The Duchess War

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Five

  “Lydia,” Minnie said, dashing down the corridor. “Lydia, wait! What are you doing?”

  Lydia stopped in the corridor, her arms held straight at her sides, terminating in tight fists. “Going upstairs.” She didn’t turn around. “What does it look like?”

  Minnie came abreast of her. “It’s not too late. Go back in there and apologize—Stevens will forgive you. I know he will.”

  “Well, I won’t forgive him,” Lydia said. “He related the most vile rumor about you—that you were not legitimate. The cad, saying such things to me!”

  Minnie took hold of her shoulders. “Lydia, listen to me. Go back. Apologize. Say you’re sorry. Say you were mistaken. Say you were drunk on punch, and I’m sure he’ll take you back.”

  “Well, I won’t have him.” Lydia stamped her foot. “I won’t. I won’t have a man who could talk about my dearest friend that way. I won’t marry someone who could laugh about it and expect me to nod my head. I won’t do it.”

  “You know what will happen when your father dies. Your brother gets the mill, and you…”

  “I’ll have my portion.” Lydia raised her chin.

  Scarcely enough to live on, Minnie knew. And having severed her relationship with Stevens in so uncivil a fashion, Lydia would be unlikely to find anyone else. Besides…

  “What if next time, the rumor is about you?” Minnie persisted.

  She didn’t have to say that it might be. Too many people knew Lydia’s secret. The doctor who had diagnosed her. Anyone who had seen her in Cornwall during those dreadful months. Lydia lived with the possibility of public ruination every bit as much as Minnie did.

  “What does it matter who knows?” Lydia said, looking away. “Apparently, truth is no bar to rumor. After all, Stevens is spreading that vile rumor about you.”

  Explaining the source of the rumor would raise questions—questions that Minnie couldn’t answer. Questions like, why was there no record of the birth of one Wilhelmina Pursling? What had her name once been, and why was it necessary to change it?

  Minnie shook her head. “My parents were married. I can assure you of that.” That, and nothing more. “But Lydia, you must not be so neglectful of your future. Throwing away a fiancé, simply because he said one thing you did not like? Nobody is perfect.”

  Lydia simply wrapped her arms around herself and shook her head. “How can you ask? How could I stay silent?”

  “But he was…” She stumbled. “You said…”

  Lydia had said Stevens would make her happy. She’d said it over and over, as if trying to believe it herself. It was the way Lydia was. She believed the best. She wished everyone happy. She could have found the bright side of a solar eclipse.

  Lydia turned to Minnie now. “Sometimes,” she said slowly, “one is faced with choices. When something seems inevitable—when, for instance, marriage to a man would do my father good—when he’s a decent man who likes me… Well, it didn’t seem that I would find a better match. It makes sense.” She frowned fiercely. “It made sense.”

  “So go back and apologize.”

  Lydia’s features hardened. “After what he said about you? He told me I should have nothing more to do with you. I cannot believe this world is so cruel as to require me to sacrifice my dearest friend in order to make a good marriage.”

  Oh, Lydia. Minnie’s heart hurt for her. Even with all that had happened to her friend, she still believed that.

  “It might be that cruel,” Minnie whispered. And then, because she knew how cruel it could be, she added: “It is.”

  “It is not.” Lydia unfolded her arms, but only long enough to put them around Minnie, to draw her close. “I won’t let it be.”

  Minnie could almost let the warmth of that embrace fool her. Almost.

  Someday…

  Someday, Lydia would discover all that Minnie had withheld from her. Their friendship couldn’t survive it. It wasn’t the truth of what had happened that would destroy their intimacy, but the fact that she had held it back all those years. That she’d been the repository for her friend’s darkest secrets, while holding her own selfishly close to her chest.

  It wasn’t a matter of if they would stop being friends. It was a question of when. And yet Minnie had been unable to give her up. Lydia was warm and hopeful and happy, and sometimes, despite Minnie’s logical bent, Lydia managed to infect her with sheer optimism.

