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

Chapter 7

They got him off the table on the seventh of December. It took Gideon, Clara, the eel man, and the doorpost, and it was not a success. He came upright with all his weight on the sound leg, and the room went white at the edges, and they had him back on the table inside fifteen seconds with his teeth going like a boy’s.

“Well,” said Gideon, unmoved. “That was standing. You will not do it better by being angry at it. Tomorrow the same, and the day after the same, and by the middle of January you will do it and swear at me while you do it, which is the sign that it is working.”

“How long to stand?”

“Three weeks to walk across this kitchen. Six to walk out of it. Longer than you will like.” Gideon put both hands flat on the thigh. “You shall have the rest of it now, so you may do your raging early. That bone has set short—better than an inch short, once the swelling is out. You will want a stick on that side for the remainder of your life, and a boot built up under the heel. And there is no man living anywhere else who can give you back the inch.”

Edmund lay still for a while. “Say it again.”

“An inch. And a stick.”

“Thank you,” said Edmund, and found, to his considerable surprise, that he meant it.

He learned that they called him Duke in the fen to his face, and not Your Grace, and that this was neither insolence nor familiarity, but something older and flatter than either. He learned that no letter came from Lady Vivienne, and that it took him eleven days to admit to himself that he was counting the days.

He learned a great deal that fortnight, and almost none of it was about himself, which was itself an education. He learned that the fen came to the toll house not for the toll but for the surgeon. A drover with a wrist. A woman with a boy who had come off a gate. He watched Gideon set a collarbone by touch, talking all the while about the weather, with the boy’s mother holding a candle at exactly the height she was told.

“How do you know where it is?” Edmund asked once.

“Because I have got my fingers on it, sir. How do you know where your own nose is? You have never once looked at it.”

In the last week of December, when he could stand long enough to lean on the window frame, he watched a boy herd geese across the drove, and heard the geese, and smelled the wet thatch, and found himself thinking not of Blackmere at all but of this kitchen, and of the woman in it, and of the way she had not once, in fifty days, asked him for anything.

He wanted to give her something. He had nothing to give her except trouble.

She caught him watching her one evening and did not flinch.

“You are staring, Your Grace.”

“I was thinking you would have made a good physician.”

“I have made a good one’s hands,” she said. “That is enough for one lifetime.”

The weather turned hard in January. The frost held, and the drove rang like iron, and Edmund walked its length twice a day leaning on the eel man’s ash stick, first with the doorpost, then with Clara’s arm, then alone. The first time he walked the twenty yards to the gate and back without touching her, he reached the step, turned, and saw her standing in the doorway with her hand over her mouth, and she would not meet his eyes for the rest of the afternoon, and he did not know, until much later, what he had seen there.

One night, by the fire, he said, “Tell me about the causeway.”

Gideon went on whittling. “What about it, sir?”

“The rail that gave way. You told me on the third of November that it had been rotten since Whitsun. I have been thinking about that.”

“It was rotten,” said Gideon. “I have lived by that causeway twenty years. I heard the carpenters at it in May, and I said to Clara, they have shored the far side and left the near. I said it to her, and she wrote it in her book, because it is her nature to write such things down.”

Clara came in from the gate with the lantern and set it on the table. She did not sit.

“I walked out to the causeway this morning,” she said. “After the flood, they put in a new rail on the near side. They were quick enough about it, once there was a dead duke to answer for.”

“And the old rail?”

She was quiet a moment.

“It lies in the dyke,” she said. “Where the carriage pushed it.”

Edmund looked at her. Something in her voice had changed. Something in the room had changed.

“Miss Hollis,” he said slowly, “what are you keeping in that chest?”

“I am keeping a good many things, Your Grace.”

“Name one.”

She met his eyes.

“Your strongbox,” she said. “I fished it out of the dyke at first light on the fourth of November, with the money in it, and I have not spent a penny of it, and I will not, because it is not mine. I put it in that chest, and I locked it, because I knew that if you died, the first thing they would ask me was what I had taken from you. And I knew that if you lived, somebody would come for it.”

“And the rail?”

She did not answer at once. Outside, the frost had begun again, ticking against the glass.

“I fished that out too,” she said. “After the flood, when the water dropped. It floated up against the bank, and I saw it in the mud.” She stopped. “The near-side rail was not rotten, Your Grace. It had been sawn half through, at the post, and tarred over so the cut would not show until it had a weight on it. It held until the third of November. And then it let go.”

The fire was the only sound in the kitchen for a long moment.

“You have known this since the flood.”

“I have known this since the flood,” said Clara. “And I have been asking myself ever since who it was in May who stood on your land, with a saw and a pot of tar, on the night the carpenters were gone.”

She went to the chest, and for a long time stood with her hand on the lock.

“We leave for Heatheridge in nine days,” she said. “I think we had better decide, before then, whether the thing in this chest goes with us—or whether it stays here, and somebody comes in the night to take it from me.”

She locked the chest again, and the key went into her pocket, and Edmund lay in the firelight and listened to the frost, and understood that his carriage crash had never been an accident at all, and that the woman who had saved his life had known it for two months, and had gone on saving him anyway.