Margaret Ilsley had spent nineteen years locked behind four iron bars, hidden from the world as a madwoman by the aunt who once saved her life — until a duke on a black horse stopped in the road below her window, looked up, and did not look away.

 PART 7

Mr. Bardolf stopped four feet inside the room and took off his hat a second time.

Miss Ilsley. My name is Bardolf. I am a magistrate of this county, and I am extremely sorry to have come into your room without asking your leave.

Margaret sat with her hands flat on the papers, and found, for a moment, that she could not say anything at all.

You are the first person to ask my leave for anything in nineteen years, she said at last. I find I cannot say anything else just now, and I should be obliged if you would give me one.

Nobody in the room spoke for a long moment.

Then she picked up the nine sheets and held them out.

I have written an account, she said. It has the chancery order in it — the date and the court, though not the number, because I have never seen it. It has the passage from Blackstone, volume and page. The names of every servant dismissed from this house in nineteen years, with the reasons given at the time. Four physicians who attended me before I was thirteen. And an account of a letter I sent to Mrs. Dowset of this parish, which was never answered. I wrote it because a doctor is coming on Thursday who has never seen me, and I worked out that there is no way to behave in this room that is not evidence of exactly what my aunt has told him. So I decided the only thing left to me was to be legible.

Bardolf took the pages. He read the first standing in the middle of the room, and the second, and then sat down — without asking — on the edge of the bed, which Margaret said afterward was the exact moment she knew.

He read all nine sheets. It took a quarter of an hour, and no one spoke.

At the end of it he took his spectacles off and said, not to Margaret but to Mrs. Dowset:

Madam, I have sat on that bench two-and-twenty years, and I have had a great many papers put into my hand. I have never had one written by the person in the room.

He asked her four questions before he left, and Margaret answered each one as flatly as she could manage.

When did you last leave this room?

I was thirteen. I got as far as the head of the stairs. A housemaid screamed, and the bars went up within the month. In the fifteen years since, I have been in this room, sir. Not out of it. Not once. Not for an hour. Not for four minutes.

Has anybody in this house ever struck you?

No, sir. Not once, in nineteen years, and I want that written down in the same hand as the rest of it, and read to anyone who ever asks. My aunt has never raised her voice to me. She has brought me my dinner twice a day for nineteen years. She nursed me for four months when I was nine, and I should be dead without her. And there are four bars on that window, and I have not been down those stairs since I was thirteen years old. I have had a great deal of time to think about how those two facts sit together, sir, and I have never once been able to make them into a story anyone would believe. That is why I wrote you nine sheets instead.

Bardolf put his spectacles back on and looked at the page a moment.

Madam, he said to Mrs. Dowset, without turning round, I think we shall want the doctor on Thursday after all. And I shall be in this house when he comes.

The doctor came, and Bardolf had him met at the door, and that — Margaret said afterward — was almost the least interesting part of the entire four months that followed. There was no trial. There was never going to be one; Bardolf told her so plainly, and why. A suit in chancery would run four or five years, in which Prudence Kelsol’s counsel would argue good faith throughout, and Margaret herself would be examined by four physicians and cross-questioned by a barrister on the soundness of her own mind, in print, in the London papers, for half a decade.

You would win it, Bardolf told her. I have very little doubt. And you would be five-and-thirty at the end of it, and you would have spent those years being the woman in the Ilsley case. The alternative is that she surrenders the estate and goes, and nobody says one word of it in any court, and you are at Ashgrove by Christmas.

Margaret thought about it for four days.

She will not be punished, she said finally. She will be nine-and-forty, and live on a hundred a year in a cottage at Devizes, and tell everyone who will listen that she was cruelly used. And about four people will believe her.

That is the whole of what I can get you, Miss Ilsley. It is a great deal less than justice, and nine years faster.

Then take it, said Margaret Ilsley.

She was asked about that decision for the rest of her life, and her answer never varied. I was eight-and-twenty. I had had nineteen years. I was not going to give her five more.

There was one point on which she would not bend, and it cost Bardolf four months of arguing with the other side. She would not have the settlement drawn as a compromise.

She is to surrender it, Margaret told him in his own office in January. Not to be bought out. The paper must say she surrenders the management of an estate over which she has had no lawful authority since the spring I turned one-and-twenty. And it must say the date.

Her counsel will not sign that.

Then there is no agreement, and we go to chancery, and I shall be five-and-thirty when it ends, and I have thought about that for a fortnight, and I mean it. She met his eyes across the desk. She has been frightened of exactly one thing for nineteen years — being talked about. A suit in chancery is five years of her name in the London papers. A paper with a date on it sits in a drawer and nobody reads it. She will sign the second to avoid the first. I want the date, Mr. Bardolf. Not for her. For me — because in thirty years somebody will say my aunt kept me out of kindness, and there was a great deal of misunderstanding on both sides, and I want one piece of paper in England with a date a person can go and look at.

Prudence Kelsol signed it in February.