  Sometimes, she believed they would be happy. There would be no more fears for the future. It would all come out right, and they would be friends forever.

  Of all the fool fantasies that Minnie could have indulged in, that was the one that hooked deep under her skin, the one that she could never let go. And so she simply held her friend and prayed that she would not be proven right too quickly.

  “So,” Lydia said. “The Duke of Clermont spoke to you for a long while there. What did he say?”

  “Nothing.” But Minnie smiled despite herself. “Nothing at all.”

  The dwelling—if you could call it that, and Robert was uncertain it deserved the title—was the worst kind of slum. What plaster remained on the wall of the single room was cracked and streaked with soot. The single room smelt of sour vinegar and old cabbage. The chair he sat in was uncomfortably close to the ground, as if one leg had broken and they’d cut the rest down to match. If he leaned too far to either side, the chair squeaked and swayed. This squalid tenement represented everything that Robert’s father had put wrong in Leicester, and he’d come to fix it all.

  It had taken Robert far too long to try to make amends. But in his defense, he’d only recently discovered what had gone wrong.

  In front of him, the resident—a thin, coughing man by the name of Finney—pulled his coat around him.

  “Graydon Boots.” Finney pushed back in his seat and stared at the ceiling. “Now that is a name I’ve not let myself think in years. I last worked for them back in…’58, was it?”

  “That is what the records say,” Robert told him.

  The man pointed his pipe at Robert. “And you’re telling me that after all these years, after Graydon Boots has been gone for over a decade, that some high Muck-a-Muck wants to award me a pension. Me.”

  Robert nodded.

  “Mr. Blaisdell, I spent four months in prison. It ruined my health, but my mind still works. I’ll not be believing that, I won’t. There’s some kind of trick.”

  There wasn’t a trick. Robert’s grandfather had given the factory to his father as part of a devil’s bargain. His father—who had known nothing of industry—had handed the factory over to an overseer and ordered him to extract as much profit from it as he could get. Robert had only discovered the place while looking over his grandfather’s records from decades before. His father’s books, incomplete as they generally were, hadn’t even mentioned it.

  “Mr. Finney,” Robert said, “I am not telling you that Graydon Boots is awarding you a pension. That would be absurd. The charity I represent has been looking into the events of that year. They’ve decided you were unfairly imprisoned.”

  “I’ve been saying that for years.”

  “In fact, Leicester has a curious history in that regard,” Robert said. “Did you know that more people have been convicted of criminal sedition in Leicester in the last decade than in the entirety of England?”

  Another thing his father’s overseer had started, as best as Robert could tell, and that hadn’t ended when the factory went under.

  “We speak our minds here, we do.”

  Robert set the papers on the table. “Speaking your mind is only illegal if your words are intended to create disaffection with the government. Not with your masters; with the government.” At first, Robert had only wanted to try to make right what his father had destroyed. But the closer he’d looked, the more he’d found. He’d eventually gone through the records of those trials, and it was clear that the jury had not been correctly charged with the law. “You should never have been
convicted simply for organizing a union.”

  Finney looked at him, shaking his head. “As you say. But the masters get what the masters want. I don’t want to be involved any longer. I’ve my hands full with the Cooperative, I do.”

  As if to emphasize this, the door to the tiny room opened. Two women stood in the doorframe. One, a thin elderly woman in a sagging brown gown had a sack of groceries. She shoved at a yellowing cap that was slipping from her head, and gestured to her companion. “I just don’t think it will work, is all I’m saying.”

  Her companion was Miss Pursling. She seemed a picture of severity, her honey-brown hair pulled tightly up, with only a few tamed curls at her neck.

  The two women were focused totally on one another.

  “Mrs. Finney,” Miss Pursling was saying, “I’ve talked to every chemist in town. You’re my last hope.”

  Mrs. Finney unwrapped her shovel. “But the Cooperative sells food. Not any of that other nonsense.”

