Every servant at Rothmir House had been given the same order on the morning of the Duke’s wedding. Do not look at the bride. Keep your eyes on the floor and your hands busy. If she speaks to you, answer in six words or fewer and step back.
Margaret Vain had worked there for six years, and she had never heard such an order given. Servants were invisible. That was the whole point. You did not need to forbid a thing that could not happen.
Unless somebody was afraid of what the bride might see. She carried the hot water up the east stairs at half seven, thinking about that word, afraid. She had never known the Duke to be afraid of anything. She had seen him bury a wife and sign a death record with a steady hand.
He was standing on the landing when she reached it. He had not been there a moment before. He was already dressed, gray coat, no gloves, and his face had the look of a man who had not been to bed at all. “Vain,” he said.
“Look at me. ”
She looked at him. That was permitted. It was the bride she was not to see.
“When you go into that room, you will set down the water and you will leave. You will not speak. If she asks your name, you will not give it. Do you understand me?
”
“Yes, your grace. ”
“If anyone in this house lets her know who serves in it, they will be on the road by nightfall without a character, without a shilling. ”
“Yes, your grace. ”
He was still not moving.
There was something else he wanted to say, and Margaret watched him decide not to say it. That frightened her more than anything he had said. Then he reached past her and opened the bride’s door himself, which no duke in England would ever do for a housemaid, and he put his hand flat against her back and pushed her through. The bride was sitting at the glass in her shift with her hair down.
She was not crying and she was not nervous. She was waiting. She turned around and looked at Margaret’s face for a long time, longer than was decent. Then she said very quietly, “Do you know who I am?
”
“No, my lady. ”
The bride smiled. It was not a cruel smile. That was the terrible part.
It was almost kind. “You will,” she said. Margaret set down the water and got out of the room without a word, which was the only order she had been given, and the only one she meant to keep. She went down the back stairs too quickly and stopped on the second landing with her hand against the wall, forcing herself to breathe.
Six years of being nothing in that house. Six years of being a pair of hands and a gray dress and no history at all. And a girl she had never met had looked at her as though she had come to Rothmir specifically to find her. Nobody knew who Margaret Vain was.
She had made very sure of it. Mrs. Pike was at the bottom of the stairs. The housekeeper had been at Rothmir for twenty years and had a face like a closed drawer.
She did not ask what had happened. She looked at Margaret’s empty hands and the color in her face. “You took the water up,” she said. “Yes.
”
“Did she speak? ”
Margaret hesitated. That hesitation was an answer, and Mrs. Pike took it.
“Then you will forget she did,” the housekeeper said. “Go and see to the plate. There are two hundred coming and half of them will count the forks. ”
The wedding was at eleven.
It was, everyone agreed afterward, a very fine wedding, and also the shortest anyone could remember. The Duke said his part like a man reading a bill of sale. The bride said hers clearly and turned her head at the end and looked back down the length of the church at the servant standing at the rear. Half the county saw her do it.
Her name was Clara Hollowell. Her father had died in March and left her more money than the Rothmir estate had seen in three generations. She had no mother, no brothers, no title, and she had brought seventy thousand pounds into a house that had been quietly rotting from the cellars up. The county understood the arrangement perfectly.
The Duke needed money. The girl needed a name. Nobody pretended otherwise. But the county had also expected the girl to be grateful, and she was not.
Margaret watched her at the wedding breakfast from her place along the wall with a jug of wine in her hands. Clara Hollowell sat at the Duke’s right and ate almost nothing and answered every question in a low, pleasant, perfectly steady voice, and her eyes went around that room like a woman taking inventory of a house she had just bought. Twice those eyes stopped on Margaret, and twice Margaret looked at the floor. The Duke saw it the second time.
He did not turn his head. He simply put his glass down and said something to the man on his left. A moment later, Mr. Cobb, his lawyer, rose from his seat halfway along the table, came around behind the chairs, and murmured to the butler.
The butler came to Margaret and told her to go and stand in the passage and send Hannah in with the wine instead. So she was in the passage holding a jug she was no longer permitted to pour when she heard the room go quiet. Two hundred people do not fall silent at once unless somebody has stood up. Then she heard Clara Hollowell’s voice, and it carried because the girl had made sure it would.
“Before we go on, I should like to present someone. ”
A murmur. Somebody laughed uncertainly. “There is a woman in this house who has served it for six years,” Clara said, “and I do not believe more than a dozen of you have ever troubled to learn her name.
That seems to me a poor way to begin a marriage. So I shall learn it first, and you may follow if you like. ”
Margaret’s hands had gone cold around the jug. “Send in the woman who brought my water this morning,” Clara said.
There was a silence of perhaps four seconds. Then the butler appeared in the passage doorway, his face gray. He simply stood aside. Margaret walked into that room because she had been ordered to and because the alternative was to run, and there was nowhere in England for her to run to.
Two hundred faces turned. She saw the Duke among them. He had gone absolutely white and was gripping the arm of his chair, looking at his wife of three hours as though she had drawn a pistol on the table. Clara Hollowell stood up in her wedding dress, came around the corner of the table, and took Margaret’s free hand in both of her own.
In front of the whole county, in front of the bishop, in front of Mr. Cobb. “This is my sister,” she said. Somewhere behind Margaret, a woman dropped a fork.
The Duke’s glass went over. Wine ran down the white cloth and off the edge of the table, and nobody moved to stop it. “Get her out,” he said. He was not looking at Margaret when he said it.
Mrs. Pike reached her before anyone else did, took her by the arm hard enough to hurt, and pulled her back through the passage and the still room and out into the cold scullery corridor where nobody could hear. Then she let go and stood in front of the door, and for the first time in six years, Margaret saw that closed drawer face come open. “What did she say to you this morning?
” Mrs. Pike said. “Word for word. ”
“She asked if I knew who she was.
I told her no. ”
“And you don’t. ”
“Mrs. Pike, I have never seen that girl before in my life.
I have no sister. My family is dead. All of it. ”
Mrs.
Pike looked at her for a long moment. “Then somebody has told her a lie. And they have gone to a great deal of trouble to do it, and they did not choose you by accident. ”
From the great hall came the sound of two hundred people all beginning to talk at once.
“Listen to me now,” Mrs. Pike said very low. “That girl will come and find you tonight. She will ask you to read something.
When she does, you say nothing. You agree to nothing, and you come to me first. ”
“Why? ”
“Because the last woman who was brought into this house to be somebody’s sister went up the east stairs in the dark and did not come down alive, and I have kept my mouth shut about it for six years.
”
Margaret knew exactly who the last woman was. She had known for six years. She had scrubbed the floor of that woman’s room every Tuesday morning without once being permitted to ask how she had died. And nobody in that house had the least idea that the woman who died on the east stairs had been her sister.
Nobody spoke of it the next morning. That was the strangest part. Two hundred people had heard a duchess of three hours call a housemaid her sister, and by breakfast the whole house had agreed without anyone giving the order that it had not happened. The story went out to the county before noon, and it was a good story and it was not the true one.
The new duchess had been unwell. The journey from London had been long, the church cold, the wine stronger than she was used to. She had spoken out of confusion. Mr.
Cobb carried that story out himself in his own carriage to four of the largest houses in the district before the church bells had finished ringing noon. Below stairs, the order came down through Mrs. Pike, and it was shorter. Whoever repeats it goes.
