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 6

By late August the walled garden had surrendered. The beds lay clean and black under her lines of twine; the espaliers were cut back to obedience; feverfew and chamomile stood in drilled rows — and the Duke of Halewick knelt in the dirt of the middle path, sleeves rolled, being taught.

“Feverfew,” he said, with confidence, holding up chamomile.

“You did that on purpose.”

“I did. You say feverfew in a particular flat Yorkshire way I have grown attached to.”

He turned the flower in his fingers. He was brown from a month of mornings on the horse; no stranger now would have picked him for the corpse the county had been dressing for two years.

“Say it once more and I’ll learn it properly.”

She took the chamomile off him and put feverfew in his hand, and her fingers were half a second longer about it than the transaction strictly required, and neither of them remarked on it, and the bees went on working down the row.

Only one corner of the garden she had left untouched: the old cherry-laurel hedge along the north wall, glossy and dark and handsome. He had watched her walk past it all summer without pruning it, and asked why once.

“Because I’d want gloves, a west wind, and a bonfire,” she’d said, and moved on — and he had looked at his mother’s pretty hedge and understood that the garden had been growing the family poison all along, in plain sight, wanting only somebody who knew its face.

Today he weeded his row to the end of it and then sat back on his heels and said, without preface, in the voice he used for the things that cost him:

“I find I am afraid. You should know it. I had made a decent peace — two years in the making, and I was a good scholar of it. I wanted nothing, and it held. And now I want thirty more years and every one of them furnished, and it is the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me, and it is your doing.”

He looked at her across the row of feverfew.

“I am given to understand men say such things better. I never expected to say one at all, so you must take it as found.”

The garden was loud with bees and very quiet with everything else. She was kneeling in dirt in her grey dress; he was holding a weed as if it were his hat.

She leaned toward him — or the garden tilted; afterward she was never certain which — and his hand came up, slowly, asking all the way, to the smear of soil on her jaw—

The garden door banged.

Gates, at speed unbecoming his office: beg pardon, your Graces. A rider from Marle Court. Sir Henry Marle presented his compliments and would be delighted to accept the invitation to dine on Thursday.

“What invitation?” said the duke.

Gates’s face performed a butler’s apology. “Mr. Roland Vane’s, your Grace. Issued in your name.”

On Thursday, four men sat at the long table at Halewick and decided, over the fish, whether a dying man was well. Sir Henry Marle had been magistrate for the district for eighteen years, and looked it: big, weathered, gouty, with the small patient eyes of a man who has listened to two decades of lying under oath. Dr. Croft was in silken form. He praised the duke’s color, praised the duchess’s nursing — and then laid his trap with the tenderness of a man tucking in a child.

“And yet I’ll confess to Sir Henry what I hardly dare confess at this table. In forty years I have seen four such rallies in wasting cases — the constitution’s last grand effort, the flare of the candle-end. Each time the family hoped. Each time I buried the hope inside the half-year. I pray nightly to be wrong in this case.”

He turned his glass by the stem, sorrowful.

“But if the decline should return — and return suddenly — I would beg the family to be ready for it, and not to go hunting the house for a hand to blame. A deathbed makes accusers of us all, Sir Henry. It is the oldest story in my profession.”

In one speech at a magistrate’s elbow he had explained away the recovery, pre-written the relapse, and fitted the county’s favorite suspect for it without once saying her name.

Verity ate her turbot and admired the workmanship coldly, from across a counter.

But Sir Henry’s gout was at him under the table — she had watched him ease the foot since the soup — and when the physician turned to Roland’s London talk, she said, quietly, that her father had served men with that enemy for thirty years, and that if Sir Henry’s man steeped the colchicum as most did, he was boiling the virtue out of it — and told him the right of it, grains and hours, plainly.

Sir Henry looked at her for the first time all evening as something other than furniture with a history.

“Your father was Holt of Petergate,” he said. It was not put as a question, and the table went briefly and delicately deaf. “I sat second at York the season they tried him. I have never forgotten his answers under oath. Exact as a carpenter’s rule at his own ruin.” He took snuff, unhurried. “The wine merchants’ guild used to send him their doubtful casks, I recall. There was said to be no cheat in a bottle the man couldn’t find.”

“There wasn’t,” Verity said. “It’s a trade like any other, Sir Henry. It only wants honesty and a method.”

“Hm,” said the magistrate, and looked down the table at Croft with his small patient eyes, and said nothing further about it.

It was then that Julian set down his glass and said, in the pause, that Halewick had been dark long enough: at Michaelmas there would be a harvest ball, the first in two years, and the county was to come and be presented to his duchess.

“All of it,” he said pleasantly. “Both halves of every story I understand to be circulating. My wife will be at the head of my table, where she is.”

Roland was first on his feet with his glass raised, warm as June: to the harvest, to Halewick, to the Duchess. His delight sounded exactly like delight.

The guests were seen out at eleven. At her door, in the candle-dark of the corridor, Julian stopped, and turned his hat brim once through his hands.

“I should like to kiss you,” he said. “You may refuse me, and it will alter nothing that is owed you in this house. I’ll ask you to say it plainly, though, whichever way. I’ve had a bellyful of guessing what people can bear.”

“Yes,” Verity said. “Plainly.”

He kissed her the way he did everything — unhurried, deliberate, entire, a man spending from principal — and when it ended, her back was at the doorframe and her breath was gone missing, and the candle had tipped a thread of wax across her knuckles without her once feeling the burn.

“Goodnight, Duchess,” the Duke of Halewick said, and bowed as though they had been dancing, and went away down the dark corridor.

It took every year of her father’s training to make her hands unpin her hair that night in the ordinary order.

The marriage had stopped being an arrangement somewhere on the stairs of that evening, and they both knew it, and neither had needed to say so.

Past midnight, a light moved in the still-room. She saw it from her window — a slow candle behind the garden door’s glass, there and gone. By the time she reached the east stair it was dark, the lock unforced, the room to all appearances hers: scales level, drawers shut, daybook square on the bench.

Tallow-smoke on the air, and under it the ghost of macassar oil.

She searched an hour by candlelight for what had been taken, and the answer was nothing. Nothing was gone.

She stood in the cold dark room with that nothing a long while.

A thief takes. There was only one kind of visitor who leaves.