She Hid the Half-Dead Duke of Corvenna in Her Cellar When His Uncle’s Men Rode Up the Moor

Inside, now, the woman had a lantern in one hand and a turf knife in the other, and the Duke of Corvena, who had been crawling for the better part of a mile, understood that she was not offering him a choice. He got as far as the flagstones of her kitchen before his arm gave way. Out on the black shoulder of the moor, five or six horses were coming up the old drove road at a trot, and the sound carried the way sound does across heather at night, flat and close and much nearer than it was.

Torquil heard her set down the lantern. He heard a ring pulled and the groan of a trap in the floor, and then her hands were under his good arm, hauling with a strength that had nothing lady-like about it whatsoever. “Six steps,” she said, “do not fall down them. I cannot carry you up again.” He did not fall down them. It was, he thought afterwards, the last act of his own will for four days.

The cellar smelled of earth and apples and salt. She rolled him behind a rank of barrels into the hollow beneath the ledge where the peat was stacked, and pulled turfs down over him until nothing showed but a strip of face, and put a hand flat against his mouth for one hard second, which said everything that needed said it saying.

Then the trap shut, and the dark closed, and above him the hooves came into the yard. He heard it all through 18 in of board and flag. Boots the kitchen door. A man’s voice, loud in the way men are loud when they wish to be thought official. “Woman, there is a fugitive on this moor.” “There is nothing on this moor but weather,” she said.

Her voice did not shake. It was not even raised. “And you are letting mine in. We are searching every dwelling from Torcross to the water.” “Search, then. Mind the churn.” They searched. Torquil lay under the peat and heard them turn over her small poor life above him. A box dragged, a bed shifted, the dresser hauled from the wall.

Once a boot came down on the trap and stopped, and the dust of it fell on his face, and he did not breathe. What is below? Roots and last year’s apples. The ring is stiff. You will want both hands. There was a pause of perhaps 3 seconds, and in it the Duke of Corvenna learned what it is to have his whole life resting in the mouth of a woman whose name he did not know.

Leave it, the man said at last. It stinks. They went. He heard her bar the door and heard her stand a long while against it, not moving. Then the trap opened, and the lantern came down, and she knelt by him in the earth smell and began, without one word of preface, to cut his coat away from his shoulder. Her name was Morwenna Truewen.

He got that much on the second day, between the fever and the cold that came after it, and not much else, because she was not a woman who talked to fill a silence. She kept bees. Nine hives stood in the shelter of the wall behind the cottage, and she went out to them at first light and came back with her hands smelling of smoke.

Her father had been a lay preacher on that moor for 30 years and had taught her to read, and had died in the spring, and she had stayed because there was nowhere else, and because the hives were his. She fed Torquil broth with a horn spoon and made him sit up for it, and when he could not lift his right arm, she held the cup, and never once said anything to make a proud man feel his weakness.

She dressed the wound with linen torn from her own petticoat, and told him matter-of-factly that the ball had gone through the meat of the shoulder and out again, and that he had lost a great deal of blood and rather more sense, and that had he lain another hour in the wet, he would not have wanted a doctor but a spade.

On the fourth day the fever broke, and he found he could think again. “You have not asked my name,” he said. “No. Most would. Most have not had six-armed men in their kitchen.” She was at the fire with her back to him. “You will tell me or you will not. Vaunce, said Torquil, which was true and about a third of the truth.

Morwenna turned round. She had a plain strong face and grey eyes that were entirely too steady, and she was holding his shirt which she had washed, and which she now folded over her arm so that he could see the collar. There is a device worked in the linen, she said, a hound and a broken tower. My father showed me the Corvenna arms on the church board at Torcross when I was nine years old.

She laid the shirt on the chest. I have known since Tuesday. I did not ask because a man who has been shot at is entitled to keep his own counsel until he can stand. He looked at her a long moment. There were 400 people at Corvenna who would not have dared that speech, and half of London that would have sold him for less than the price of the linen.