At eleven, Margaret was told to go up. The Duchess had asked for the maid who brought her water. The Duchess had asked twice. The Duke had gone out at nine to look at the flooded fields and would not be back before dark, and so there was no one in the house with the authority to refuse her.
“Say nothing,” Mrs. Pike said. “Agree to nothing. And if she orders you, then you let her order you.
And you come to me the moment you are out of that room. ”
The Duchess’s chamber faced east. It was the best room in the house and had stood empty for six years. Clara Hollowell was sitting on the window seat with her knees drawn up like a schoolgirl, her hair still down.
“Shut the door,” she said. Margaret shut it. “They have told everyone I was drunk. The lawyer went round the whole county with it.
He was quite thorough, I must say. He even had them add that I was seasick, and I have never been on a ship in my life. My father owned eleven of them. ”
Margaret said nothing.
“You are going to stand there and say nothing at all, aren’t you? They’ve told you to say nothing. ”
Clara smiled that same almost kind smile from the morning of the wedding. “Good.
That means they are frightened. People do not frighten servants over a mistake. ”
She crossed to the writing desk. “Sit down, Margaret Vain.
”
Margaret’s breath caught, and she saw Clara notice it. “You didn’t know I had your name. I’ve had your name for eight weeks. ”
She took out a letter.
It was not new. The paper had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone soft, and the seal had been broken and pressed back and broken again. “My father died in March,” Clara said. “He was ill for a fortnight and lucid for about four hours of it.
And in those four hours he did not ask for a priest and he did not ask for his accounts. He asked for a pen. He wrote this. He made me swear not to open it until he was in the ground.
I opened it in the carriage on the way back from the churchyard because I have never once done as I was told. ”
She pushed the letter across the desk. “Read it. I have no one else in England to show it to.
”
Margaret read it. It was short, a dying man’s hand, the letters going wide and loose toward the end. He wrote that he had not been a good man in his youth, that in the winter of 1798 he had been in Bristol, that there had been a woman there whom he had not married and had not provided for as he ought. A child had been born of it.
He had learned of the child too late, and by then the mother had married elsewhere and asked him never to come. He had honored that request for twenty-six years and regretted it for twenty-six years. He had made inquiries at the end and learned that the child had lived and was a woman grown, at that day in service in the house of the Duke of Rothmir. He gave a name.
Margaret read it three times. “The name in the letter was not Margaret Vain,” she said levelly. “The name in the letter was Charlotte. ”
“This letter does not name me.
It names a housemaid at Rothmir of the right age. There are four women in this house of the right age, and I have looked at every one of them. ”
“It named you the moment you looked up at me from the floor,” Clara said. “The others don’t look up.
You did. ”
Margaret kept her face perfectly still. “May I ask when your father made these inquiries? ”
“In February.
He had a man in London do it. ”
February. Charlotte had been dead five years and eight months in February. Somebody had told a dying man that a woman was alive and taken his money for it and put a house and a name in his hand.
And eight weeks later, that dying man’s daughter had been married into that same house in a hurry to a duke who needed seventy thousand pounds. She stood. “May I go? ”
“You are going to go downstairs and tell them what I’ve shown you.
”
“I will not. ”
“Then you’ll say nothing at all, and I shall be alone in this house with a husband who won’t look at me and a lawyer who tells the county I was drunk at my own wedding. ” Clara’s voice cracked just slightly. “I have no one.
Do you understand? My father is dead, and there is not one person on this island who is mine. ”
Margaret was at the door. “I understand better than you think.
”
She got as far as the corridor before Clara spoke again through the half-open door, not loudly. “You knew the name. When you read it, I was watching you, and you knew it. ”
Margaret went down the back stairs.
Mrs. Pike was waiting in the still room with the door shut and the shutter closed. “She showed me a letter,” Margaret said. “Her father’s dying letter.
”
“I said you were to bring it to me. ”
“She would sooner burn the house down. ”
Margaret sat on the flower barrel because her legs had stopped being reliable. “Mrs.
Pike, how long has Mr. Cobb been the Duke’s lawyer? ”
The housekeeper’s eyes narrowed. “Since the old Duke’s time.
Fifteen years, near enough. Why should you care about Cobb? ”
“Because that letter tells the duchess she has a half sister in service in this house. And the inquiries that put it there were made in February by a man in London and paid for by a dying man who could not check them.
And the woman it names has been dead for six years. ”
Something went out of Mrs. Pike’s face, and what was left underneath it was much older and much more frightened. “Say the name,” she said.
Margaret said it. The housekeeper reached behind herself for the edge of the table and held it. “You’ve known all along,” she said. “Six years you’ve been in this house scrubbing that floor every Tuesday, and you’ve known who died on it.
”
“Yes. ”
“Then God help you, girl, because there are two people in this house who know that name, and one of them is the Duke. ”
Mrs. Pike came around the table and gripped her wrist.
“Whatever she showed you, get it away from her and burn it tonight. The last person in this house who held a piece of paper with that name on it went up the east stairs in the dark, and there was nothing left of her by morning but a line in the parish book. ”
From somewhere at the front of the house, the great bell rang. Mrs.
Pike went white. “That’s the drive gate. The Duke’s not due till dark. ”
They heard wheels a moment later, not the Duke’s carriage.
A lighter one, quick on the gravel. Mr. Cobb climbed down before the footman could reach the door. He was not expected back for three days.
He had a leather case under his arm, and he did not go into the house. He stood on the gravel and looked up at the east window, where a girl in a white dressing gown was standing with a letter in her hand. He smiled. He did not come in for four hours.
He gave the case to a footman, walked round the east lawn twice with his hands behind his back, went down to the stables and spoke to the head groom for the better part of an hour, and then sat in the estate office with the door open, writing, where anyone passing might see him being industrious. Below stairs, they told each other he had come about the flooded fields. Margaret counted the hours and did not believe a word of it. The Duke came home at dusk with his boots ruined to the knee.
Whatever passed between him and Cobb took nine minutes by the kitchen clock, and when it was over, the Duke came out and went straight upstairs without eating. At eight, the bell for the east chamber rang. “That’s her,” said Hannah. “That’s the third time.
She won’t have the ladies maids. She sent Ridley down twice with her hair half done. ”
“She’ll ask for you,” Hannah said. “She will not get me.
Mrs. Pike has forbidden it. ”
But Mrs. Pike had gone up to the linen room at seven and had not come down.
And it was the butler who came into the kitchen at a quarter past eight. And the butler did not know that anything had been forbidden. “Vain. The Duchess wants the house shown to her tomorrow, and she wants it shown by someone who has been in it longer than a year.
Go up and take her orders. ”
There was no refusing that in front of eleven people. The Duchess was not alone. The Duke was standing at the fireplace with a glass in his hand that he had not drunk from, and Mr.
Cobb was in the chair by the window with his legs crossed, entirely at ease, as though he lived there. Margaret understood in the half second before the door closed behind her that the bell had not been rung by Clara at all. “Ah,” said Cobb pleasantly. “Here she is.
”
“The Duchess wishes to see the house,” the Duke said. His voice was flat and careful. “You will take her through it tomorrow after breakfast. The state rooms, the long gallery, the chapel, the gardens, if the weather holds.
You will not take her into the east wing. ”
“Why not? ” said Clara. She asked it in the mildest voice in the world.
“The east wing is unsafe,” the Duke said. “The roof went two winters ago. There is damp in the walls, and the floors are not sound. ”
“Then it must be repaired.
