“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 4

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 Maud that when he was at Fenmir he would send out a proper nurse from Heatheridge, and that she might consider herself discharged with a year’s wages. Maud went on scouring the pot and said very good, Your Grace, in a voice that took the skin off him from the ankle up.

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

Your grace, I have this hour had your grace’s second letter, the first not having been shown me. Sir Talbot 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.

“You will have to write it,” Thaddius said, when she had read it aloud twice. “I cannot hold the pen.”

“Then say it slowly,” said Maud, “and do not say and whereas, because I shall not write it.”

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.

I am alive, he dictated. 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 being broken in two places when the carriage went off the causeway at the rotten rail. I am attended by Mr. Elias Hollis, formerly surgeon’s mate, and by his daughter. I am not able to write with my own hand, and this is written for me by Miss Hollis, which you may verify by comparing it with the toll book.

She stopped. “That last is mine.”

“You may strike it out.”

“Why did you put it in?”

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

“Leave it in,” he said.

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

The pen stopped for a fraction of a second, 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 Maud, “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 Elias 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 day of it. Go on with the letter, girl.”

“I will replace it.”

“You will replace it in the spring,” said Maud, “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. They look very alike from here.”

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

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 Elias set a collarbone by touch, talking all the while about the weather, with the boy’s mother holding a candle at the exact height she was told.

“How do you know where it is?”

“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.”

They got him off the table on the seventh of December. It took Elias, Maud, 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 Elias, 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.” Elias 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, when 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.”

Thaddius lay still a while. “Say it again.”

“An inch. And a stick.”

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

He learned 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 Arabella. That took eleven days to arrive at, because he did not admit to himself that he was counting.

The attorney came out on the ninth of December, stayed two hours, and went away white about the mouth. Before he went, he offered Maud money — a bank order for one hundred pounds, on the Fenmir account, for the accommodation and the trouble.

Thaddius heard the whole of it through the door.

“It is a hundred pounds,” said Maud, “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.”