“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 5

“You are quiet tonight,” said Maud on the eleventh.

“I am thinking about a woman.”

“Then you are quiet for a poor reason. Lift your arm.”

“I have been betrothed since the spring,” Thaddius said, “to a lady who sat on the third of November and told me not to be frightened. She has written eleven miles further than this to order a bonnet. I have had it from the eel man, who has it from the carrier.”

Maud strapped the bandage and cut the end. “Do you want me to be sorry for you?”

“I want somebody to be.”

“Then you had better ask somebody who has the leisure,” said Maud, and got up and took the basin out. At the door she stopped, and said, without turning round: “It was ill done of her, all the same. I have thought so since the third of November, and I should have said it before now, if I had thought you were fit to hear it.”

On the sixteenth of December, at dusk, with the frost coming down hard, Maud came in from the gate with the lantern and set it on the table.

“There are three horses on the drove, and one of them is a gray with a white face, and there is a man on his offside carrying a case, and they are coming at a walk, which means they mean to stop.”

“Talbot rides a gray with a white face,” said Thaddius.

“I thought he might.”

Sir Talbot came into the kitchen with the frost still smoking off his shoulders and got hold of both of Thaddius’s hands before Thaddius could do anything about it. “We were told you were gone. 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, pulled up the stool, sat, and looked, for a moment, entirely sincere. “You look very ill.”

“I am very well.”

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

Behind him, Dr. Peele 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. Maud 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. Pritchard,” said Talbot. “An attorney. There is a paper, and I would ten thousand times rather have burnt it in the Fenmir library this morning than bring it out here. But it is served, Thaddius. It was served in London on the twelfth. It cannot be unserved by any wishing of mine.”

Pritchard 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 Fenmir 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 Talbot.

Thaddius 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. Peele 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 Thaddius.

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

“Peele,” said Thaddius. The physician looked at the dresser. “Peele. 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 Peele, 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 upon the leg, and the man who put his hands on it is sitting on that stool, and has been blind eleven years.” Thaddius let it stand a moment. “How much, Peele?”

“Your Grace insults me.”

“How much?”

Dr. Peele 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 the commissioner and a jury of twenty-three, upon the fourteenth of February,” said the attorney. “Fifty-nine days.”

Thaddius looked at the smoke stain shaped like a heron he had been studying since the third of November, and felt something go quite cold and quite steady in the middle of him. “Talbot. If they find me incapable, what is your first act?”

Talbot did not even pause. “Fenmir 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, as you like.”

Talbot took out a 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 slate roof, falling vacant at Lady Day, in my gift — your father would have a dry room in it and never see a fen winter again.”

“For what?”

“For the truth. For going into that hall on the fourteenth of February and saying what you have seen in this kitchen — the fever, the wandering, what he said in the eleven days. Nothing invented, nothing embroidered. The plain truth on your oath, that a man who talked as he talked at the height of that fever is not a man fit to have nine thousand acres and four hundred souls in his hands.” He held out the pocketbook. “You would be doing him a kindness, Miss Hollis. I am not ashamed to say I would be doing you one.”

The kitchen was very quiet. Maud put the poker down in the fender carefully, so that it did not ring.

“He talked about his mother’s glasshouse,” she said, “and a horse he had at nineteen. And on the ninth night he cried out about the rail on the causeway — which is your rail, Sir Talbot, and has been rotten since Whitsun, and which the commissioners have written to Fenmir about twice.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “That is what I saw in this kitchen. I shall be very glad to say it on my oath in a public hall, and you need not give me fifty pounds for it, and you may take that cottage and let it to somebody who wants it.”

Talbot put the pocketbook away without any change of expression whatever. “You are a proud woman.”

“I am a poor one,” said Maud. “It is often mistaken.”

At the door he stopped, gloves half on. “One thing more. You will be served in the new year. My counsel means to call you.”

“As your witness.”

“As my best one,” said Sir Talbot, and smiled at her almost kindly. “You have sat alone with an unmarried gentleman of great fortune in this room these six weeks past, Miss Hollis, and written every letter he has sent, and he has made you promises. By February it will be thirteen. You will not have to say one word that is untrue. You will simply have to be looked at by three-and-twenty men out of this county, while my counsel asks you your age, and your income, and how you came to be so obliging.”

The three of them went out. The gray with the white face went off along the drove, unhurried, into the dark. Thaddius heard the gate. He heard Maud drop the bar, and stand there with her hand on it for rather a long time.

“Sir,” he said to the ceiling. “The fourteenth of February. Can I be got on my feet by it?”

Elias came over, put his broad, dry hands on the splinted thigh, was silent a while. “On your feet with a stick and a boot built up, and no promises about the stairs at Heatheridge. And it will hurt you every day from now until then, and there will be days you weep at it, and I am too old to be gentle about it, and my daughter will hold you up because there is nobody else to do it.”

“Begin tonight,” said the Duke of Fenmir.