It is a great deal of house to leave rotting. ” Clara looked at Margaret. “How many rooms are in it? ”
Margaret’s mouth was dry.
“Nine, your grace. ”
“And is it damp? ”
The Duke had not moved, but the glass in his hand had come very slightly toward his chest. “Yes, your grace.
The north end is very bad. ”
It was the first lie she had told in that house in six years. There was no damp in it. There had never been damp in it.
There was a fire laid in the north end twice a week, and she had never once been permitted to see who lit it. Cobb uncrossed his legs. “Your grace,” he said to Clara in the tone of a man being helpful, “you must forgive an old lawyer for being tedious, but there is a further reason. The east wing was the late Duchess’s.
It has been shut since she died. His grace has never been able to bring himself to open it, and I think it does him credit. ”
The room went very still. “The late Duchess,” Clara said.
“Charlotte, Duchess of Rothmir. ”
Cobb inclined his head gravely. “Six years this September. A fever, very quick.
His grace was not four years married. ”
“No one told me,” Clara said. “It was in the settlements, your grace. Your father read them.
”
“My father was dying when he read them. ”
“He was clear enough to sign,” said Cobb. “Vain may go,” the Duke said suddenly. She went.
She got down two flights before she had to stop. Cobb had said not four years married. It had been six. He had shortened it by two years in front of a girl who could not check it.
Why would a man lie about that? Nobody lies about a thing so easy to count unless the counting is exactly what he is afraid of. She did not sleep. At a little after midnight, the latch on the attic door lifted.
Clara Hollowell stood in the doorway in a dark cloak with a candle in a shielded holder. She put her finger to her lips. They went down to the still room because it was the only room in Rothmir with no window onto a passage. “How long have you been in this house?
”
“Six years, your grace. ”
“Say the month. ”
“I came in the October. ”
“Of which year?
”
“1824. ”
Clara let out a breath. “She died in the September. A month before you came.
” She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “The lawyer said four years married. It was six. I counted it against the settlements in my father’s box.
He lied to me tonight about two whole years, and he did it without so much as blinking. And my husband stood there and let him. ”
“Your grace, I cannot discuss this. ”
“I’m not asking you to discuss anything.
I’m asking you to listen, because I have not been able to say any of this aloud for eight weeks and I shall go mad. ”
She told Margaret everything. That they had not told her he had been married. That every person at that wedding had known.
That two hundred people had watched her marry a widower, and not one of them had thought she ought to be told. “And now I am to be walked around the house tomorrow like a visitor and kept out of nine rooms. ” She looked up. “You lied about the damp.
You looked at the Duke before you answered, just for an instant. Servants don’t look up before they answer a question about a roof. ”
Margaret said nothing. “I am not going to give you away.
God knows I have no one to give you away to. ” Clara’s voice dropped. “Margaret, is there something in the east wing? ”
“I do not know.
That is the truest thing I have said in six years. I am not permitted in the north end. Nobody is, except Mrs. Pike.
”
Margaret should not have said it. She heard herself say it anyway, and she knew as she said it that she was choosing a side. “Mrs. Pike goes in.
Twice a day, with a tray. ”
Clara went absolutely white. Neither of them spoke. “Your grace,” Margaret said very low, “you must stop asking.
Not for my sake, for yours. You have been in this house for days, and you have already been told a lie you can prove, by a man who has no reason to lie unless there is a great deal of money in it. It means you are not safe here, and the only thing keeping you safe is that they think you are stupid. Let them go on thinking it.
”
Clara looked at her for a long moment. “You are the only person in England who has told me the truth since my father died. And you are a housemaid, and I do not even know if you are my sister. ”
“I am not your sister, your grace.
”
“You said the letter did not name you. You did not say it named nobody. ”
Clara stood up. “I am going to ask you one thing, and then I shall let you sleep.
The name in that letter. Do you know who it belongs to? ”
Margaret thought of the parish book. She thought of four years of weekly letters that had stopped in September.
She thought, if I tell her tonight, Cobb will know by Friday, and one of us will go up the east stairs in the dark. “No, your grace,” she said. It was the second lie she had told in that house, and she told it in the same day as the first. At six, the yard bell went for the servants rising.
Margaret came down and found Mrs. Pike already in the kitchen passage, fully dressed, with her keys in her hand and a face like ash. “Whatever you did last night, you were seen. ”
“I was not.
”
“Cobb’s man sleeps over the still room. There is a candle end in the corn bin that was not there when I locked up. He has been down twice this morning to look at it. ”
From the front of the house came the sound of the great door, a voice raised, and then the sharp double ring of the bell that called the whole staff to the hall.
That bell had rung twice in six years. Once when the old Duke died, and once on the September morning they told the household that the Duchess had taken a fever in the night. “He has gone to his grace with it,” Mrs. Pike said.
“God help us both. ”
Forty-one of them stood in the great hall in two lines. The Duke came down the main stairs. Cobb came behind him one step back and to the left, where a lawyer stands when he wants everyone to see that he is not the one giving the orders.
“There was a person out of her bed last night,” the Duke said. “The still room was used after midnight. I want the name. ”
Silence.
“If no one owns it, the whole hall loses its half day for a month, and Mrs. Pike will go through the boxes in the attic room by room. ”
Margaret’s letters were in her box. Four years of them in Charlotte’s hand, tied in a bootlace under the false bottom she had cut herself with a kitchen knife in her first month at Rothmir.
She stepped forward. “It was me, your grace. ”
The Duke looked at her for a long moment, and something moved behind his face that she could not read at all. “For what purpose?
”
“I could not sleep. I went down for a light and sat a while alone. ”
“She is lying,” said Cobb comfortably. “Thank you, Mr.
Cobb,” the Duke said. “Was anyone with you, Vain? ”
“No, your grace. ”
“Then you may sit up all night if you wish to, in the stable loft tonight and tomorrow night.
Mrs. Pike, see that she has a blanket. The rest of you go to your work. ”
The hall emptied fast.
Cobb did not move. When the last footman had gone, he said, without heat, “Two nights in a hay loft for a girl who was out of her bed on the fourth night of your marriage. ”
“You have the estate books to do,” the Duke said, and walked away. Margaret, still standing where she had been left, saw Cobb watch him go.
He was not angry. He was pleased. He had wanted her out of the house, and the Duke had put her out of the house. The loft was above the carriage horses, cold, smelling of hay and leather and warm animal.
It was the first time in six years Margaret had slept anywhere without eleven other women breathing around her. Mrs. Pike came at nine with a blanket. She also came with a lantern and a plain deal box, and she climbed the ladder with both, which for a woman of sixty was not a small thing.
She sat down on the boards with her back against a beam. “You took that for the girl,” she said at last. “I took it for my own box in the attic. ”
“I took it.
” Mrs. Pike set the lantern down. “I’ve been in this house since I was nineteen. I’ve never once put myself between a servant and that family.
”
She pushed the box across the boards. Inside was paper. A great deal of paper, loose, some of it torn, all of it in one hand. Margaret knew the hand before her fingers touched it.
“Where did you get these? ”
“Out of the grate in her room on the morning. They’d been put in, but the fire was banked and went out under them. I came in to lay her out, and I found them half burnt, and I took them out with my hands.
”
She turned her palm up in the lantern light. There was an old waxy scar across three fingers. “Why keep them? ”
“Because they told me she died of a fever,” Mrs.
