“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 8

Maud Hollis was on her feet at the far end of the hall being sworn, in a gray gown she had made herself, entirely and impersonally attentive, as though the whole business were a job of work that had come in.

The petitioner’s counsel had a voice like a warm bath. “You wrote his letters. Every letter that went out in his name from the third of November to the second of February. So that everything this county has heard from the Duke of Fenmir this winter has come out of your hand.”

“Out of my hand and out of his mouth. They are not the same thing, and I hope the court will keep them apart, because I have taken a great deal of trouble too.”

“During the fever, was his grace in his right mind?”

“No. He had a fever of a hundred and three and a broken thigh and no Lord Chancellor in the house after the fifth day. He was not in his right mind on the ninth of November, and he was not in his right mind on the tenth, and by the fourteenth he was, and I can tell the court the hour, because it is written down.”

She took out a common ruled daybook with a marbled cover, rained on. “It is the treatment book. My father dictated it and I wrote it, four and five times a day. The hour, the pulse, the state of the wound, and what was said.” She opened it. “The ninth of November, three in the morning. Pulse one hundred twenty-four. Talking of a rail on a causeway. Not sensible. The fourteenth of November, seven in the morning. Pulse eighty-eight. Asked what day it was. Asked for food. Asked whether anyone had come, and was told no, and said very well, and asked for the toll book to see what the road had taken that week.” She looked up. “That is a man in his senses, sir. That is a landlord.”

The hall made a noise. Counsel changed his ground. “You have been very generously treated. Last night, at Fenmir, before eighteen persons. Fifty pounds — rather more than six years of this witness’s income.”

“You may have it back.” She put a paper packet on the ledge. “Forty-five pounds nine shillings, in the same notes, and I should be obliged if the clerk would count them.” A second, smaller paper beside it. “The Heatheridge coach, four shillings. A bed at the Swan, three and six. An attorney’s clerk to write my deposition fair, my own hand being in question in this cause. One pair of gloves, two shillings, my own not being fit for a public court. Ten shillings left with my father, needing somebody found to sit with him. Four pounds eleven shillings, itemized, and I will swear to every line.”

“You mean the court to believe you did not want the money?”

“I mean the court to believe what I have written down. I wanted it very much indeed, sir. There is a hole in my roof. But it was given to me across a dinner table in front of eighteen people to prove something about him, and I will not keep it, and you may make what you can of it.”

He made what he could of it for eleven minutes more, and asked her three separate ways whether she expected to be the Duchess of Fenmir.

“I have thought of it,” she said, “in the way a person thinks of a thing read about in a book. And then I have got up and done the four o’clock strapping — and I would ask the court to notice that the strapping got done every night for thirteen weeks, which is the only part of this that any of you can check.”

At the back of the hall, in the crowd by the doors, the Duke of Fenmir found he could not see very well.

His own counsel got up and asked her four questions, and she was ten minutes on the first, and the hall did not move — the horses in the dyke, the door off the hinges, the flood, the plank, the nail keg. She told it flatly, as a series of things done, and it was the flatness that finished it, because there was not a man on that jury who did not know what four foot of fen water does to a house.

“Is there anything else within your knowledge that this court ought to have?”

“Yes,” said Maud. “And it is not in my deposition, and I want to say why before I say what, because it looks very bad. On the morning of the fourth of November, at first light, I went down the drove to the dyke where the carriage was, to see whether the horses were living, and to cut them out if they were not. They were not.” Her hands were folded. “The near wheel horse was on the far bank with a harness on him. I cut the harness off with my father’s shears. The near-side trace was cut — two-thirds through from the inside with a knife, and torn the rest of the way.” The hall went very quiet. “It is a leather trace an inch and a half thick, and it does not part on a rail. I have had it in my father’s chest in a sack since that morning, and it has not been out of the chest, and my father can swear to the day it went in, because he heard the lid.”

“Why in God’s name did you not speak of it?”

“Because I am a toll-keeper’s daughter, and the only people I could have told were the family who had ridden away, and the coroner they had promised me, and a physician who had written mortification in his book before he looked at the leg. I had a duke on a kitchen door who could not sit up, and a blind man of one-and-seventy, and I judged the sack was safer shut. If that was wrong, it was wrong, and I have had fourteen weeks of it, and I will answer for it. But I am asked in this hall whether that gentleman is in his right mind, and I say he is, and I say further that somebody in this cause has an interest in his not being anything at all. It is time the sack was opened by somebody with the right to open it.”

The commissioner took off his spectacles. “Where is the chest at Saints Drove?”

“Eleven miles, and my father is sitting by it.”

They found the Duke of Fenmir of sound mind at twenty minutes past four, and it took the jury nine minutes, and there was such a noise in the sessions house that the commissioner gave up trying to stop it. Maud never once looked for him at the doors — not when the jury came back, not when the hall shouted, not when the commissioner thanked her from the bench in eleven words repeated in that county for thirty years.

