The Duchess War

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Eleven

  “Where have you been these last days?” Lydia asked. “I sent a note over two nights ago, but your great-aunts returned that you were ill.”

  Minnie glanced at her friend. Lydia was smiling; she didn’t look worried. Instead, she’d linked her arm through Minnie’s and was conducting her to the back of the Charingford house.

  “I wasn’t ill.”

  “I know that, silly.” Lydia patted her hand. “If it had been serious, you’d have insisted I be told. And if it wasn’t serious, you’d have written yourself. Now, what was it?”

  Minnie looked about. There were no servants nearby, nobody to hear what they said. Just the wood-paneled wall of the hallway. “I really can’t tell you everything. But I’m involved in another strategy right now.”

  Lydia’s face went utterly blank.

  “Not like that,” Minnie hastened to add. “Never like that.”

  “Oh, God. You scared me. Look at my hands.” She held them out; they trembled.

  “If it had involved you,” Minnie said, “I’d have told you first thing. This one…” She grimaced. “It’s someone else’s secret.” Lydia accepted this with a small shrug, and opened the door to the back sitting room. It was, to Minnie’s surprise, occupied. Occupied and very, very warm.

  Three servants sat at the hearth, which blazed a cheery orange, flames licking high enough to tickle the chimney. The servants were balling up papers and feeding them into the fire one by one, so as to keep the blaze under control. The air was heavy with the scent of burning fibers.

  “What is this?” Minnie asked.

  “Oh, didn’t you hear?” Lydia said. “Some group of radicals is leaving handbills all over town. They left a huge stack outside Papa’s hosiery. He had to rip them from the workers’ hands himself. He spent the entire morning trying to round them all up.”

  Minnie looked at her friend. “They’re that dreadful?”

  Lydia gave her a cheeky smile and stepped into the room, rescuing one crumpled sheet from a servant’s hands before the flames could take it. “See for yourself.”

  Minnie glanced at the page her friend held out. She took it, scanned it—

  And ran into a paragraph that brought her hand to her mouth.

  …Stopping work is something of a discovered attack. First, you give your concerns a real voice, one shouted out with a volume lent by a thousand throats. Second, you vacate the factories in which you labor—thus leaving the shrinking pocketbooks of your masters as a vehement counterpoint. Be aware of where you are, and the space you’ll leave behind.

  “It’s talking about a strike,” Lydia said, “is it not?”

  Stopping work is something of a discovered attack.

  Minnie felt all the blood in her turn to ice. “Perhaps.” She was actually a little dizzy. “There’s still a long way between talk and organization, and between organization and turning out.” She put a hand against the wall for support.

  Be aware of where you are, and the space you’ll leave behind.

  Those words were familiar—too familiar. That last sentence was almost a direct quote from Tappitt’s On Chess, an obscure volume. She’d quoted it to the Duke of Clermont thinking nothing of the words. He’d confessed to ignorance of the game, after all.

  She’d used those words before, too. She’d said something almost identical to Stevens just a few months ago when they were talking about the Harley street pump. Small surprise; the words of chess strategy had been part of her lexicon ever since she could remember. Her first memory was sitting at a chessboard, her father before her.

  This, he’d said, is a discovered attack. See? One move, two threats. Can you show me them?

  “If it weren’t true,” Lydia said, “Father wouldn’t have been so furious. But he can’t afford to have the hosiery stand idle.”

  “I see,” Minnie said.

  Lydia waved her hand at the servants. “We can finish these off,” she said. “Leave us.” The maids stood and vacated the room. Lydia sat before the fire and began feeding the pamphlets in at regular intervals.

  Good. Burn them all. Maybe nobody had seen them. He’d used her words.

  “Lydia, have you seen Stevens?”

  “Just today. After this was distributed, he and my father were closeted together for hours. If there is a strike, after all, Stevens will be the one to put it down. They were arguing about something. And then Stevens left—father told me he was going to Manchester to look into something. Although what he could learn from Manchester about our workers, I don’t know. Perhaps the workers are communicating with one another?”