Pike said. “And I laid her out myself. And I know what a fever leaves, and I know what a fall leaves. And the back of that girl’s head was broken like an egg.
”
Margaret found she had stopped being able to feel her own hands. “She did not go up those stairs. She came down. Two in the morning, dressed, boots, a traveling cloak.
There was a bag on the landing with her linen in it, and it was gone by the time the doctor came. That girl was leaving this house in the middle of the night, and something met her on those stairs. ”
She looked at Margaret. “Now you tell me something.
You knew that name yesterday before I said it. You’ve scrubbed that passage every Tuesday for six years, and you never once asked me a question about it. And there isn’t a maid in England who wouldn’t ask. Who are you, girl?
”
Margaret had rehearsed six years of not answering that question. “I am her sister,” she said. Mrs. Pike closed her eyes.
“Vain. She was Charlotte Vain before she married. And you came in the October with a character from a house in Norwich that nobody ever wrote to check. ”
“She wrote to me every week for four years.
Then in the September, the letters stopped. Three weeks later, I read fever in the parish book. I sold my mother’s clock and bought a false character, and I have been in this house six years, and I have found nothing. ”
“You found nothing because I made sure you found nothing,” Mrs.
Pike said. “I have kept every girl in this house out of that passage since the day she died. And I never once asked myself why I was doing it, because if I had asked, I should have had to do something about it. ”
She reached into the box and moved the papers aside.
From the bottom, she took a single folded sheet that had not been burnt at all. “This one was in her hand on the stairs. I took it out before the doctor came, and I have never shown it to a living soul. ”
Margaret unfolded it.
It was dated the eleventh of September, 1824, three days before Charlotte died. It was not finished. It stopped in the middle of a line, and it was addressed to Margaret. Charlotte wrote that she was going to leave, that she had found something in the estate office that she should not have seen, and that she had been stupid enough to say so aloud to the wrong man.
That she did not believe her husband would hurt her, but she no longer believed he could protect her either, because he was in debt to that man past any hope of getting out. She wrote that Margaret was to meet her at the Fen crossroads on the fifteenth with whatever money she could raise. Then she wrote the line that stopped Margaret’s breath. That she could not travel fast and could not travel far in a day because she was five months gone with child, and that she had told nobody in the house and would not until she was clear of it.
The sheet ended there, mid-sentence, as though someone had come into the room. “You knew,” Margaret said. “You laid her out. You would have seen.
”
“I saw,” said Mrs. Pike. “Then she died carrying it. ”
“No.
” The word sat in the loft like a stone dropped in water. “She did not die that night. She died on the second morning. They put it about as one night because it was tidier.
On the second morning, the doctor came out of that room gray to the lips and said to me in the passage that it had come early and it had come alive. ”
Margaret could not speak. “I have never asked what became of it. In six years, I have never once asked, because a woman of my age with no family and no character has nowhere to go.
I told myself I did not know. I have gone on telling myself every day since. ”
“Mrs. Pike, don’t.
”
“You carry a tray up the east passage twice a day. Twice a day, every day, for six years. ”
“Where is the child? ” Margaret said.
Mrs. Pike got up, the way an old woman does, in stages, holding the beam. She stood there with her head bent under the roof, and she did not answer. She went down the ladder.
Margaret heard her cross the stable floor. Then the old voice came up through the boards, quite steady, the way she gave orders in the kitchen. “Tuesday. I am at the linen at four on a Tuesday, and the north passage door is unlocked from four until five.
It has been unlocked at that hour for six years, and no one has ever tried it. ”
Margaret lay back in the hay with her sister’s last letter against her chest and did not sleep at all. She never got to Tuesday. Monday came in wet, and by noon the whole house knew that the Duchess had refused to come down.
Her breakfast went up and came back untouched. At eleven she sent for the estate steward and was told he was out. At half past, she sent for the carriage and was told the roads were flooded, which was true, and that no carriage could go out, which was not. At one, Margaret was in the yard with the wet linen when she saw a girl in a gray cloak go past the end of the stable range and turn left along the east front.
Not toward the gate. Toward the old kitchen court and the door in the north end that everyone in that house had spent six years pretending was bricked up. Margaret dropped the basket and caught her at the corner. Clara did not startle.
“Your grace, that door is bolted. ”
“It was bolted an hour ago. It is not bolted now. ”
Clara held up her hand.
There was a key in it, an old iron one, the wards worn shiny. “Mrs. Pike’s ring hangs behind the still room door between two and three while she is at the linen. Everyone in this house knows it.
”
“Then everyone in this house also knows what happens to a servant found on the wrong side of that door. ”
“I am not a servant,” Clara said. “That is the one useful thing about all this. Go back to your washing, Margaret.
If I am caught, you were never here. ”
She put the key in the lock. Margaret stood in the rain for perhaps three seconds. Then she followed her in.
The north passage was warm. Not damp, not cold, not the smell of a shut room. There was a smell of soap and porridge and cold smoke, and a runner of drugget down the middle of the floor that had been walked on until it was bare in a line. Clara stopped so suddenly that Margaret walked into her.
“Someone lives here,” she whispered. There were three doors. Two stood open onto empty rooms with the furniture under sheets. The third at the end was shut, and under it there was light.
Clara went to it. Margaret caught her wrist, and they stood there listening. There was a sound in the room. A small, regular tapping sound.
Clara opened the door. The room was a nursery. There was a fire guard in front of a small banked fire, a rag rug, a low bed with the covers turned back neatly, a table with a tray on it with a bowl and a spoon. On the rug with her back to the door, a child was kneeling and tapping two wooden blocks together, one against the other, over and over.
She was about five. She had dark hair, badly cut, as though someone had done it with sewing scissors. She was thin and clean and dressed in a gray wool frock that was too big for her. She did not turn round.
Margaret stood in that doorway and looked at the back of that head, and she thought with a terrible calm that she had scrubbed the passage outside this door every Tuesday morning for six years and had never once heard a sound through it, because the child made no sound. “Sweetheart,” Clara said. The tapping stopped. The little girl turned around and looked at them with Charlotte’s eyes.
Not like Charlotte’s. Charlotte’s. The same dark, wide-set, slightly grave eyes that had looked up at Margaret across a schoolroom table twenty years ago. Margaret’s knees went.
She caught the door frame. The child looked from one of them to the other. She did not smile and she did not cry and she did not call out. She got up and went and stood by the little table with the tray on it and put her hands behind her back.
Somebody had taught her to stand still with her hands behind her back when the door opened. “She doesn’t speak,” Clara said. Her voice had gone thin. Clara crossed the room and knelt down on the rug in her good cloak and held out her hand, palm up, the way you do to a strange dog.
The child looked at the hand for a long time. Then she came forward two steps and put one of the wooden blocks into it. Clara Hollowell, who had faced down two hundred people at her own wedding breakfast, put her other hand over her mouth and began to cry without any noise at all. Margaret went to the table.
The tray was Rothmir china. There was a bowl with porridge gone cold in it and a cup of milk, and beside it a folded napkin, and under the napkin a small book of the sort children learn letters from, well used, the corners soft. She opened the cover. Inside the board, in ink gone brown, someone had written a date, the nineteenth of September, 1824, and under it, in a hand Margaret had seen twice a day for six years on the kitchen slate, in Mrs.
Pike’s square, careful writing, one word. Charlotte. Six years old in September. Born the day her mother died.