  “But the advertisement—”

  “Miss Pursling, I do like you, but how can I bring this before the Board?”

  Miss Pursling looked down. “You have no idea how the rest of the Commission will scold if I come back a failure.” She did meek well, her head bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. “Please.”

  “Well.” Mrs. Finney set her shawl on the entry table. “I suppose. Maybe. I might say something.”

  “Thank you,” Miss Pursling said. “Thank you.”

  That was the moment when her husband intervened. “Mrs. Finney,” he called. “We have a guest. You’ll never believe what he is saying.”

  The two women turned to Mr. Finney. Miss Pursling’s gaze fell on Robert. Her eyes widened and she took a step back.

  “It’s a gentleman from London,” Mr. Finney said. “Mr. Blaisdell, my wife. And Miss Pursling. He’s a solicitor, I believe.”

  Miss Pursling didn’t bat an eye at that. “A solicitor,” she repeated. “How curious, Mr. Blaisdell.”

  “Merely a representative,” Robert returned.

  “Mr. Blaisdell here is saying that there’s a fund that has established pensions for men who have devoted themselves to unions, who find themselves in poor straits for it.” Mr. Finney laughed.

  Mrs. Finney simply frowned. “Well, then what could they want with us?” She looked around. “There’s only the two of this in this wide, big room, and we have meat on the table three times a week. We’re not poorly off.”

  Robert blinked at this and looked around the room, trying to see it with her eyes. Not poorly off?

  “They’ve offered me a pension!” Finney laughed. “Me! When the only service I did for Graydon Boots was to get everyone to turn out after Jimmy died of poisoning.”

  Robert looked away. One of the overseer’s first cost-cutting mechanisms had been to replace the original boot-blacking with a formula that was less expensive—but far more dangerous for those who had to stand with their hands immersed in it on a daily basis. Money couldn’t make up for that, but he’d had to try.

  “Yes,” Robert said. “And I’ve explained this isn’t for your work at Graydon Boots, but for your experience in organization.”

  Finney simply shook his head sadly. “You’re a young lad. You wouldn’t understand. I learned my lesson, then, about keeping to my place. No more turning out. No more association with that sort of thing. Especially not now. I hear the Duke of Clermont’s in town.”

  “He is,” Miss Pursling put in.

  Finney spat on the ground. “It all started when he acquired Graydon Boots.” His hands, liver-spotted with age, trembled. “More hours worked for less pay. Then came the strike-breakers, the convictions. He’s a beast of a man, and I’ll never—”

  “Nathan Finney,” Mrs. Finney interrupted, “that’s dangerous talk. You were taken from me once. Did you not learn to think before you speak?”

  “No, no,” Robert said. “You needn’t hold your tongue on my account. I am quite in agreement.”

  Miss Pursling took two steps into the room. “You are, sir?”

  She clearly thought he was here on a whim.

  He turned to her. “I’ve gone through the records of what Clermont did,” he said softly. “Is it so wrong to want to make matters right again?”

  She turned her head away. “I question only your methods.” A trace of a frown flicked across her face. “Your motive…I do not yet understand.”

  “But my motive is simple. I think privileges are wasted on the peers,” Robert replied. “They have the right to be tried in the House of Lords. Think, Mr. Finney, what that would have meant for you. The Lords would never have heard a case of criminal sedition based on the evidence presented against you. The law is too clear; they’d protect their own.”

  “Too true, too true,” Finney echoed.

  “I think,” Robert said, turning to Miss Pursling, “that if the Duke of Clermont, for instance, were to write handbills saying what Finney here had said back in ’58—now, he could speak the truth and nobody could stop him with threats of imprisonment based on a perversion of the law.”

  Miss Pursling had tilted her head at him. “Could he?” she asked.

  Finney nodded. “All too right, Mr. Blaisdell.”

  “But peers use that privilege not to speak truth, but to suppress it. Think, Mr. Finney, what could you do with a seat in the House of Lords?”

