“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 6

The subpoena came on the sixth of January, requiring Maud Hollis, spinster, to attend the sessions house at Heatheridge on the fourteenth of February to give evidence upon the part of the petitioner. She read it standing at the window, folded it in three, put it behind the tea canister on the mantel, and went out to see to the gate.

Thaddius had his attorney’s opinion within the week, and it was not one he liked. “He says you cannot be excused. He says worse than that — he says that if we apply to have you excused, their counsel will stand up in a public hall and say the woman who kept me alive is afraid to be looked at, and that it will be the best half hour of their case.”

“Then we shall not apply,” said Maud. “They mean to take you to pieces in front of three-and-twenty men and every soul in this county who can get a seat.”

“I shall stand there and answer what I am asked, and come home on the carrier’s cart, and open that gate on the fifteenth for anybody who wants to come through it, including them.” She threaded a needle against the window light. “It is not courage, before you tell me it is. It is only that there is nowhere else to be standing.”

The fen took a side in the third week of January. It did not announce itself; that is not how the fen does anything. It arrived in the form of the eel man, standing in the doorway with his hat in his hands on a Tuesday morning, saying there had been a bit of talk at Wick End Chapel, and that there were eleven men and four women who would come to Heatheridge on the fourteenth if it would answer, and they had put by the carrier’s money between them, and they did not want anything — and he was to say particularly that they did not want anything.

“To say what?”

“To say what they’ve seen,” said the eel man, surprised. “Which is you sitting up in that chair, eating your dinner and arguing about the drainage bill, which the whole parish has watched you do through that window since Christmas, ’cause there’s nothing else to look at out here. There’s a paper saying you’re a mad duke. Well — we’ve seen you. That’s all it is.”

Word came out from the steward twice a week, and none of it was good. Sir Talbot had sold standing timber at Sedge Halt for six hundred pounds in January, no month to sell timber in. He had put off four of the outdoor men. He had had the stopping-up order for Saints Drove engrossed fair and left lying on the estate-room table, dated, wanting nothing but a signature he had not yet the right to give.

“He is spending my money to prove that I cannot spend it,” Thaddius said.

“He is spending it,” said Elias, “because he has none of his own, and because a man borrowed against a title he has not got yet cannot wait for the fourteenth of February in any comfort at all.”

Lady Arabella wrote on the twenty-seventh of January. Three pages, and very well done. She had been prevented. She had been ill. She had been given to understand by those in whom she reposed the fullest confidence that he was gone, and the shock of it had made her wretched all winter. There was one line, in the middle of the second page: I hear you are still in that dreadful place. I do beg you, my dear Thaddius, to consider how it looks.

He read it twice and put it on the fire. Maud, mending at the table, said nothing whatever, and went on mending.

The attorney’s letter came on the twenty-ninth, and was much shorter. Your grace must be at Fenmir. The strongest part of their case is a picture — a duke lying in a fen cottage while his estate goes ungoverned. Every day your grace remains at Saints Drove is a day of their evidence. Every day your grace is seen at Fenmir, in the estate room, at the audit, in the parish church, on your own feet, before witnesses, is a day of ours. The carriage should come out on the first of February.

Thaddius put the letter down on the blanket. Nine thousand acres, forty rooms, two hundred years of pictures — and he discovered, sitting up on his elbows in a toll house at Saints Drove, that he did not want to go home in the least.

On the thirty-first of January he walked out of the toll house on two sticks, down the step, along the eleven yards of brick path, and through his own toll gate, and it took him six minutes, and when he got there he stood holding the gatepost and looked at the fen. He had ridden across it a hundred times. He had never once looked at it.

“Well,” said Maud beside him. “There it is. You own the whole of it.”

“I have never seen it before. I have ridden through it, on the way to somewhere else.”

The board on the gatepost was painted and repainted, the letters soft at the edges. A saddle horse, a penny. A carriage and pair, sixpence.

“Sixpence,” he said.

“Owing,” said Maud.

They stood a while. The sun went down, and the sheet of water on the fen went from gold to pewter, and it got cold very quickly, and neither of them mentioned it.

“On the night of the flood,” Thaddius said, “I asked you why you did not get in the punt, and you said ask me in the spring.”

“I did.”

“It is nearly February.”

“February is not the spring,” said Maud Hollis. “February is the worst month there is. Come in before you take a chill. You are going home on Tuesday.”