Named by a housekeeper because there was nobody else to do it. Shut in nine rooms and fed twice a day and never spoken to. “Margaret. ” Clara was still on the floor.
“Margaret, who is she? ”
“She is the Duke’s daughter. ”
“He has no children. There is no heir.
”
“There is no heir,” Margaret said. “That is the whole reason. ”
Clara sat back on her heels in the ashes, and Margaret watched her understand it piece by piece, the way you watch ice go over a pond. “That is the whole reason my father was worth seventy thousand pounds to him,” Clara said slowly.
“A duke with no heir, a title that goes sideways to a cousin if he dies. That is what I was bought for, to give him an heir. ” She looked at the child. “And there is one sitting on the floor alive.
”
“A daughter cannot take the title. ”
“No, but she can take everything that is not entailed with it. The land is entailed. The money is not.
The Rothmir money, the real money, the Hollowell money now passes to the Duke’s issue. Issue, not sons, issue. ”
“Then she has been kept alive in a locked room for six years because she is worth more dead. ”
“No,” Clara said.
“Think. If she were worth more dead, she would be dead. She has been kept alive. By Mrs.
Pike. By somebody who has the authority to have a fire laid twice a week and a tray sent up twice a day for six years in a house of forty-one servants without one of them talking. ”
“A housekeeper cannot do that. ”
“Only two men in this house can do that.
”
Margaret looked at the child, who had gone back to the rug and picked up her other block and was tapping it against the fire guard, block, block, block, watching them. “He declared her dead,” Margaret said. “There must be a record. ”
“Then there is a paper somewhere that says the Duke of Rothmir’s child was born dead,” Clara said.
“And there is a living child in this room. And whoever holds that paper holds him by the throat for the rest of his life. ”
Somewhere at the far end of the passage, the outer door opened. Neither of them moved.
Then Clara caught up her cloak, and Margaret got the tray straight, and the napkin folded, and put the little book back exactly where it had lain. And she looked at the child and put her finger to her lips. The child put her finger to her lips. It was the first thing she had done that was not obedience.
They got as far as the second empty room. Clara pulled her in and pushed the door to, and they stood behind it in the dark with the sheeted furniture, and Margaret held her breath so hard that her chest ached. Footsteps came up the drugget. Not Mrs.
Pike’s. Heavier, unhurried. They stopped outside the nursery. “Good afternoon,” said Mr.
Cobb. There was no answer, of course. There would never be an answer. “Blocks again,” Cobb said in the mild, patient voice of a man remarking on the weather.
“You had a doll at Christmas and you did not care for it. I remember. ”
A chair scraped. He had sat down.
“I am going to be very busy this week,” he said, “so I shall tell you now because I like things to be in order. Your father has married again. There will be a good deal of coming and going in this house, and I want you to be particularly quiet. Do you understand me?
”
Silence. “There’s a good girl. ”
A pause. The fire shifted.
“Six years in September,” Cobb said, almost to himself. “And she never once told him what she’d seen. Do you know, I have often thought your mother was the only person in this house with any sense at all? ”
Then he laughed quietly.
Margaret Vain stood in the dark two rooms away with her sister’s child on the other side of the wall and understood that she had been looking for the wrong man for six years. They got out because the child made a sound. She had never made one before, or if she had, no one had ever been in that passage to hear it. But as Cobb’s chair scraped a second time, she began to tap the blocks hard and fast and out of time.
“Stop that,” Cobb said. She did not stop. And under the noise of it, two women went down twenty feet of drugget and through the north door and out into the rain. Clara did not stop running until they were behind the laundry wall.
“She did that on purpose. ”
“Yes,” Margaret said. They stood against the wet brick, and Margaret told her everything. Who she was.
The letters. The false character bought in Norwich with a dead woman’s clock money. The parish book at Fen St. Anne.
Six years of scrubbing a floor and asking nothing. The name in the dying man’s letter. Clara listened without moving. When it was done, she said, “My father’s letter names a woman who has been dead six years.
”
“Yes. ”
“He was told she was alive and in service here in February. He paid a man in London for it. ”
“Yes.
”
“Then the man in London was paid twice. ” Clara’s voice was calm, and Margaret watched the last of the girl go out of her face. “Cobb. He found a dying merchant with seventy thousand pounds and a daughter and no sons.
And he had the estate books of a duke who was drowning. And he put a letter in my father’s hand that made me feel I had a sister in this house. That is why I came. I was not sold, Margaret.
I came gladly. He knew I would. He knew a girl with nobody left would walk into any house on earth if you told her there was blood in it. ”
“He wanted you married before you could ask a single question.
He has the money since the wedding. He drew the settlements himself. ”
Clara stopped. “He drew the settlements himself,” she said again, slowly.
“My father was dying. He read them in four hours between doses, and I signed where I was told. I did not know what I was looking at. ”
She turned and looked up at the east front of Rothmir with the rain coming off it.
“I want my father’s box,” she said. “It is in my room. And I want the estate office. ”
They did it that night, and they did it badly, and it very nearly finished them.
Clara went into the estate office at eleven with a candle on the reasonable grounds that she was the Duchess of Rothmir and might sit where she pleased. The settlements were not in the office. What was in the office was a chest of estate correspondence. And in it, in a bundle tied with tape and endorsed in Cobb’s own neat hand, eleven years of accounts for a trust Clara had never heard of.
She brought them out under her cloak. They read them in the still room at two in the morning with the shutter closed. “He is the trustee of the late Duchess’s marriage settlement,” Clara said at last. “Charlotte Vain brought thirty-one thousand pounds into this house in 1818.
Look at the source. It came from a Bristol shipping account. It was my father’s. He settled it on her when she married anonymously through an agent.
The way a man provides for a daughter he cannot own. ”
Margaret said, “He knew where she was all along. ”
“The settlement money is held in trust for her issue. The trust does not close while there is issue living.
If the child is dead, the trust closes, and the money goes back to the estate. And the estate is my husband’s, and my husband owes Cobb more than the estate is worth. If the child is alive, the money is hers, administered by her trustee until she is twenty-one, and he draws his fee and lends her money to her father at whatever rate he likes. And nobody on God’s earth ever audits him, because officially she does not exist.
”
She turned the page. “That is why she is alive. And that is why she has never been in a room with another human being who might one day be asked a question in a courtroom. ”
“And me?
” Clara said. “Where do I come into it? ”
Margaret had been thinking about that since the laundry wall. “A trust like that cannot run forever.
She will be twenty-one one day, and if she is ever produced, somebody has to explain six years. So he needed a story and a person to hang it on. You stood up at your own wedding breakfast and called a housemaid your sister. Cobb had the whole county told by noon that you were drunk and unwell.
He did not do that to protect you. ”
Clara’s face changed. “He did it to establish it. A young wife who is not right in her mind, who says wild things in front of witnesses, who wanders the house at night.
”
“How long before there is a child in the east wing that everyone agrees is yours? ” Margaret said. “Born too early, hidden because you were not well enough to be seen. He does not need her to be dead.
He needs her to be yours. ”
Clara Hollowell put her head down on the still room table on eleven years of another man’s accounts and did not move for a long time. When she sat up, her eyes were dry. “We take her out of this house tonight.
”
It was Mrs. Pike who let them in through the north door. She had been waiting in the dark of the passage since one, because she had seen the light under the still room shutter. She said afterward that it had come at last, and she was glad of it.