The trace went to a saddler at Heatheridge, who gave his opinion in four sentences and would not be shaken from it. A groom in Sir Talbot’s service, told what it would mean for the man who had held the knife, sat down and talked for two hours. There was fourteen thousand pounds borrowed in London against an expectation, at a rate that would have frightened a horse. Sir Talbot was committed for trial at the Lent assizes. On the ninth of March, he heard the verdict standing very straight in a good coat, and was sentenced to transportation for the term of his natural life.

There was one thing more, found by accident: a letter, eleven years old, kept under the lip of the instrument chest in oilskin, granting Elias and Maud Hollis the toll house free of rent for the term of their two lives — signed, Thaddius learned with a cold and total shame, by his own hand at eight-and-twenty, in the third week of his title, among forty other papers he had never read, on the very day the parish cart had come for a newly-blinded man and his daughter of sixteen. His father’s steward had drawn it up unread and unremembered; Thaddius’s signature had gone onto it before the ink of the whole page was dry.

He read it aloud to a public meeting on the drainage question, withdrew the petition to stop up Saints Drove forever, and told the county exactly why, leaving nothing out and making it no prettier than it had been.

On the steps of the sessions house, in a thin wet dusk, Maud Hollis was waiting with the toll book under her arm. She opened it to the ribbon and held it out with the pencil.

“Sixpence. You said in the spring, and there were snowdrops out this morning, and I have carried this entry since the third of November, and I am tired of looking at it.”

He paid her sixpence on the steps of the sessions house, and she wrote paid against it and shut the book. “There. Now you are a stranger who has paid his toll, and there is nothing owing between us in either direction.”

“You told me to ask again in the spring,” said Thaddius. “There were snowdrops out this morning.”

“So there are,” said Maud, and did not elaborate.

“Then it is spring,” said Thaddius. “And I have something else to ask you.”

Maud looked at him. “Ask it.”

“Marry me,” said Thaddius.

“That is not a thing to say to a woman in a puddle.”

“It is the only thing I have thought about for more than a minute in five months. I am nine-and-thirty, an inch short on one side for the rest of my life, I have nine thousand acres I have only just begun to learn the names of, and I have done you one great injury in public and one great carelessness eleven years ago, and I am not going to pretend either will stop mattering. Marry me all the same.”

Maud Hollis stood on the bottom step with the toll book under her arm.

“Yes,” she said. “There are conditions. I keep the gate until Lady Day. My father chooses where he lives, and nobody chooses for him. And I will not be given things — not a settlement, not a carriage, not a pearl necklace out of a strongroom. If you want to spend money on me, spend it on the glasshouse, which I have wanted since the ninth of February.” She looked up at him in the wet dusk. “And when you are ashamed of something, you will come and say it to me first, in a room with the door shut, before you say it to eighteen people at a dinner table. That is the whole of it. I can live with everything else.”

“Yes,” said Thaddius.

“Then, yes,” said Maud Hollis, and took his free hand, and they went down the last step together at the pace of a man on a stick, in front of about forty people, none of whom said anything at all until they had turned the corner.

They were married at Wick End Chapel on the third of May. Elias Hollis walked her up the aisle without a hand out, having paced it three times alone at six that morning, and did not put a foot wrong. The receipt for fifty pounds hung afterward in the estate room at Fenmir, in a plain black frame, and visitors asked about it, and Thaddius told them every time, all of it, in about ninety seconds, and never once made it sound better than it had been. The sixpence sat beneath it in a little brass dish.

On a warm evening the second summer, on the flood bank above Saints Drove, with the water going out gold all the way to Sedge Halt, Thaddius leaned on his stick and asked the question he had carried since the night of the flood.

“When the punt came, and they told you to come away — did you think about it?”

Maud considered it properly, the way she considered everything, her arms folded into her shawl. “For about as long as it takes to say it. There was room for two, and my father is old, and you could not sit up, and if I had gone, you would have been under a foot of water inside the hour, and I should have had to live in this parish afterward.” She shrugged. “It was not a great deal of thinking, Thaddius. It has been made a good deal more of since than it deserves.”

“Everybody in this county thinks it was the finest thing done here in fifty years.”

“Everybody in this county was in their beds,” said Maud. “I was standing in the water, and I could not lift you, and that is the whole of it. And if you go on making a song of it, I shall charge you sixpence.”

“I have not got sixpence.”

“No,” said his wife. “Well. It says owing.”

She put her hand through his arm, and they turned and went back along the floodbank toward the lights of the house, at the pace of a man on a stick, with the whole flat gold country going quiet around them, and the gate behind them standing open for anybody who wanted to come through it.

THE END.