridge, to the bank, to the Lord Lieutenant of the county, to the rector at Sedge Halt, who was a magistrate, and to the London physician who had written mortification in his book, and would presently wish he had not.

“Write this,” Edmund said. “I am alive. I am at the toll house at Saints Drove, in the parish of Wick End, where I have been since the third of November, my thigh broken in two places when my carriage went off the causeway at the rotten rail. I am attended by Mr. Gideon Hollis, formerly surgeon’s mate, and by his daughter. I am not able to write with my own hand, and this letter is written for me by Miss Hollis.”

Clara’s pen stopped. “That last part is mine.”

“You may strike it out.”

“Why did you put it in?”

“Because your attorney will be shown that letter by somebody who wants it to be a forgery,” she said. “There are fourteen years of my hand in that toll book on the nail. It is the only proof of anything in this house.”

“Leave it in.”

She wrote on. Somewhere in the middle of it, he said, “Miss Hollis. There was a pig.”

The pen stopped for the space of a breath, then went on.

“There was a pig in the sty behind this house on the fourth of November, because I heard it, and it was a good deal of pig by the noise of it, and there has been no pig since the eighth. And there has been beef tea in this kitchen four times a day for three weeks, and beef does not walk up a drove in November of its own accord.”

“The pig is at Wick End,” said Clara, “in about eleven pieces, and it fetched two pound fifteen, and the two-fifteen is gone, and I will thank you not to make a scene about it in front of my father, who does not know.”

“He does know,” said Gideon Hollis from the fire. “He has been eating eel four times a week and no pork at all since Martinmas, and he has been blind eleven years and not stupid for a single day of it. Go on with the letter, girl.”

“I will replace it.”

“You will replace it in the spring,” said Clara, “along with the sixpence, and I shall take both and be glad of them, and that is not the same thing as being paid. And I want you to keep the two apart in your head, Your Grace. They look very alike from here.”

“They do not look at all alike from here,” said Edmund. “And here is where I am sitting.”

The attorney came out from Heatheridge on the ninth of December, stayed two hours, and went away white about the mouth. Before he went, he offered Clara money. A bank order for one hundred pounds, drawn on the Blackmere account, for the accommodation and the trouble.

Edmund heard the whole of it through the door.

“It is a hundred pounds,” said Clara, “and if I take a hundred pounds off that estate this month, then when somebody at Heatheridge asks me in a witness box what I was given for it, I shall have to answer a hundred pounds, and every other word I say will be worth nothing whatever. Write in your book that I refused it, sir. Put the day and the hour and set your name to it, and let me watch you do it. That is what I will take, and there is nothing else in your case I want.”

On the eleventh, as she dressed his leg, she said, “You are quiet tonight.”

“I am thinking about a woman.”

“Then you are quiet for a poor reason. Lift your arm.”

“I have been betrothed since the spring,” Edmund said, “to a lady who sat by my bed on the third of November and told me not to be frightened. She has ridden eleven miles further than this to order a bonnet. I have it from the eel man, who has it from the carrier.”

Clara strapped the bandage and cut the end. “Do you want me to be sorry for you?”

“I want somebody to be.”

“Then you had better ask somebody who has the leisure,” said Clara, and carried the basin out. At the door she stopped, and said, without turning round: “It was ill done of her, all the same. I have thought so since the third of November, and I should have said it sooner, if I had thought you were fit to hear it.”

He was still lying with the weight of that in the room when, at dusk on the sixteenth of December, the frost coming down hard, she came in from the gate with the lantern and set it on the table.

“There are three horses on the drove,” she said. “One of them is a gray with a white face, and there is a man on his offside carrying a case, and they are coming at a walk, which means they mean to stop.”

“Reginald rides a gray with a white face,” said Edmund.

“I thought he might.”