  “Me, sitting in the Lords?” Finney laughed. “I should like to see that.”

  “So should I,” Robert said. “If I had a chance to be a part of this nation’s governance, I’d not waste it protecting my prerogatives and interests. No. I’d find every last way that the deck was stacked to allow people like Clermont to poison his workers, and to punish them for voicing complaint when he did so. And I’d eradicate them all.”

  He was surprised by the vehemence in his voice.

  “Now that,” said Mrs. Finney, “that is sedition, and best not to say those words no matter how safe you think you are. You’re young, Mr. Blaisdell. We were all once young. But take a deep breath and put such talk away. It’ll do nobody any good.” She glanced warily at Miss Pursling. “Besides, Miss Pursling, have you not met the Duke of Clermont? You do travel in those circles. Sometimes.”

  Mr. Finney subsided in his chair, somewhat embarrassed.

  Miss Pursling looked away from Robert. “I have.”

  “And how is the old bugger?” Finney asked. “One can only hope—”

  “Shush, Mr. Finney.”

  “I believe,” Miss Pursling, “that this is the other man’s son.”

  Finney brushed this off. “Seen one duke, seen ’em all. Am I right, Mr. Blaisdell, am I right?”

  Robert didn’t answer. He simply watched Miss Pursling. She’d scarcely shown any emotion at all as he spoke, not even a furrow of concentration on her brow.

  She shook her head now. “He’s tall. He’s wealthy. He’s handsome, and those things rarely bode well for a man’s character.”

  Robert winced.

  But she wasn’t done. “I very much doubt he understands what it means to be a working man, and I suspect that all his life he’s had anything he wanted handed to him, just for the wishing.”

  It was a harsh judgment, made harsher still because it was the truth. Robert burned in his seat.

  “Men who have only known easy times often cannot comprehend hard ones,” Miss Pursling said.

  Amazing how deeply facts could cut. Robert couldn’t even be angry with her. It was no more than he’d told himself of an evening.

  “And yet…” She trailed off, shaking her head, and Robert leaned forward, desperate to hear what she might say of him.

  Her voice was so quiet, and yet the room seemed quieter still, waiting for her to fill the silence.

  “And yet,” she said, without once looking Robert’s way, “I think he is not at all like his father. I don’t know what to make of him.”

  He felt rooted in place, unable to move. She hadn’t glanced his
way once as she spoke. She hadn’t raised her voice. And yet those words, spoken in a near-whisper, seemed like a benediction whispered over his head.

  Not at all like his father.

  He let out a shaky breath. “So will you tell the magistrates about this conversation, Miss Pursling?”

  “And involve the Finneys? I think not.” She bit her lip. “Tell me, Mr. Blaisdell. This charity you represent. Are you offering pensions to everyone who worked at Graydon Boots?”

  Not everyone. They wouldn’t believe that, for one. Half of them were dead; more had left town.

  “Those who were wronged,” he said tightly, looking away.

  “Mrs. Finney,” Miss Pursling said, “I am most grateful for your agreement to present the proposal to the board of the Cooperative.”

  “Of course,” the other woman answered.

  “Mr. Finney. Mr. Blaisdell.” Miss Pursling inclined her head, touched her skirts in a mild curtsey, and withdrew.

  He’d thought her unattractive in this mode, head turned down, voice so quiet. Not any longer. Some women blazed with light and energy. Miss Pursling reminded him of the pearlescent hint of dawn that crept under the door after a long, long night. There was a quiet grace to her, like a tiger pacing in its cage. There was a majesty in claws unused, in muscles poised for action that never came. There was a somber beauty to a caged beast.

  He wanted to see her break free of that melancholy. He wanted her to turn those knowing eyes on him and tell him that he wasn’t his father, that he wouldn’t be him.

  What stood between them had become infinitely simple and entirely too complicated all at once.

  Not at all like his father.

  He wanted her to say that again, and he wanted her to mean it.