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 6

Lady Cassandra was not a stupid woman, and stupidity was the only thing that might have saved Nell from what came next.

She noticed, the very next morning, that the Duke had not touched the fresh tonic left at his bedside. She noticed, too, that a laundry woman who had removed herself entirely from the house mending some weeks before had been sent for twice in as many days — and that Mrs. Puit’s ledger, always left open on the housekeeper’s desk for anyone to glance at, had been closed and locked when Lady Cassandra passed it that afternoon.

She acted before the day was out. Nell was summoned — not by Mrs. Puit this time, but by a note in Lady Cassandra’s own hand, delivered by a maid who would not meet her eyes — to the morning room, where Lady Cassandra sat alone with a length of fine lace spread across her lap, as though she had been mending it herself, which she plainly had not.

“I understand you have been carrying tales to his grace,” she said, not looking up from the lace. “About my tonic.”

“I’ve said only what was asked of me, my lady.”

“How convenient, to be asked exactly the questions that raise a laundry woman so high in a lonely man’s esteem.” Now she looked up, and there was nothing of the drawing room’s careless cruelty in her face. This was colder, and more careful. “I have written already to the magistrate in town, Mrs. Faroh, regarding a length of Belgian lace gone missing from my dressing room last month. Servants’ thefts are so very hard to prove — until, of course, someone thinks to search a laundress’s own rooms, where a widow with a hungry child might easily be tempted to hide such a thing. I should hate for your daughter to watch her mother taken up by the constable. Children remember such things far too well.”

Nell felt the floor tip under her the way she imagined the Duke’s had tipped in the gallery. She said nothing for a long moment, because she understood, with a clarity that frightened her more than the threat itself, that Lady Cassandra was not bluffing — that a length of lace could be planted as easily as a story could be spread, and that a duke’s good opinion would count for very little against a magistrate already primed to believe the worst of a woman who scrubbed floors for her bread.

“You’d do that,” Nell said quietly, “to a woman who’s done you no harm.”

“I would do a great deal more than that to keep what is owed my son.” The bell laugh came once, thin and humorless. “Go back to your tubs, Mrs. Faroh. Forget whatever you think you know about tonics and measures. It will go very much easier for you and for that clever little daughter of yours.”

Nell did not go to the Duke that night. She sat instead in her cold room above the still room with Ivy asleep beside her, turning the threat over and over, and understood for the first time how completely a woman without name or money could be made to disappear if someone with both decided she should be. It was Ivy, waking near midnight and finding her mother still sitting upright by the window, who asked what was wrong, and it was the child’s flat, unfrightened question — is it about the medicine, Mama? — that decided her. She would not teach her daughter that the truth was a thing to be frightened out of a person.

She went to Mrs. Puit before dawn, not to the Duke, because she trusted the housekeeper’s dry, unshakeable calm more than she trusted her own nerve to face him with fear still fresh in her chest. Mrs. Puit listened to all of it without once softening her face, and when Nell had finished, said only, “That woman has just made her first real mistake.” She did not explain further. She simply set down her ledger, took up her ring of keys, and went up the back stair.

It took her the better part of that day and the whole of the following night, working in the gaps between her own duties so that no one below stairs would remark on her absence, before she found what she was looking for — a locked drawer in the small writing desk Lady Cassandra used in her rooms, opened at last with a housekeeper’s master key and a housekeeper’s long-practiced disregard for what she was and was not strictly permitted to do in her own domain. She was nearly caught at it. Lady Cassandra’s own maid returned unexpectedly for a forgotten shawl while Mrs. Puit stood at the open drawer with the ledger in her hand, and it was only the housekeeper’s eleven years of composure, and a swiftly invented excuse about moth in the hems, that sent the girl away again none the wiser.

Inside the drawer was an apothecary ledger from the town three miles off, showing regular purchases of poppy tincture in quantities no single household tonic could ever account for. Each purchase signed not in Lady Cassandra’s own hand, but in a servant’s — plainly instructed, and plainly frightened — along with a half-written letter to a solicitor in London, inquiring in careful, roundabout language what evidence a family might need to present before a court to have a peer declared incapable of managing his own estate. There was no mention anywhere of Belgian lace.

Mrs. Puit brought it to the Duke herself before first light, and it was in that same quiet exchange that she told him of the threat made against Nell the evening before — a magistrate, a fabricated theft, a warning wrapped around a child’s safety. The Duke went very still on hearing it, in the particular way Nell had come to recognize as more dangerous in him than any raised voice could have been.