She had the child dressed, wrapped in her own good shawl, a bonnet on her head that had belonged to a housemaid in 1819. She had packed the wooden blocks and the letter book into a flour bag, because the child would not come without them. “There’s a gig in the far barn. Wheeler’s, not the house horses.
He’ll not miss it till six. ”
“Come with us. ”
“I’m sixty-one and I have a bad hip, and I’d have you in a ditch by Norwich. Somebody has to be in this kitchen at six saying you’re gone to fetch the fish.
”
The child stood between them, holding the housekeeper’s skirt in one fist. Mrs. Pike knelt down slowly on that bad hip on the flag stones. She did not say anything else.
She simply put her hand on the side of the child’s head for a moment, and the child leaned into it. Then Mrs. Pike got up, turned her round, gave her a small push toward Margaret, and did not look at her again. They went out through the kitchen court and along the ha-ha with the moon behind cloud, three of them, the child walking between them holding a hand each and making no sound at all.
The barn door was standing open. The gig was out on the cobbles with the horse already in the shafts. And beside it, with a lantern in his hand and his coat buttoned to the chin, stood the Duke of Rothmir. For a moment nobody moved.
Then he lifted the lantern and looked at them. At his wife of eleven days in a servant’s cloak. At his housemaid. At the flour bag.
And last of all, for a long time, at the child. Margaret felt the small hand tighten in hers. “Your grace,” Clara said, “stand out of the way. ”
The Duke did not stand out of the way.
He set the lantern down on the mounting block and said in a voice Margaret had never heard from him in six years, “There are two roads out of this estate, and Cobb has a man on the Norwich one. If you take that gig, you will be stopped before Finn Bridge, and he will take her back, and he will have you both certified before Michaelmas. ”
He picked up the horse’s bridle. “Get in the trap.
I know a third road. I have been waiting six years for somebody in this house to be brave enough to make me use it. ”
Nobody moved. “No,” said Margaret.
She heard herself say it. Six years of yes, your grace and no, your grace, and it came out of her flat and hard, and the Duke of Rothmir turned his head and looked at a housemaid as though he had never seen one before. “He has a man on the road. So you say.
”
“I say it because I put him there. Eleven days ago, on Cobb’s instruction, in my own hand, out of my own stable. ” He let go of the bridle. “You may believe what you like about me.
But that child does not go up the Norwich road tonight. ”
“How long have you known she was in that room? ”
“Since the morning she was born. ”
“You put her there.
”
“Yes. ”
“Say it properly,” Clara said. Her voice had gone very low. “Say what you did.
”
The Duke stood in the lantern light and did not defend himself. “I signed a paper on the twentieth of September 1824 that said my wife was delivered of a stillborn child. It was witnessed by my physician, who has since died, and by my lawyer, who has not. It is in the register at Fen St.
Anne under the same hand that wrote fever three lines above it. And the child was two days old and in the north room with the housekeeper. ”
“Why? ”
“Because Cobb came to me on the morning she was born and told me that if it was ever known there was a living child, I should be tried for the murder of its mother.
”
The rain had stopped. Water was coming off the barn gutter in a slow tick onto the cobbles. “I did not push her,” he said. “I want that said once, and then I shall not say it again, because I do not expect it to be believed, and I have stopped expecting it.
I was not in the house. I was at the Crown at Finn over a bill of sale for the West farms, because I was selling land my grandfather bought in order to pay a debt to my own lawyer. I came back at half past one in the morning, and there was a light on the east stairs, and my wife was at the bottom of them in her traveling cloak. ”
He stopped.
“Somebody was on the stairs above her. I saw the shape of him go up as I came in at the door. I never saw his face. I have told myself for six years that I never saw his face.
”
“Cobb,” Margaret said. “Cobb was in this house that night. ”
“He had been in it since ten. He came down at two in the morning fully dressed with his boots on, and he found me on the floor with her, and he said, this is very bad, your grace, and there will be talk, and you must let me manage it.
”
“And you let him. ”
“I let him. She was breathing for two days. I sat in that room for two days, and she never opened her eyes.
And every hour Cobb came in and told me what I was going to say. Fever. Quick and cruel. No inquest.
No gentleman from Norwich walking through my house asking my servants what they had heard on the stairs. I let him because I was twenty-three thousand pounds in that man’s debt, and I could not have told you at three in the morning whether I had done it myself. ”
“Then the child came,” the Duke said. “Two days early, out of a dying woman, and she came alive.
Cobb met the physician in the passage before he reached me. I did not hold her. Do you understand? I have never held her.
By the time I came out of that room, it had already been decided. A living child was a living witness that my wife had been fit and well and five months gone and running from this house. The moment anyone in England knew there was a child, there would be an inquest. And at the inquest there would be a man who could say where I had been and what I had drunk and what I stood to gain.
”
“You stood to gain nothing,” Clara said. “The money was hers. ”
“The money was hers. And on her death without issue, it came to me.
That is what he told me at four in the morning with her still warm in the bed. That if she died childless, I inherited thirty-one thousand pounds from a woman found broken at the bottom of my own stairs, and no jury in Norfolk would want to hear another word. ”
“So you signed her dead and left her in a room for six years. With a tray and a fire twice a week and nobody to speak to.
”
“Yes. ”
“She does not talk. She is five years old, and she does not make a sound, because in six years nobody has ever answered her. You did that?
”
“Yes,” the Duke said. He did not say he had had no choice, or that he had wept over it, or that it had cost him. He stood there and let it be said to him by a housemaid in a wet cloak, and he kept his eyes on the child. After a moment, Margaret realized that he could not look anywhere else.
“Why did you keep me? ” she said. The Duke’s head came up. “You came in the October with a character from a house in Norwich that had let its staff go two years before.
Cobb never checked it. I did. ”
Clara turned to stare at him. “Six weeks after I buried her,” the Duke said, “a young woman with her face walked into my hall asking for a place.
I gave her one, and I have kept her in this house for six years, and never once led her near that passage. I could not put a nurse in that room. A hired nurse talks. But a woman who had come here to find out what happened to Charlotte Vain would never sell that child to anybody.
Not for any price, not ever. ”
Margaret could not breathe. “You were the only person in England I could trust with her,” the Duke said. “And I could not tell you, because the day you knew, you would have taken her out of this house, and I did not think you would get five miles.
”
“Six years,” Margaret’s voice broke. “Six years I have been twenty feet from her every Tuesday morning. You could have told me any day. Any single day.
”
“I know. ”
“A child tapping two blocks on a fire guard, because you were afraid. ”
“I know,” said the Duke of Rothmir. And Margaret looked at him and saw quite clearly that he did know, that he had known every day, that it was the only thing he thought about, and that it did not make one particle of difference, and he was not going to pretend that it did.
“Get in the trap,” he said quietly. “There is a farm track past the ice house that comes out on the Thetford road at Martrle. Four miles of mud, and no one uses it. From Thetford, you may be in London by tomorrow night.
I have two hundred and forty pounds in my coat, and it is everything I have that is not pledged. ”
“And you? ” Clara said. “I shall be here when he finds the books gone.
”
“He will hang you. ”
“He will try. He has held that night over me for six years, and I have paid him with everything I own and my grandfather’s land and my wife’s name, and now yours, and I find I have nothing left to pay with. There is a certain relief in it.
”
He put the lantern out. “Ma’am,” he said to Clara, “I have wronged you more than any man ever wronged a woman in eleven days. And if you live to be eighty, I hope you never once feel obliged to forgive me. Go with them.
