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 4 

She was sent up to the drawing room with a basket of mended linens and found Lady Cassandra there before the fire with two other ladies of the neighborhood, and no warning that she was walking into anything at all.

“That is the one,” Lady Cassandra said, before Nell had even set the basket down, in the particular carrying voice of a woman who wishes to be overheard. “The laundry girl. The one who has taken to nursing every stray creature on the estate as though it were her personal ministry. I hear she has quite adopted the stable boy — and a tutor found for her own child, at the estate’s expense. One does wonder how a laundry woman manages to attract such generosity from persons who ought to know better.”

The other two ladies laughed — small, polite laughs that agreed with everything and committed to nothing.

Nell set the basket down very carefully on the table nearest the door. She did not answer at once. She had learned the hard way that an answer given too quickly was an answer given in anger, and anger was a luxury a laundry woman with a daughter to feed could not afford.

“I don’t know what generosity you mean, my lady,” she said at last, her voice steady, though her hands folded in front of her apron pressed hard enough into each other to leave marks. “I set a boy’s broken leg because it was broken, and I was there. I’ve asked no one for anything since.”

“How very touching.” Lady Cassandra’s smile did not move above her eyes. “And your hands, my dear — red as a fishwife’s. One can always tell a woman’s true place by her hands, whatever airs the rest of her puts on.”

“My hands are red because I work them, my lady. I’d be ashamed if they weren’t.”

A small, sharp silence — the kind that happens when a servant has said something true and no one in the room quite knows how to answer truth spoken so plainly. Lady Cassandra’s bell laugh came again, three beats, thinner this time.

“How refreshingly direct,” she said. “Do run along.”

Nell did not cry on the stairs going down, though her eyes stung the whole way. She did not know the Duke had come to the drawing room door in the last moment of the exchange and heard the whole of it, and had said nothing to his cousin then, only because he judged correctly that Nell would rather be defended in private than made a spectacle of in front of witnesses.

He found her an hour later in the still passage outside the linen room.

“She had no right to speak to you that way in my house,” he said, his voice gone flat and cold, in a way she had not heard from him before.

“She’s your cousin, your grace. She may say as she pleases.”

“Not in my house.” He said it again, and that was all. But something in the set of his jaw told her the matter was not finished — and something in her chest, unbidden and unwelcome, was glad of it.

She pulled back after that, all the same — the way a burned hand pulls back from a second fire without waiting to see whether it would truly burn twice. The talk below stairs had turned uglier than Lady Cassandra’s drawing room comment. Someone always ready to say a laundry woman was reaching above her station, currying favor, playing the pitiable widow to soften a lonely duke’s guard.

Nell heard enough of it, secondhand and unkind, to write a short note to Mrs. Puit asking to be released from the house mending and returned entirely to the laundry, where at least the gossip couldn’t follow her up three flights of stairs. She told herself it was sense, not cowardice. She told Ivy, when the child asked why they no longer went up to the house on Tuesdays, that some doors were better left unopened, and left it at that.

She did not know, in those weeks, that the Duke had begun to seem unwell to those who saw him daily.

Mrs. Puit noticed it first — the way he sat too long over his morning correspondence without reading a word of it, the faint tremor in his hand when he lifted a cup, the strange, heavy drowsiness that came over him some evenings before the tea things were even cleared, as though his body had decided, without his consent, to fall asleep sitting upright.

The family physician, summoned twice in a fortnight, pronounced it overwork — nervous exhaustion, the natural toll of a man managing too great an estate with too little rest — and prescribed a nightly tonic to settle him. A tonic Lady Cassandra herself, ever solicitous of her cousin’s health, took to preparing personally each evening from the still room, since the housekeeper’s hands were, she said, too occupied with Christmas to be troubled with it.

No one thought anything of that particular kindness.

No one but a child of seven, who had spent four years at her grandmother’s knee learning that a spoonful too many of one root could turn a remedy into something else entirely — and who happened, on the second evening of the new year, to be sent up with a basket of mending and pass the Duke of Milestone in the long gallery, swaying very slightly on his feet, one hand braced against the wall as though the floor had tilted beneath him.