The apothecary’s daughter was bought to be a dying duke’s widow — but she smelled the poison in his wedding wine and knocked the cup from his hand before sixty guests. They locked her in her rooms. The wasps on the terrace died overnight, and no one counted them but her.

PART 3

She watched the doubled measure poured that very night, with the physician’s own studious peace, into the same glass — and she watched the Duke of Halewick drink it like a gentleman, because a dying man’s wife should be a stranger, and strangers do not knock the cup from their husband’s hand twice.

In the morning, the black iron key was long as her hand, and Mrs. Bracken turned it in the lock below the east stair with the air of a woman opening a tomb she had personally sealed.

“The old duchess’s still-room,” she said. “His Grace’s mother. Nobody’s crossed this sill in eleven years.”

The door gave onto cold stone and the ghosts of herbs: lavender and rue gone grey on their hooks, a copper still with a fine green bloom, a wall of little drawers labeled in a faded lady’s hand, and at the far end a half-glazed door, a walled garden beyond gone waist-high in weeds.

“She physicked the whole parish out of this room,” Bracken said. “Chilblains to childbed. There’s not been a soul in this house since to mend so much as a burnt thumb.”

Verity set the key on the bench with a small clack — as near to a ceremony as she came.

“I’ll send you down a supper tray. You’ll forget to eat, else. I know your sort.”

“What sort is that?”

“The sort that’s happier with work than with company.” The housekeeper paused at the door. “He slept ill last night, they tell me. Whatever it is you mean to do down here — do it well.”

Alone, Verity unwrapped her father’s scales from their flannel and set them on the bench. Thomas Holt had weighed out thirty years of the county’s health on those pans, been ruined in one season by a rich man’s grief and a richer man’s lawyer, and died above his shuttered shop owing four hundred pounds. She allowed herself one minute by the still-room clock to put her hand flat on the cold brass and cry for him.

One minute.

Then she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and went to work.

If she noticed the maid, Susan Prue, finding a third errand of the morning past the east stair door, she gave no sign of it.

Dr. Croft paid his visit on the second day, filling the doorway with good broadcloth and benevolence.

“A pretty hobby, Duchess.”

He turned a jar of dried feverfew in the light and set it down half an inch out of its place.

“I’ll speak plainly, as a friend. His Grace’s system is delicately poised — poised, madam, as a scale is poised — and an amateur kindness could tip it past my mending. You will compound nothing for the duke. Rosemary-water for the linen, by all means.” He smiled with real warmth; that was the worst of him. “I knew of your father, you know. A capable man, I always heard. A cautionary tale, in our two trades — how quickly a name goes, once a great family decides it should.”

“So I have found,” Verity said.

“I’m glad we understand one another,” said Croft, and left her his blessing and the smell of macassar oil.

The next morning she carried the duke’s night-glass down to the scullery herself, before Susan could reach it, and stood at the still-room bench with the dregs of the strengthening tonic under the window’s light. She wet the tip of her little finger and touched it to her tongue — one grain’s worth — and stood very still.

Sweet. Sugar-sweet, under the bitter show of gentian. And no honest tonic wants sweetening it doesn’t confess to.

Her father had a shop-saying about sweetness in the wrong place.

It is the taste of something being hidden.

The hall-boy came off the kitchen stair with a copper of wash-water and met the cook coming up, and by the time the scream carried to the still-room the water had done its work, from his wrist to his elbow. Verity reached the kitchen before the housekeeper did.

Afterward the staff told it in the servants’ hall for a week: the duchess on her knees on the wet flags with the boy’s arm held in a basin of cold well-water, her voice level as a builder’s line.

“More cold water. Not a rag near it. Honey from the larder and clean linen — and no, you will not butter it, who taught you that? Stand back.”

The whole kitchen moved to her orders as though the house had been waiting two years for someone to give any.

The boy was Davy Prue, eleven, the maid Susan’s brother. He gripped Verity’s sleeve with his good hand through the worst of it, and she let the sleeve be ruined, and told him about a dog she had known in Petergate that stole a whole goose off a smoking-hook, until the shaking stopped.

Mrs. Bracken stood in the doorway through all of it and said nothing at all. But that evening the supper tray she carried down to the still-room had two chops on it instead of one, and she stayed while Verity ate, and mended the fire although the fire wanted no mending.

It was three nights later that the light happened.

Two o’clock, and Verity at the bench with her daybook open, when the garden door’s glass showed a second light beside her own candle’s reflection.

She turned.

The Duke of Halewick stood in the doorway in his dressing-gown, chamber-stick in hand, looking like his own portrait after a long illness of the portrait.

“I saw the light under the stair,” he said. “May I sit? Kindly say no if you’d rather. Everyone in this house says yes to me, and it has spoilt my manners.”

“Sit,” she said, and moved the daybook aside, and he sat on the second stool, and looked briefly, absurdly pleased about it.