  No. Stevens had read the handbill. He’d remembered that Minnie had once mentioned a discovered attack. And—true to his word—he’d gone to Manchester to look into her background because he believed she was involved. Minnie felt dizzy.

  “Do you think my father pays his workers enough? Stevens says if he gives in to their demands once, they’ll just prove all the more unreasonable. But I’d be willing to bet you could think of a way to prevent that. Like what you did with the W.H.C.”

  There wasn’t anything she could do about that now. Minnie shook her head, clearing it of her racing fears. “I don’t know,” she said. “But Stevens and your father…”

  Lydia rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to talk of Stevens.” She lowered her voice, and then in direct contradiction to her last statement, looked at her. “Do you think Stevens has figured out what happened all those years ago? That these rumors about your background have come about because someone talked about me? We both went to Cornwall. Maybe—maybe he’s found something out there.”

  “He hasn’t,” Minnie said.

  “But how—”

  “I know because he confronted me with his proof,” Minnie said. “There’s nothing about you. It’s all nonsense—something about my mother not being married, some rumor he heard from some silly goose at the end of her life who is losing her memory.”

  Lydia let out a whoosh of a sigh.

  But it was no comfort to Minnie. Stevens had gone to search out news of Minnie. The room seemed wrapped in cotton batting, swathes and swathes of it surrounding her. Shouts sounded in the distance; muffled shouts. The sound of a great crowd, the blink, as bright sun swallowed her vision—

  “Minnie, is everything all right?”

  Lydia’s worried voice brought her firmly back to the present. No shouts. No riot. No crowd.

  Not yet, at any rate. And maybe…

  “I’m well,” she said slowly. “Just…thinking.”

  It would take Stevens at least a week to uncover the truth—if he even recognized what he was looking at when he saw it. And Minnie had the duke’s letter. That, along with everything else she had come up with, would prove that she hadn’t been involved.

  Lydia watched her carefully. “What was it you wanted to talk with me about?”

  Minnie sighed, and looked over at her friend. “At the W.H.C. the other day, Doctor Grantham asked to see you.”

  Lydia’s nose went up a notch. “So?”

  “So…he wanted to see you.” Although he might have only said it to tweak Stevens. “He’s handsome and young. I rather like him.”

  “I don’t,” Lydia said flatly. “He was working with Doctor Parwine when it happened. And ever since then he’s looked at me in the most knowing way.”

  “He looks at everyone that way,” Minnie said. “I think he can’t help it.”

  “And he’s so sarcastic.”

  “He’s sarcastic with everyone.”

  Lydia looked away. “I don’t like to remember, and he makes me remember. Every time I laugh, he looks at me, judging me for my frivolity. I can’t stand being around him.”

  “I had no notion,” Minnie said, moving over to sit beside her friend.

  “I work so hard for my frivolity.” Lydia’s hands were shaking. “How dare he judge me for it!”

  Only Minnie knew the truth of that.

  “I know s
ometimes you think I’m not serious enough. That I dream too much. That I should be more rational.” Lydia sniffed.

  “I don’t think that.”

  “Only the tragedies are great,” Lydia said. “Melancholy is wisdom. Suffering is strength.”

  “Lydia…”

  “Some people would think me weak, because I was seduced by an older man.”

  Minnie looked around—but the room was clear, and her friend spoke in a low voice.

  “Because I didn’t know he was married. Because I didn’t truly understand what was happening. Some people would think that I was weak because I asked you for help.”

  “I don’t.” Lydia had come to Minnie, and Minnie had figured everything out—how to get Lydia away from the public eye for the term of her pregnancy, how to make the journey seem respectable so that nobody talked. It had required only a little strategizing—and at that point, Minnie had been happy to have something to do.

  Lydia threw a stack of handbills on the fire and waited until they caught in flames. “Some people would think I was weak because I cried when I miscarried. And they would think you foolish for holding me and saying it would be all right. But most of all, they would think I was foolish because I learned to smile again. They think you are useless because you do not wear silks and ribbons, because one has to listen carefully to catch what you say. And those people don’t know anything.”