Your money is your own. He has not touched the principal. He could not without your hand. Take her to your father’s people in Bristol.
”
He stood back from the horse’s head, and that was when the child let go of Margaret’s cloak. She walked out across the cobbles, small in a housemaid’s bonnet from 1819, holding her flour bag, and stopped in front of the Duke of Rothmir and looked up at him. He did not move. Margaret thought afterward that he had stopped breathing.
The child held up the flour bag. He went down on one knee in the wet very slowly, the way a man moves when he is afraid of frightening something, and he took it. “Thank you,” he said. And the child said, in a small, rusty, careful voice, as though she had been practicing it alone in a room for a very long time and had never yet found anyone to say it to, “You may come in.
”
Nobody moved. Then a light went up in the house behind them. The estate office, the north window, the shutter thrown open. “Your grace,” Mr.
Cobb called across the dark yard, perfectly pleasant, perfectly unhurried. “I find my accounts are not where I left them, and I have sent to Finn for the magistrate. ”
The magistrate came at half past seven in the morning. His name was Sir Henry Lyle, and he had known the old Duke.
What he found was every servant in Rothmir House standing in the great hall in their outdoor clothes, a lawyer in the middle of them with a leather case, and a child on the stairs. Cobb had done it properly. By seven, he had a sworn information laid against the Duke for the murder of his first wife. He had the physician’s memorandum from 1824.
He had the Duke’s own signature on the stillbirth paper. He had a groom prepared to say that his master had come home from the Crown so drunk he could not get down from the horse. And he had a story for the child that was six years in the building. That she was the present Duchess’s, born too soon and hidden out of shame.
That the young woman was not in her right mind and had been saying so in front of two hundred witnesses at her own wedding breakfast. “I am sorry for it,” Cobb said to Sir Henry, and he looked sorry. “I have served this house for fifteen years. ”
“And the housemaid?
” said Sir Henry. “Dismissed. She has been carrying tales to her grace and unsettling her. She came here with a false character.
”
“That is true,” Margaret said. The hall went quiet. “I did come here with a false character. I bought it in Norwich in the September of 1824 for two pounds and my mother’s clock, and I have lied in this house every day for six years, and I will swear to every word of that in any court in England.
Would you like to know why? ”
Sir Henry said, “Let her speak. ”
So she spoke. She told him her name.
She told him about a schoolmaster’s house in Norfolk and three girls and an eldest sister who taught the youngest to make a capital G. She told him about four years of weekly letters and the week they stopped, and about the parish book at Fen St. Anne, where a clerk had written fever three lines above stillborn in the same hand on the same day. Then she took out Charlotte’s last letter.
Dated the eleventh of September 1824. Unfinished, breaking off in the middle of a line. “Read the fourth paragraph aloud, sir,” Margaret said. “If you please.
I would rather it was not me. ”
Sir Henry read it. It said that she had found something in the estate office that she should not have seen. That she had been fool enough to say so to the man himself, and that he had been very kind about it, and that his kindness had frightened her more than anger would have.
It named him. It named him twice. It said she was five months gone with child. Sir Henry put the letter down on the hall table.
“Mr. Cobb. Where were you on the night of the fourteenth of September 1824, in this house? ”
“I have never denied it.
”
“And the estate office? What was in it that a young woman ought not to have seen? ”
“Eleven years of trust accounts,” said Clara Hollowell. She came down the last three stairs with the bundle under her arm and put it on the table beside the letter.
Sir Henry saw the tape and the endorsement in Cobb’s own writing, and he opened it. “You are trustee here,” he said slowly, “of the late Duchess’s settlement. ”
“For her issue,” Cobb said. “There is no issue.
The child was born dead. His grace signed it. ”
“My husband signed it,” said Clara, “with your hand on the back of his neck. But the trust has run for six years, and I have read every quarter of it.
A trust for a dead child does not need a trustee’s fee of four hundred pounds a year. Why did you never close it? ”
Cobb said nothing. “Because you could not.
Because closing it wants a death certificate for the beneficiary. And to get one of those, you need a body. And there is no body, because she is standing on those stairs. ”
Every head in that hall turned.
The child sat on the fourth step with her flour bag in her lap. “That is the present Duchess’s child,” Cobb said. “Born too early. Hidden.
”
“I was married eleven days ago in front of two hundred people in a fitted gown,” Clara said. “Sir Henry, look at me, and then look at her, and tell me whether any woman on this earth bore a five-year-old child eleven days after her wedding. ”
“She is not five,” Cobb said instantly. “She is small and backward, and she—” He stopped.
He had said it too fast, and he knew it, and every servant in that hall had heard him know it. “How old is she, Mr. Cobb? ” said Sir Henry.
Silence. “He knows to the day,” said Mrs. Pike. The housekeeper came out from the servants’ line with her hands folded in front of her apron.
“I laid the Duchess out. Fever leaves a body one way, and a fall leaves it another. I will say in any court what I saw at the back of that girl’s head. There was a bag packed on the landing, and it was gone before the doctor came.
I took her letters out of the grate with my hands, and I have the scar of it. And I have carried a tray up the north passage twice a day for six years, and Mr. Cobb has known it every day. He came up himself once a month to see her, and he sat in her room and talked at her because he thought she could not understand him.
”
Cobb turned toward the door. The door was full of footmen. Nobody had told them to stand there. “She never once told him what she’d seen,” Margaret said.
Cobb’s head came round. “That is what you said in that room on Monday afternoon, at about a quarter past three. Her grace and I were two doors down, and we heard every word. ”
“Six years in September,” Margaret said, “and she never once told him what she’d seen.
Do you know, I have often thought your mother was the only person in this house with any sense at all? ”
Sir Henry looked at Cobb for a long moment. “Her mother,” he said. “You said her mother.
”
And that was all of it in the end. Not the letter, not the accounts, not the six years. One sentence said out loud in a locked room to a child a man was certain would never speak. They took him at ten in the morning.
He went quietly, and at the door he stopped and looked back down the hall at the Duke and smiled. “I shall take you with me,” he said. “Yes,” said the Duke. “I expect you will.
”
The trial was at the Norwich assizes in the spring, and it was a very great scandal, and the newspapers had it for eleven days. Cobb was convicted of the murder of Charlotte, Duchess of Rothmir, on the evidence of a letter, a housekeeper, and a quarterly fee column. The Duke was not tried for murder. The grand jury threw the bill out in nine minutes.
What he was tried for, and what he pleaded guilty to on the first morning without any defense being offered at all, was the false registration of a birth and a death and conspiracy to conceal them. Three separate counsel told him he could fight it. He would not have it. He stood up in a full court and said that he had signed a paper that said his daughter was dead when she was alive, and that he had left her in a locked room for five years and eight months, and that no circumstance on earth made that a thing another man had done.
He got two years. The court of chancery took the child’s case in the June, and it took eight months. The Duke did not oppose a word of it. From the Norwich jail, he executed every paper his counsel put in front of him and instructed them in writing that he made no application for custody and would make none.
The court appointed the child’s guardian in the February. It did not give her to her father. It did not give her to her stepmother, who was twenty-two and had petitioned for the marriage to be annulled in the same term. It gave her to Margaret Vain, spinster of no fortune, formerly a housemaid in that house.