Then you know what I am worth, he said. I know what you would be worth to them. She sat down on the settle. Your Grace, they came back the day after, and they will come again. So you had better tell me who wants you dead because I am the one who will be lying to them. So he told her. He told her about his father’s younger brother, Lord Ellis Vaunce, who had managed Corvenna through 11 years of a minority and had never once been asked to account for it.

He told her about the audit he had ordered in June and the conveyance he had found drawn in a lawyer’s hand and dated three years back transferring the whole of the Corvenna ward to rights to a company of which his uncle was the only real name. He told her that he had said nothing and had written quietly to a King’s Counsel in London and had set to ride there himself with the papers in his saddlebag alone because he had been fool enough to believe his own blood would not go so far. And the papers? Said Morwenna. On

the horse. The horse is somewhere on this moor or in his hands, likely in his hands. Then you have nothing. I have my word, said the Duke of Corvenna, and the word of a dead man is worth nothing at all, which is precisely why he wants me to be one before my Colmers. Morwenna Trewein sat very still. Outside, the wind came round the corner of the cottage and found the gap under the door, as it did every night.

“Eat your broth,” she said. “You are no use to anybody at that weight.” They came back on the 11th day. Torquil was standing by then, in a dead preacher’s coat, too short in the arm, and he was at the back window when the horses came up out of the comb, and he counted them, and saw that this time there were seven.

And at the head of them, on a grey he had known since he was a boy, riding easily, hat in hand to the weather, came his uncle. He went down into the cellar because she made him, and lying in the dark under his own helplessness was the hardest hour of his life. Lord Ellis Vance did not shout. He had never needed to.

Torquil heard the voice come through the boards, warm and reasonable and terribly familiar, the voice that had taught him to cast a line and to shoot and to sign what was put in front of him. “My dear young woman, I am looking for my nephew. I have heard he is dead.” “He is missing, which on this moor is nearly the same thing.” A pause.

The scrape of a chair. “There is a man abroad here who has taken his ring off him, a vagrant, we think, dangerous. If any word should come to you of where the body lies, there would be 50 guineas in it, and no questions.” “50 guineas is a great deal of money to a woman with nine hives. It is. I have had it written out and cried at Torcross paper. Keep this.

Show it to any who can read.” When they had gone, she came down the six steps and put the handbill into Torquil’s hands without a word. It was printed and signed beneath in ink, in his uncle’s own hand, in the loops he had known since childhood. “50 guineas for information leading to the discovery of the body of His Grace, the Duke of Corvena. He looked at the date.

Then he looked at it again, and his hand began to shake, and Morwenna took the paper out of it before he could crush it. What is it? The date. His voice came out of him strangely. The 17th. Morwenna, I was set upon on the night of the 19th. He had that cried in the market 2 days before there was any body to look for.

She sat back on her heels among the earth and the apples. “Then we keep it,” she said, “somewhere better than a cellar.” And she went up and put it inside the hollow of a straw skep behind the hives, under the wax, where nobody in this world goes looking who has not been stung. October came on the moor.

He grew strong slowly and hated every day of it. And in the growing strong, he found that he did not, in fact, hate the days. He learned to cut peat left-handed badly, and she let him, and never laughed except once. He carried water. He sat on the wall in the low sun while she worked the hives in her veil and her gloves of soft leather.

And when a bee came and settled on the back of his hand, she said, “Be still.” And he was still, and it went away, and she looked at him across the smoke and smiled. The Duke of Corvena, who had been shot at by his own blood and had not flinched at it, found his heart going harder at that smile than it had gone in the cellar.

One evening, she read aloud to him because his eyes still swam, and he watched her mouth make the words by rushlight, and thought about the fact that she had lied to seven-armed men with her chin up, and had never once asked what she would get for it. “You will go back,” she said without looking up. “When you can ride.” “Yes.” “Good.

