The Maid’s Little Girl Noticed the Duke Growing Weaker Every Night — Then She Looked Him in the Eyes and Said, “You’re Not Tired, Sir, You’re Drugged”

PART 2

Ordway read the note twice. Went pale. Said nothing further about turning anyone out into the rain for some time.

It had come down from the house that morning, carried by a footman who did not know its contents and delivered with the flat instruction that it was to be read and obeyed. Peter Coe was to keep his position and his wages until fit to work again — on pain of the steward’s own dismissal, should he be found disobedient in the matter. Signed with a single initial. No name. No explanation.

Nell heard the gossip in the laundry house that afternoon — that some friend of the family, no one seemed to know who, had taken an interest in the crippled stable boy. She thought, with a small, unaccountable relief, that perhaps the world did occasionally write itself without her help.

She did not connect it to the quiet man from the stable loft, because she did not know there had been a man in the stable loft at all.

Two mornings after she’d found him, Peter was moved to the groom’s quarters proper, his leg set correctly by a physician from town who arrived without anyone summoning him, and left without giving his name to anyone but the head groom.

Nell checked on the boy before each shift, found him no worse, and went back to the copper tubs with her hands raw and her mind elsewhere. No one thanked her, because no one but a boy of twelve and a girl of seven knew there was anything to thank her for — and both of them, in their own ways, kept it quiet.

She told herself this was simply how the world worked. You did the kind thing because it needed doing, and then you went back to your washing, and the washing did not care what you had done the night before.

She met the Duke of Milestone properly nine days later. It took her the better part of an hour to realize she had met him once before.

Mrs. Puit sent for her on a Tuesday, which was unusual enough to set the whole laundry house whispering before Nell had even dried her hands. She was wanted up at the main house, in the housekeeper’s own room, and told to leave her apron on because it was work she was wanted for, and not scandal.

“His grace’s linen wants a hand steadier than the upstairs girls have got,” Mrs. Puit said without looking up from her ledger. She was a square, gray, dry-spoken woman who had run Milestone for eleven years, buried two husbands, and outlasted four stewards. She said everything as though she had already decided it, and was merely informing you of the fact.

“You’ll do the fine mending three days a week in the house. Same wage as now, plus a shilling. And you’ll keep your mouth shut about anything you see or hear up here, same as everybody does. Can you manage that?”

“Yes, Mrs. Puit.”

“Good. His grace has only just come home. Don’t gawp at him if you pass him in the hall. He hates it.”

Nell did not gawp. But three days later, kneeling at the grate in the small parlor off the east gallery with her back to the door, she heard a voice behind her — without any particular warmth or coldness in it.

“You’ve a gift for that leg of Coe’s. It’s healing straight.”

She turned. And there he was.

Not the duke she had built in her mind from gossip and distance — some gilded stranger in silk who wouldn’t know a hayfork from a hairpin. A tall man, dark-haired, with a face that had been broken once at the bridge of the nose and never quite set right. Eyes the brown of strong tea gone cold. Tired, even standing still.

She knew him.

She knew the set of his shoulders, and the particular stillness of him — the way a man stands when he is used to not being noticed, even when he wishes to be. She had seen that stillness once before, in a loft, though she had not looked up to see the face that went with it.

She got to her feet too fast, and did not curtsy, because her knees had gone strange and she was not entirely certain they would hold the movement.

“You were there,” she said. “That night. In the stable.”

“I was.”

“You said nothing.”

“There was nothing that wanted saying. You weren’t doing it to be seen.”

She felt the heat come up her neck. Not shame, exactly. Something closer to being caught at prayer.