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

Chapter 6

Sir Reginald Ashcombe came into the kitchen with the frost still smoking off his shoulders and caught hold of both of Edmund’s hands before Edmund could do anything about it.

“We were told you were gone,” he said. “We were told on the causeway that you could not last the night, by a physician of the first eminence, and I have had a fortnight I would not wish on my worst enemy.” He let go, drew up the stool, sat, and looked, for a moment, entirely sincere. “You look very ill.”

“I am very well.”

“You look,” said Reginald, “like a man who has been lying in a fen for six weeks.”

Behind him, Dr. Crowe had come in and had not spoken and did not come near the table. A third man, a stranger in a black coat, set a japanned case on the dresser without being asked and opened it. Clara stood at the fire with the poker in her hand, not because she meant anything by it, but because she had been making up the fire when they knocked, and she did not put it down.

“Who is that?”

“That is Mr. Thorne,” said Reginald. “An attorney. There is a paper, and I would ten thousand times rather have burnt it in the Blackmere library this morning than bring it out here. But it is served, Edmund. It was served in London on the twelfth. It cannot be unserved by any wishing of mine.”

Thorne read it. A petition to the Lord Chancellor, praying that a commission might issue to inquire, by the oaths of good and lawful men, whether His Grace the Duke of Blackmere was of sound mind and capable of governing himself and his estates—and that the person and estate be committed to the care of his nearest of kin, being Sir Reginald Ashcombe.

Edmund listened to all of it lying flat on a kitchen table: that His Grace had suffered a violent injury on the third of November and a fever of eleven days; that Dr. Crowe had attended him that night and found him in a settled delirium; that His Grace had refused all regular medical attendants and committed himself for upwards of six weeks to the hands of an unlicensed blind man of one-and-seventy and his daughter; that His Grace could not write his own name, and that all letters in his name had been written by the said daughter; that the estate had stood ungoverned since November; and that His Grace had been heard to make gifts, and promises of gifts, of an extravagant kind, to persons in that house.

“The last is a lie,” said Edmund.

“It is not sworn to yet,” said the attorney comfortably. “It is a particular. It will be sworn to, or not, at the inquiry.”

“Crowe,” said Edmund.

The physician looked at the dresser.

“Crowe. Look at me. On the third of November you stood in this room and said twelve hours, fifteen at the outside. It is the sixteenth of December.”

“Recovery in such a case is not unknown,” said Crowe, to the dresser.

“Will you depose to a settled delirium?”

“I shall depose to what I observed.”

“You observed me for nine minutes by that clock, and you did not once put your hand on the leg, and the man who put his hands on it is sitting on that stool, and has been blind eleven years.” Edmund let it stand a moment. “How much, Crowe?”

“Your Grace insults me.”

“How much?”

Dr. Crowe took his hat off the dresser and walked out into the frost without answering. And that was the answer.

“When is the inquiry?”

“The commission sits at the sessions house at Heatheridge, before a commissioner and a jury of twenty-three, upon the fourteenth of February,” said the attorney. “Fifty-nine days.”

Edmund looked at the smoke stain shaped like a heron on the ceiling, the same stain he had been studying since the third of November, and felt something go quite cold and quite steady in the middle of him.

“Reginald. If they find me incapable, what is your first act?”

Reginald did not even pause. “Blackmere is bleeding to death, and has been since your father’s time, and the drainage is the only thing that will save it, and the drainage requires the drove to be stopped up and the water carried round by Wick End. I should sign the order in the first week. I have said so to your face, in this room, before witnesses, which is more than most men in my position would trouble to do.”

“And these people are tenants at will of an estate that pays them eleven pounds a year to open a gate.”

“They will be dealt with as the estate deals with everybody.” He got up, brushed his knees, turned to the fire. “Miss Hollis. A word.”

“You may say it where he can hear it,” said Clara, “as you like.”

Reginald took out his pocketbook. “You have had a great deal of trouble and no wages. There is fifty pounds here, and there is a cottage at Sedge Halt with a garden, and a yearly sum besides, if you will let the Duke’s welfare rest in my hands and say nothing further to him about the drainage.” He laid the notes on the table. “It is more than this house will ever see again.”

Clara did not touch the notes. She stood with the poker still in her hand and looked at them the way a woman looks at a dead bird on a doorstep.

“I watched the three of you ride away from a dying man on the third of November,” she said. “I have spent the forty-one days since then washing his leg and lying to no one about it. You may put your fifty pounds back in your pocket, Sir Reginald, and you may tell them at Blackmere that the Duke’s welfare is resting in the hands of a blind man and his daughter, and it is resting safer than it ever rested in yours.”

She went to the chest under the window, unlocked it, and took out the toll book. She laid it on the table open.

“When you find yourself asking what was given and by whom,” she said, “you will find my name in that book, and you will find no day it was not honest. Write that down before you go, and set your name to it.”

Reginald wrote it. His hand was not quite steady.

After they had gone, Edmund lay a long while in the silence, and then he said, “Clara.”

She was at the window, watching the horses go.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“When you told me, in the flood, to ask you in the spring—”

“That was about the water, Your Grace.”

“Was it?”

She did not answer. She turned from the window, and the lamp was behind her, and he could not read her face.

“We have fifty-nine days,” she said. “And you have one leg. You had better get used to it, because if we are going to Heatheridge in February, it will not be in a carriage of mine.”