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

Chapter 8

The eel man brought them their first witness.

He came in the first week of February, stamping the mud off his boots, and would not sit, and would not take a cup of anything until he had said what he had come to say.

“There is a boy at Sedge Halt,” he said, “name of Tommie Jarrold, who camps with the droves in summer for the pennies. He told me he was on the causeway the last week of May, sleeping under the new shoring, when two men came up along the bank in the dark.” He looked at Edmund. “One carried a lantern and a pot, and one carried a saw. They were there an hour, and then they went, and in the morning the boy went over the rail and saw where the saw had been, and the tar over it, and he told his mother, and his mother told him to keep his mouth shut, because men who work at night on another man’s land are not to be troubled for their reasons.”

“Do you know the men?”

The eel man shook his head. “But the boy does. He says he would know the one with the limp by the sound of him, because he stepped on the boy’s hand in the dark and cursed him in the way a gentleman curses, not a working man.”

“A gentleman with a limp,” said Edmund.

“That is what he says, Your Grace.”

The steward came the following week, sent for by the attorney, riding out to the toll house himself because he dared not put it in a letter. He was a small, frightened man with the look of one who has lived long in a house he does not own, and he sat with his hat in his hands and would not be comforted.

“Sir Reginald took the causeway maintenance into his own hands in April,” he said. “He said the estate account was being robbed by the old keeper, and he would see to it himself. He turned off old Simms, who had kept that causeway sound for thirty years, and paid a man from outside to do it. I asked no questions, Your Grace. I should have asked questions.”

“Do you know the man he paid?”

The steward swallowed. “He signs himself Corless. He comes up to the estate office once a month for his money. He has a limp, Your Grace. A bad one. He was in the army, they say, and lost his place in it.”

Edmund and Clara looked at each other across the kitchen.

“Write it down,” said Edmund. “All of it. Every date, every name, every penny.”

Clara wrote. It took the better part of an hour, and when it was done the steward signed it, and Clara signed it as witness, and she copied it twice over, and put one copy in the chest and one in her father’s keeping.

The last piece came the night before they left.

A man came to the door after dark—not the eel man, not the steward, a stranger in a heavy coat with his collar up. He would not come in. He stood on the step and spoke to Clara through the gap in the door.

“Tell the Duke that Dr. Crowe has been seen taking money from Sir Reginald’s man at the Cock and Bottle in Heatheridge, three times since December,” he said. “Tell him there is a clerk at Blackmere who can prove it, name of Mr. Bell, and that Mr. Bell is afraid, and that Mr. Bell will talk if he is given a promise of protection.” He turned to go, and then stopped. “And tell him to sleep with the door barred, miss. There is a man in Heatheridge asking which way a carriage would come in from the fen on the fourteenth, and he is asking for the toll house girl, and he does not ask politely.”

He was gone before Clara could ask his name.

She barred the door. She did not tell Edmund until the morning, and she told him only the part about Crowe and Bell, and she lied about the rest, and he knew she was lying, and he did not press her, because they had a journey to make and a trial to win and he did not have the strength for two battles in one week.

They left on the morning of the thirteenth of February, in a farm cart borrowed from Wick End, with straw in the bottom and Clara driving and Gideon riding up with the eel man behind. The chest went in the cart between them, wrapped in sacking, and Edmund sat against it with his splinted leg out straight and his stick across his knees.

They were a mile out when she slowed the horse.

“You should know what is in this chest, Your Grace,” she said, “before we set it down in front of a jury. It is your strongbox, with your money, every note of it, and a written account of the day I took it from the water and every penny of its condition since.”

“And?”

She looked at the road ahead.

“And the near-side rail,” she said. “The piece that gave way. I cut the good end off it and brought it home, and it is in there wrapped in oilcloth. It has the saw mark on it, and the tar, and the date you will want to prove.”

Edmund looked at the sacking. Fourteen weeks, he thought. He had been carrying the question for fourteen weeks, and she had been carrying the answer, and both of them had been locked in that chest the whole time.

“Clara.”

“What?”

“You could have thrown that rail back in the dyke the day you found it, and let them bury me, and taken the money, and no one would ever have known.”

“I know,” she said. “And I should never have been able to sit with it.” She clicked her tongue at the horse. “Ask me in the spring, Your Grace. It is February. It is almost spring.”

The cart rolled on toward Heatheridge.

Behind them, in the toll house, the fire was banked and the door was barred, and on the sill of the window that looked out on the causeway, someone had left a knife, driven into the wood, with a strip of black cloth tied to the hilt.

Gideon Hollis, blind, heard the knock that came at midnight, and answered it in his shirtsleeves with a eel-knife in his hand, and the man on the step looked at him and looked at the knife and decided, after a moment’s thought, that the matter could wait until the morning.

It is a decision the man had a very long time, afterward, to think about.