Her mother’s sister. Her nearest blood. As the Master of the Rolls observed in a judgment that was reprinted in four newspapers, the only person in the entire proceeding who had come to Rothmir asking nothing and been lied to by everyone. With the guardianship went the settlement.
Thirty-one thousand pounds and eleven years of accounts, and the trusteeship of it, and the management of the Rothmir lands that were charged to it, which was most of them. So the woman who had scrubbed the north passage on Tuesdays came back to Rothmir House in the March with a five-year-old holding her hand, and the forty-one servants stood in the hall to receive her, and Mrs. Pike opened the door. Clara’s annulment was granted in the same month.
She came to say goodbye in the June in traveling clothes, with a Bristol shipping agent waiting in the carriage, because she had discovered at twenty-two that she had eleven ships and no idea how to run them and intended to find out. “I called you sister before I knew why,” she said at the door. “I was not wrong. ”
“You were not wrong.
”
“He wrote to me in the jail. Four pages, and every one of them about her, and not one word about himself, and no request of any kind. I have not answered it. I do not know that I ever shall.
”
She looked up. “You will have to decide what to do about him. He has eighteen months yet. You have had six years, and you are the one who has to look at her face every morning and decide what she is to be told.
”
She kissed Margaret’s cheek and got into the carriage. Margaret stood on the steps and watched it out of the gate. Behind her in the hall, in a room with the shutters open and the sheets off the furniture, a child was tapping two wooden blocks together in the sunlight. Not the same rhythm.
It had changed in the spring into something almost like a tune. Three years later, the east wing came down in the first summer. Not the whole of it. The masons wanted to save the outer wall, and Margaret let them.
But the nine rooms in the north end came out to the roof beams, and the drugget went on the bonfire in the kitchen court, and the little iron fire guard went with it. The child watched from the lawn with Mrs. Pike. When the north wall went, she did not say anything, and Margaret did not ask her to.
Her name was Charlotte, as it had been written in a housekeeper’s square hand inside the cover of a letter book in 1824. Margaret thought about changing it and did not. It seemed to her a poor sort of rescue that began by taking the child’s name away. She was eight now, and she talked to the horses, and she could not sit still through a psalm, and she had a governess who despaired of her and adored her in roughly equal measure.
She had, at the last count, forty-one people in that house who would have walked into a fire for her. The estate was solvent by the third year, which was the least likely thing that had happened to anyone in this story. Margaret learned land the way she had learned everything, by not being ashamed to ask. The Bristol money came in twice a year, and she put every penny of it back into the ground.
The West farms that had been sold to pay Cobb were bought back in the third spring, one of them from Cobb’s own widow, to whom Margaret sent the whole of the asking price and not one word of comment. Clara wrote from Bristol every month, long letters full of tonnage and freight rates and the iniquities of insurers, and every one of them ended the same way. How is she? Tell me a thing she has said.
She came for three weeks every August. Charlotte called her aunt Clara and was under the impression for years that this was a blood relation, and Margaret never corrected her, because in the only sense that had ever mattered in that house, it was true. The Duke came home in the October of the second year. He did not come up the drive.
He came on foot from the Fen road with one bag, in a coat three years out of fashion, and he stopped at the gate lodge and asked the woman there whether he might send a message to the house, which caused her to burst into tears and then to laugh at herself for the rest of her life. Margaret went down to the lodge. She did not ask him in. They talked in the lane for an hour.
Neither of them ever told anyone what was said. What Rothmir knew was that at the end of it, he did not come to the house. He took the north cottage at Martrle, a four-room laborer’s place with a bad chimney, and he lived in it. He asked for nothing.
He did not petition the court. He did not write to Margaret asking to see the child. When he met them in the village by accident twice in the first year, he took off his hat and walked on. He worked.
And Margaret’s agent found that first winter that the drainage plan for the low meadows had been left in an envelope at the estate office with no name on it and was better than anything he could produce. What he did do every month was write a letter to his daughter and not send it. She found that out in the third spring from Mrs. Pike, who had it from the woman at Martrle who did his washing and had seen the box.
Margaret thought about it for four days. Then she walked to Martrle on a Sunday afternoon with Charlotte beside her, and did not tell the child where they were going or why, because she had not entirely decided herself until they were at the gate. He was mending a wall. He straightened up and saw them and went absolutely still.
Margaret watched a man who had faced a Norwich jury without a defense turn gray at the sight of an eight-year-old in a Sunday coat. “I have brought her to ask you something,” Margaret said. He came to the gate and did not open it. Charlotte looked up at him with her mother’s eyes.
“Are the letters really thirty-eight? ” she said. The Duke looked at Margaret. “She counts everything,” Margaret said.
“She has been counting since before she could speak. ”
He went into the cottage and came out with a wooden box and set it on top of the wall he had been mending. “Thirty-nine. There is one from this morning.
”
Charlotte took the lid off. She looked at them for a long time, then took the top one out and turned it over. There was her name on it and nothing else. No address, because it had never been going anywhere.
“Why didn’t you send them? ”
Margaret had wondered whether he would lie. “Because I did not think I had the right to ask you for anything,” he said, “and a letter is a thing that asks to be answered. ”
Charlotte considered this with great seriousness.
“You could send them and say, don’t answer. ”
“I did not think of that. ”
“You could have,” she said. It was not unkind.
It was the flat, ruthless justice of eight years old, and it landed on him harder than the Norwich assizes had. Then she put the letter back in the box, put the lid on, pushed the box a little way toward him across the top of the wall, and said, “You can start on Sunday. One a week. I’ll read them at breakfast.
”
She went off to look at the pig. The Duke stood holding the box with both hands like a man who has been handed something hot. “Margaret,” he said. “Don’t.
”
“No,” he set the box down. “No, I know. ”
They watched the child hanging over the pigsty gate, telling the pig something at length. “She has a piano master coming on Thursdays,” Margaret said.
“She is not musical. She is extremely loud. ”
The Duke laughed. It was not a sound anyone at Rothmir had heard from him before, and it came out of him half-broken.
“Sunday,” Margaret said. “One a week, and you will send them by the post like anybody else, and pay the postage. And if there is one word in any of them that asks that child to feel sorry for you, I will burn the lot, and you will not get another chance. ”
“Yes.
”
She turned to go and stopped. “There is a Michaelmas dinner at the house. Forty-one people. Mrs.
Pike sits at the top now because she is sixty-four and has earned it, and I do the carving, and it is a very great deal of noise. ” She did not look at him. “You may come in. ”
And she walked off down the lane to collect her sister’s daughter from the pig.
Behind her, at a gate at Martrle in the third autumn, the Duke of Rothmir stood with his hands on a wall he had built himself and cried, which nobody saw and which nobody ever put in a newspaper. Charlotte was married at twenty-two in the church at Fen St. Anne to a man who built bridges and had no title whatsoever and made her laugh until she could not stand up. The register that day was signed by the bride and by the groom, and by Margaret Vain, spinster, guardian, and by Clara Hollowell, shipowner of Bristol, and by Julian Rothmir, who had walked from Martrle.
Three lines above their signatures, on the same open page, in a clerk’s neat brown hand, was the word fever. Nobody at that wedding pretended it was not there. They had all looked at it. It was, Margaret thought, watching her sister’s daughter go out into the churchyard sunlight on a bridge builder’s arm, the whole difference between that house as it had been and that house as it was now.
That nobody at Rothmir lied about the page anymore. They simply went on writing underneath it.