“He Won’t Survive the Night,” the Doctor Warned—So His Family Abandoned the Dying Duke of Fenmere, Unaware That the Stranger Who Refused to Leave Him Had Discovered His Carriage Crash Was No Accident.

PART 2 

“Send to Fenmir. I have sent to Fenmir.”

“Send again.”

“I sent on Tuesday and I sent on Thursday, and both letters went by the eel man, who is honest, and neither has been answered. And I am not going to spend another sixpence on paper this week to please you.”

It was the sixth of November, and the Duke of Fenmir had a fever of 103, and had discovered, in the way of such men, that being frightened made him extremely disagreeable.

“They were delivered,” Maud said, wringing the cloth over the basin. “The eel man was given a shilling at the kitchen door at Fenmir and told to say nothing about it in the village, and he told me so within the hour — because he is honest, and because a shilling for saying nothing is the sort of thing a fen man dwells on. Lift your chin, or lie in your own sweat. It is entirely as you please.”

He lifted his chin.

He lay in the kitchen on the door, three feet from the fire, because there was nowhere else on the ground floor to put a man who could not be moved, and he was there five days before he understood that the trestles had been Maud Hollis’s bed, and that she had been sleeping in the chair.

He was disagreeable about that too, when he found it out.

“You should have told me.”

“To what end. You cannot walk up a ladder to the loft, and I cannot carry you up one.” She was scouring the basin with sand. “It is a chair, Your Grace. My father slept twenty-one years in a hammock nine inches from another man’s boots and has never once complained of a chair in my hearing.”

“I have not thanked you.”

“No. I am obliged to you.”

“You are not obliged to me,” said Maud. “You are obliged to my father, who put your bone back with a fever coming on him, and his hands cold, and who has been up at three every night since to feel your leg. I have carried the water. Be obliged to the person who did the work.”

Elias Hollis, splitting sedge for kindling by touch at a rate of perhaps forty a minute, said: “Do not be obliged to anybody yet. Being obliged is for men who are out of the wood.”

“Am I in the wood?”

“You are in the middle of it,” said the old man cheerfully, “and it is a wood that lasts a fortnight, and I have known better men than you go down in it on the eleventh day for no reason at all.”

It was on the eighth of November, in the middle of the night, that Thaddius asked the question he had been carrying about for five days.

“Why have you not put me in a cart?”

The fire had gone down to a red eye. She was in the chair with a shawl around her, her feet on the fender, and he had thought her asleep.

“Because it would kill you,” she said without opening her eyes. “That is not the whole of it.”

“No,” she agreed. “It is not.”

She got up, made the fire, and told him — in a low, flat voice with no complaint in it anywhere — exactly what his lying on her kitchen door was worth: that the toll came to about eleven pounds in a good year and ate into savings in a bad one, and there had been three bad ones running; that Sir Talbot had come out in October with a printed paper about a new drainage scheme, under which Saints Drove would be stopped up as a public way and the traffic carried round by the weekend bank; and that when a road is stopped, there are no tolls, and when there are no tolls, there is no toll-keeper, and no toll house.

“And the parish will take us in,” she finished, “and put my father on the men’s side and me on the women’s, and he will not last a year of it, and he knows he will not, and neither of us has said so out loud in this house until tonight.”

The fire ticked. “So you are keeping me alive for a toll house,” he said. He said it to be cruel. He was quite clear about that, afterward.

Maud considered it. “If I were, it would be a very good reason, and I should not be ashamed of it. But no.” She took his wrist without asking, and counted his pulse, looking at the fire. “There is a better one, and I am not going to tell it to you tonight, because you would make something ugly of it before morning, and I have not the linen to spare.” She put his wrist down. “Ninety-six. It was a hundred and twenty on Tuesday. Go to sleep.”

She said the last thing at the door, with the candle in her hand, because she was an honest woman and had thought about it.

“Sir Talbot said something else before he rode off, and you may as well have it. He said that when a gentleman dies in a lonely place with money on him, people ask what he was given, and by whom.” She held the candle steady. “There was no money on you. But there is a coroner at Heatheridge, and there is an unmarried woman in this house, and there is a physician who has written down mortification in his book with the day and the hour on it. So if you die on that door, Your Grace, I do not lose a toll house. I lose a great deal more than that. And I have known it since the third of November, and I have gone on washing that leg every four hours all the same. Make what you like of it.”

She blew out the candle.

PART 3

The eleventh day was the bad one, as Elias had said it would be. Thaddius remembered almost nothing of it except that at some point he was certain he was on the causeway again with the rail giving way, and that somebody had hold of both his hands and would not let go, however 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. 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 the mere-load all at once, and the Golt bank went at two in the morning with a noise like a wall coming down. The water came over the drove and under the toll house door and across the brick floor to the depth of a hand.

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

“Maud.” 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 Elias and no more. Come away, girl, now.”

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

“I’ll not leave him.”

“Maud, you have heard me.”

“Take my father.”

“I am blind,” said Elias Hollis, standing in the water in his shirt with his hands out for the table 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, and I want you alive on Thursday,” said Maud. “Get in the punt, Father, or I shall put you in it. There are three men here who will help me, and you will not like being carried, and I shall not like doing it. 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 nobody 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. And keep his feet out of it — wet feet will finish him quicker than the flood.” A pause. “And, Maud. 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,” Thaddius 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, floating half of it, until it fetched against the trestles. Then she got the long ash plank they used for the 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 got the whole of it slid across onto the tabletop, four foot off the brick, his splinted leg never once out of the line of 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 got 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 put it over his chest, waded across, and sat down on the stairs to the loft with her feet in the water and her arms round her knees, and stayed there.

It was six hours till 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 go past underneath him. “Your father called you a fool.”

“He did.”

“Was he wrong?”

“He is never wrong about anything,” said Maud, “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 at a foot until four in the morning and was gone by nine, leaving behind a floor of gray silt an inch deep that smelled of the bottom of the fen. Maud Hollis spent the whole of that day on her knees with a shovel and 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.

Thaddius 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.