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 3 

“Then you ought not to have watched, your grace.”

“No,” he agreed. “I ought not. I did anyway.”

He looked at her a moment longer than manners required — the way a man looks at a ledger that won’t balance the way he expected it to.

“You gave the boy your coat. It was raining.”

“You gave him your supper.”

“He was hungrier than I was.”

“You asked nothing for either.”

“There was nothing to ask for. He hadn’t anything to give.”

She heard how plain it sounded, almost sharp, and did not soften it, because softening it would have made it a lie.

“I’d have done the same for any creature left out in weather like that. A dog, even.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile. Gone again before she could be sure of it.

“Most people,” he said, “reserve that kind of kindness for where it will be noticed.”

“Then most people are doing it for the wrong reason, your grace. And it isn’t kindness at all. It’s a kind of trade.”

She heard herself say it, and thought too late that a laundry woman did not correct a duke on the nature of virtue in his own parlor. She braced for whatever came of having said it.

What came of it was silence — and then a short, low sound she realized with some astonishment was very nearly a laugh.

“No,” he said. “It is not. You’re quite right.”

He inclined his head to her — the smallest degree, as one might to an equal rather than a servant — and left the room without another word.

Nell stood by the cold grate with her heart going far too fast for a conversation about coal and kindling, and told herself firmly that it meant nothing at all.

It was not the last such conversation. Over the weeks that followed, as the house turned from November into a hard, bright December, she found him in doorways more often than seemed entirely accidental — though she could never afterward have said which of them arranged it.

He asked her plain questions and seemed to want plain answers, not the soft, agreeable ones the upstairs girls gave when he asked whether the new steward’s arrangements suited the household.

She told him once, when he asked, that Ordway was feared rather than respected below stairs, and that a house run on fear kept its secrets from the man who most needed to hear them. He looked at her a long moment after that and said nothing. But the following week, Ordway’s manner toward the lower servants had gone, if not gentle, at least considerably more careful.

She learned in fragments why a man with everything might carry himself like one bracing for a blow.

Mrs. Puit let it slip one evening, mending by the same fire, that his grace had been near enough engaged three years past — to a woman of excellent family and excellent manners, who had wept beautifully in front of him not an hour after he’d overheard her boxing a housemaid’s ears for a stain that wasn’t even the girl’s doing. He’d broken it off within the month, and had trusted very little in petticoats since.

Nell thought of this and understood a little better — the watchfulness in him, the way he seemed always to be listening for the difference between what a person said and what a person did when they thought no one of consequence could see.

She noticed small things too, that didn’t add up cleanly. A new coat for Peter Coe, warm and plain, no note attached, delivered by the head groom who claimed not to know its origin. A tutor beginning to come twice a week to teach letters to three of the stable children — including, to Nell’s astonishment, Ivy — paid for by some fund Mrs. Puit described only as a friend of the estate, and would say no more about, however Nell pressed.

She did not think to connect any of it to the quiet man in the east gallery. She had decided, sensibly, that dukes did not concern themselves with laundry women’s daughters, and she held to that sensible belief with the same stubbornness she held to everything — right up until the moment it stopped being true.

Lady Cassandra Vain arrived at Milestone three days before Christmas, in a carriage with a crest so bright it looked freshly painted, and the whole house rearranged itself around her the way a room rearranges itself around a draft.

She was the Duke’s cousin — his father’s brother’s daughter — a handsome woman of thirty with a laugh like a small bell struck three times, always the same three beats, and a way of looking at servants that suggested she was doing arithmetic behind her eyes and always coming up short of patience. She had a son, Julian, nine years old, quiet and watchful in a way that made Nell’s chest ache with something like recognition.

It did not take a clever woman long in the house to understand why Lady Cassandra had come. The Duke was two-and-thirty, unmarried, with no direct heir. If anything untoward were ever to befall him, the trustees would look first to Julian Vain — and to his mother, as the natural hand to guide him through his minority.

Nell thought little of it. Only an unpleasant woman come to stay, the kind who rang for tea and complained it was cold though it had been carried up that instant.

She thought little else of it — until the afternoon of the twenty-second.