  Does nobody see you, Miss Pursling? The Duke of Clermont’s words drifted back to her.

  Yes, Minnie wanted to answer. Yes. Someone does.

  “Just once,” Lydia said, “I want everyone to see you as I do.”

  Minnie shook her head, folding her arms around her. “No. No. I don’t want them to look. I can’t bear it if they look.”

  “Well, maybe not everyone.” Lydia gave her a sly smile. “But what about—”

  Minnie let out a breath. “Don’t say his name.”

  “—the Duke of Clermont,” Lydia finished. “And that’s his title, not his name, so don’t glare at me so. He’s involved in your latest strategy, isn’t he?”

  “Of course he isn’t,” Minnie said, but her friend just grinned.

  “I want you to have a chance,” Lydia said. “I want everyone here to know how badly they’ve misjudged you, imagining you as quiet and biddable. I want them to understand what I know so well. That you have a loving heart and a clever mind.”

  Minnie sniffed, looking away. “That only happens in fairy stories. Real girls do better with large dowries and flaxen hair.”

  “And what I hate most is that we can never tell anyone my proof of how wonderful you are. But I still believe that the truth of you will come out. That one day, everyone will know you as I do.”

  “And you think they would like what they saw?”

  Lydia nodded firmly. “I know they would.”

  There was nothing naïve about Lydia’s optimism. She’d won it fair and square, and even Minnie couldn’t rob her of it. Odd, that Lydia could be so firm in her vision of the future, and Minnie could see nothing.

  She turned her head. “As it turns out, I do have something else on that front I should tell you. Doctor Grantham wanted me to invite you to come along and put up handbills with me and Marybeth Peters.”

  Lydia’s eyes drifted to the crumpled piece of paper she’d just thrown on the fire.

  “Not those kinds of handbills,” Minnie said with a smile she didn’t quite feel. “Boring ones—about smallpox and disinfectant.”

  “And Doctor Grantham will be there?”

  “No.” Minnie gave her another smile she didn’t feel. “That’s the part you’ll find so interesting. Someone else volunteered in his stead, and you’ll never guess who.”

  “Fool.” Lydia squeezed her hand. “I already know. Was it like a fairy tale? Minnie, pining in distress—wait, you’d never do that. Minnie, pinching the bridge of her nose while the idiotic men argued, wondering how she was going to get them all to do what she wished.” Lydia smiled. “And then, the Prince of Wales stepped into the room!”

  Minnie burst into laughter.

  “Oh, very well,” Lydia said. “That would be unlikely, I suppose. Besides, he’s married, and I’d hate to imagine him unfaithful to Princess Alexandra. So instead, I’m going to guess it was the Duke of Clermont. He swept in, took one look at your bosom, and claimed you for his own.”

  “Well…”

  Lydia pointed at her. “I knew it. You should see the way he looks at you.”

  Minnie tried not to, but she could call it to mind without any reminder whatsoever. Her cheeks warmed.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Minnie warned.

  So he looked at her. It didn’t mean anything. He spoke without thinking, didn’t consider the consequences of the things he did. He likely looked without intending anything by it, too.

  “He was just being…” She trailed off, not knowing how to finish. Gentlemanly? Annoying?

  She was leaning toward the latter, given that he’d used her words directly in his handbills. But she could remember him looking at her after the Workers’ Hygiene Commission had let out, his eyes so intense. And that surprised smile, when she’d said she liked his friends. It had felt as welcome as a sunrise.

  “He sent a note around,” she finally said. “He suggested we meet tomorrow afternoon. It will be me, Marybeth Peters…”

  “And the Duke of Clermont.” Lydia smiled. “I have such a feeling about this, Minnie.”

  Look up.

  Minnie put her arms around herself. “Don’t. Don’t feel. I can’t let myself.”

  Lydia simply shook her head. “Of course you can’t. That’s why I have to feel for you.”