The Duke’s Fiancée Threw Water at the Maid — She Wiped It Off and Said, “You Will Remember This Day”

Part 2

The following week, Cora found the two footmen who had dragged her down to the wine cellar standing in the long corridor, polishing the same window ledge over and over with more and more frantic energy, obviously waiting for her.

She had known them for three months. The elder was called Daniel, and he was twenty-six, with a wife and a baby in the village. The younger one, the boy who had shared his bread with her, was called Samuel, and he was nineteen, and he had once told her that his mother wanted him to go into the church and he would rather be hanged.

They had both ducked their heads when she came down the corridor. And when she stopped in front of them, they put down their cloths and stood absolutely still, like men waiting for a sentence.

“Your grace,” said Daniel. “There is nothing you can say to us that we don’t deserve. We’ve talked about it every night since. I’ve told my wife. She cried, and then she shouted at me for half an hour, and she was right to.”

“I was the one on your right arm,” said Samuel. He was white-faced. “I could have said something. I knew it was wrong. I knew it. And I just— I didn’t want to lose my place, and I—”

“Stop,” said Cora.

They stopped.

She looked at both of them for a long moment. And then she said something that she had been turning over in her mind since the docks, since the church, since the moment on the black-and-white marble when forty people had bent to a girl from the Crown and Anchor.

“Did you know that if you had refused,” she said, “the Dowager Duchess would have dismissed you on the spot, and you would have been flung out into the snow with no character and no reference, exactly as I was?”

Neither of them answered.

“You did know,” said Cora. “And you would not have been wrong to think of your wife and your child. That is not cowardice. That is arithmetic. Anyone would have done it.”

“I shouldn’t have,” said Daniel.

“No,” said Cora. “But I have thought about it a great deal, and I have decided that I will be very careful about which things I hold against people, and which things I hold against the world that made them do it.” She let out a slow breath. “When I signed Lord Vain’s confession, I did it to save my father’s life. I do not think that made it right. I think it made it human.”

She looked at them.

“So I am not going to punish you. But I am going to ask you something, and I want you to remember it.”

“Anything, your grace.”

“When someone in this house is being humiliated,” said Cora, “and there is a crowd, and it is dangerous, and everyone is looking at the floor — I want you two to be the ones who look up.”

Daniel’s jaw worked. Samuel’s eyes were shining.

“Yes, your grace,” they said, together.

It was in the kitchen, not the great hall, that the last of it happened.

Ten days after Cora returned, the cook — a formidable woman named Mrs. Hedley — came to her, red in the face and furious, and said she could not keep the peace below stairs any longer, and that her grace must sort it out, because she had scrubbed potatoes for forty years and she was not going to spend her last decade managing a family quarrel.

So Cora came down to the servants’ hall at suppertime, unannounced, and stood in the doorway, and the whole room came to its feet in a scrape of benches.

“Sit down,” she said. “Eat your supper. I want to say something, and then I will go and you can talk about me as much as you like.”

Tentatively, they sat.

“I know what you are all thinking,” said Cora.

“You are thinking that a girl who was scrubbing your floors in October is now the woman whose rooms you make up in February, and you are asking yourselves how to behave, and you are frightened of getting it wrong. Some of you are frightened because you laughed at the glove. Some of you are frightened because you laughed at the pearls. Some of you are frightened because you think I will remember every face that turned away, and that I am making a list.”

A few of them looked at their plates.

“I am not making a list,” said Cora.

She said it quietly, and she meant it.

“Listen to me. In October, I was a housemaid. In November, I was a thief. In January, I was on a ship to Canada. That is what my life was, and none of you did it to me. Lord Vain did it to me. Cordelia did it to me. A magistrate did it to me. And a world that believes a wealthy man before a poor girl did it to me.”

She looked around the room.

“None of you.”

Molly Green was crying again. Mrs. Pratt was looking very hard at the table.

“So here is how it will be. I will be the mistress of this house, because that is what I am now, and I intend to do the work properly. I will expect the same standards I expected when I was scrubbing the corridor. If you slack, I will tell you. If you steal, you will go, and I will not be merciful about it, because I know better than anyone what stealing costs.”

Someone laughed nervously, and then stopped.

“But if any of you ever needs help — if you are sick, if your mother is ill, if your wages do not stretch to the end of the month — you will come to me. Not to Mrs. Pratt. To me. Directly. And I will hear you out, because I was on the other side of that door for three months, and I know exactly what it is like to stand in a cold passage and have no one in the world to ask.”

She let the silence sit for a moment.

“Now. Eat your supper. There is a concert in the village on Sunday and I want everyone in this hall to have the evening off, and Mrs. Pratt can shout at me about it tomorrow.”

And she walked out, and behind her the servants’ hall broke into a low, confused, rising murmur, and then — slowly, awkwardly, and then all at once — into something that had not been heard in Ravenshollow Hall for a very long time.

Laughter.