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 5

“Forgive me,” he said, blinking hard, trying to gather himself upright. “I am only tired.”

Ivy stopped in front of him and looked up the way she had looked at Peter Coe’s forehead in the rain — with the flat, unfrightened attention of a child taught to look at symptoms rather than at people.

“You’re not tired, sir,” she said quite calmly, as though remarking on the weather. “You’re drugged.”

He went very still. “What did you say?”

“Your eyes are doing the thing my grandmother’s did the last winter before she died. Slow — like they don’t want to catch up to you turning your head. That’s not tired. Tired is yawning and rubbing your face. That’s something in you working on you from the inside.” She said it without a trace of fear, the way she would have told him it was raining — and then, because she was seven and had been raised never to leave a room without her manners, added, “I don’t mean any disrespect.”

He did not laugh, and he did not dismiss her, though every instinct of a grown man raised to command should have told him to send the child on her way. Instead he crouched slowly until his eyes were nearly level with hers, and studied her the way he had once studied her mother through the gaps in a loft floor.

“Who taught you that?”

“My grandmother. She kept the still room here before your time. I think she knew every root for three miles.”

“And you believe what you’re telling me?”

“I know what I’m telling you.”

Something in the flat certainty of it — the utter absence of a child’s usual eagerness to please — struck him harder than any physician’s Latin had managed in a fortnight. He did not answer her again. He straightened to his full height, inclining his head to her with a gravity he’d ordinarily have reserved for a man twice her age, and watched her go on down the gallery with her mending basket, small and unhurried — entirely unaware she had just said the one true thing in a house full of people too polite, too careful, or too frightened to say it.

He did not sleep that night. He sat instead in his study with a single candle and the small brown bottle from his nightstand in front of him, turning it slowly in his fingers, and thought of a woman in a rain-soaked stable yard who had once told him quite plainly that most people reserved kindness for where it would be noticed. He understood, with a cold and settling certainty, that he needed a person in this house who spoke exactly that plainly. That he needed her.

He sent for her the next morning — and it was Mrs. Puit, not a footman, who fetched her, which told Nell before a single word was spoken that whatever this was, it was not gossip, and it was not favor.

She found him in the small parlor off the east gallery, the same room where she had first knelt at his fire. There was no fire lit now, and in the gray morning light he looked older than she had ever seen him.

“Your daughter,” he said without preamble, “told me last evening that I am not tired, but drugged. I did not sleep on it. I thought instead. I have decided she is very probably right, and I do not know who in this house to trust with the saying of it. So I am asking you, because I have watched you long enough now to know you will tell me the truth whether it is convenient or not.”

He set the small brown bottle on the table between them. “Can you tell me what is in this?”

Nell looked at the bottle a long moment before she picked it up, drew the stopper, and lifted it to her nose. She had not her mother’s fine hands for it, not truly — but she had sat at the same still room table Ivy had, years before her daughter ever did, and some things once learned did not leave a woman entirely.

“Valerian,” she said slowly. “And poppy. Both good things, your grace, in their proper measure. A spoon of each for a bad night’s sleep would do a man no harm at all.” She lowered the bottle and looked at him, her face gone careful in the way it went careful when she was about to say something that could not be taken back. “This isn’t a spoon. This is near four times a spoon. By the smell of it, night after night. And poppy stacked on poppy that way does more than help a man sleep. It slows him. Clouds him. A physician who dosed a patient this heavy for a fortnight straight would either be a very poor physician — or he’d know exactly what he was doing, and want it to look like something else. Who prepares it?”

Nell hesitated, because she understood before he even asked the next question exactly where this was going, and understood too that there was no way to answer honestly that did not point a finger at the house’s most highborn guest.

“I don’t know for certain, your grace. I only know the talk below stairs. They say Lady Cassandra took it upon herself to prepare your nightly tonic these past weeks. Out of kindness, they say. Sparing the housekeeper the trouble.”

He was very quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had gone flat in the way it had gone flat outside her door the day of the drawing room — cold and final.

“If I am declared unfit to manage my own affairs,” he said, half to himself, “the trustees look next to my nearest male relation — still a minor. My cousin’s son. And my cousin, as his mother, would manage everything in his name until he came of age. Ten years. Perhaps twelve.”

He looked up at her, and for the first time since she had known him, there was something almost like fear in his face — quickly mastered.

“A child told me the truth last night that three physicians and a household full of grown people missed, or chose not to see.”

“She’s very observant,” Nell said quietly. “Her grandmother was the same.”

“She is more than observant. She may have saved my life, or near enough to it. And she did it the same way you dressed that boy’s leg in the rain. Without being asked. Without expecting to be believed.” He set the bottle down and looked at it as though it were something venomous — which, in its way, it now was. “I find I am beginning to understand something about this house, Mrs. Faroh, that I ought to have understood a great deal sooner. The people who are watched least closely are very often the ones worth watching most.”