“She threatened her,” he said. Not a question.

“She did, your grace. And I’d wager she meant every word of it.”

He was silent a long moment, and when he spoke again there was nothing flat or cold left in his voice at all — only something Mrs. Puit would later describe to Nell, with rare feeling, as a man who had finally stopped forgiving his own family out of habit.

Lady Cassandra Vain was confronted that same morning — not before the household, not before her own son, but in the small private study where the Duke conducted business he did not wish overheard, with only Mrs. Puit and the family solicitor, sent for in the night, present as witnesses.

She did not go quietly. She denied the ledger was hers before the ink of her own signature had even been pointed out to her. She accused Mrs. Puit of forging it, accused Nell of inventing the threat entirely out of jealousy and ambition, accused the Duke himself of being so besotted with a laundress that he would believe any lie told against his own blood. She wept then — the same practiced, beautiful weeping Mrs. Puit had once described from three years past — and for one long moment, watching her cousin’s face, Nell understood that the outcome of the whole morning still hung on a thread thin enough to snap.

It was the solicitor, quiet until then, who ended it — laying beside the ledger a second document Mrs. Puit had also found in that locked drawer: a fair copy, in Lady Cassandra’s own unmistakable hand, of a letter never sent, drafted and redrafted late into some sleepless night, in which she had written out, almost as if rehearsing it, the exact words she meant to say to the trustees once the Duke was declared unfit. The weeping stopped very suddenly.

There was no shouting after that. The Duke laid every paper before her in silence and asked, in a voice that did not rise, whether she had anything further to say for herself. She did not.

She was given a choice, quietly and without spectacle — matters of evidence being settled far more cleanly than public ones. A small annuity. A house three counties distant, sufficient for herself and for Julian, on the condition that she never again set foot at Milestone, nor attempt to influence the boy’s guardianship, which the Duke settled instead, with the solicitor’s blessing, upon a trustee of unimpeachable character and no blood claim to the title whatsoever. No magistrate was ever troubled with the matter of Belgian lace, because none had ever existed to trouble him with.

She left within the week. The bell laugh was not heard at Milestone again.

The Duke sent for Nell that same evening — not to the small parlor this time, but to the library, where a fire had been lit and the room smelled of leather and wood smoke and the beeswax the maids used on the shelves, warm and close after the cold public business of the morning.

He did not ask her to sit. He stood by the fire with his back half turned to her for a long moment, as though gathering something he had been carrying a great while, and did not quite know how to set down gently.

“I owe you an honesty I have withheld,” he said. “You believed, the night you found me in that stable, that a shadow had watched you — a groom, perhaps, or some passing traveler. I let you go on believing it far longer than honesty allowed, because I found I did not want to be the duke to you. I wanted, for reasons I am only now able to name, to be simply the man who had seen what you did when you thought no one who mattered was watching.”

“You might have told me sooner.”

“I might have. I told myself it was caution. It was, in truth, closer to cowardice. I have been made a fool of once before by a woman skilled at seeming one thing and being another, and I told myself I was testing you — when what I was truly doing was protecting myself from finding out you were exactly what you appeared to be. Because that would mean I had no excuse left not to love you.”

She stood very still at that, her hands folded tight in front of her apron, the way they had folded in the drawing room the day Lady Cassandra had named her hands red as a fishwife’s.

“That is a great deal to say to a laundry woman, your grace.”

“It is a great deal to say to anyone. It happens to be true regardless of who hears it.” He turned to face her fully now. “I wanted to see who you were when you believed no one of consequence was watching. That is the only test that ever tells the truth about a person. You did not know how to be anything but yourself in that rain, with that boy, with nothing to gain by it. That is why I am standing here now, and not before — because it took me this long to be honest enough to earn the standing.”

“And what is it you want of me, having seen it?”

“Nothing tonight,” he said. “That is the whole of what I have come to say. I will not ask you to answer me now. I will ask again in the spring, if you will let me — and your no will be exactly as safe with me as your yes would be. I have had enough in my life of answers given because someone felt they must. I would rather wait the whole winter for a truth than take a lie in an afternoon.”

She did not answer him that night either — not this time because she had nothing to say, but because she found she needed the silence to hold what he had said, before she trusted herself to speak into it without her voice shaking.