” She turned the page. Her voice was perfectly level, and it was the first time he had heard her put effort into making it so, and something in him turned over at that, painfully. The magistrate came on the last Tuesday in October with a warrant and a constable and four of his uncle’s men behind him.

Torquil watched them come up the track and knew that the choice had arrived and that he had about 90 seconds in which to make it. The warrant was for Morwenna Truin on the sworn information of Lord Ellis Vance for harboring the vagrant who had murdered the Duke of Corvenna and taken his ring. He heard the constable say her name. He heard her answer, “I am she.

” in that flat calm voice. If he stayed below he might reach London in a fortnight with a lawyer at his back. If he went up he would be one weak man in a dead preacher’s coat with no papers and no proof before a magistrate who might well be bought calling himself a Duke. Torquil Vance did not spend even one of the 90 seconds upon it.

He came up out of the trap and stood in her kitchen doorway with his shoulders strapped beneath a borrowed coat and said, “Put that warrant down. I am Corvenna.” The room went entirely silent. What followed was ugly and brief. One of his uncle’s men swore he was an impostor and a murderer besides and there was a moment, a very bad moment, when the magistrate looked from the shabby coat to the four armed men and back again and Torquil saw the whole thing swing like a gate in the wind.

And then Morwenna Truin walked out to the hives in front of them all and put her bare hand into a straw skep and came back with a handbill folded in a scrap of wax cloth and laid it flat on her own kitchen table. “Sir,” she said to the magistrate, “Read the date. Then ask that gentleman’s master how he came to advertise for a body two days before there was one.

” The magistrate read it. He read it twice. He was a slow man but not a stupid one and he had a clerk with him and the clerk had the register of what had been cried at Torcross market and upon which day. The rest belongs to the assizes and not to this more. Lord Ellis Vance was taken at Corvenna eight days afterwards in the library and the conveyance was set aside at the spring sitting and he never came into that country again.

Torquil was carried off to all of it within the hour in a magistrate’s chase with 15 things to say and no time to say a single one. He got as far as her gate and turned round. Morwenna stood at her door with the wind pulling her hair loose. Go on, she said, you have a house to save. He came back in March on foot alone with no outriders and a good coat that fitted him. She was the hives.

She did not run to him. She straightened, set down the smoker, pushed the veil back from her face and stood with the more going gold and brown behind her and her mouth was not quite steady which was the first time he had seen it so. You are well, she said. I am well. Tool stopped an arm’s length from her which was as near as he trusted himself.

Morwenna, I have spent the winter in rooms full of men congratulating me upon my deliverance. Not one of them lied to seven riders for my sake. Not one held a cup to my mouth when I could not lift my own arm. He drew breath. I have 400 people who owe me their rent and one woman in the world to whom I owe my life. I have not come to pay her because it cannot be paid.

I have come to ask her to marry me. She looked at him a long moment, the bees going about their business between them in the cold bright air. You will be laughed at, she said. A duke and a more woman who smells of smoke. They laughed at me for being shot by my own uncle. It did me no harm whatever.

He put out his hand palm up and waited and did not close the distance himself. Say yes or say no, but say it plainly. You have never said anything to me any other way. Morwenna Truin put her hand into his. There was propolis on her fingers and a healing sting on her wrist and it was the finest thing he had ever held.

Yes, she said, they were married at Torcross in May, and the whole parish came up over the tops for it. And afterwards, the new Duchess of Corvenna walked out to the hives in her wedding clothes and knocked upon each skep in turn with a little iron key and told the bees, as her father had taught her, that there had been a marriage in the house and that they were to stay.

Torquil stood in the heather behind her with his hat in his hand and listened to his wife talking to nine straw baskets on a hillside, and thought there was not a room in all of Corvenna, nor a title in the gift of the crown, worth one hour of that windy, ordinary afternoon.

She Hid the Half-Dead Duke of Corvenna in Her Cellar When His Uncle’s Men Rode Up the Moor

Inside, now, the woman had a lantern in one hand and a turf knife in the other, and the Duke of Corvena, who had been crawling for the better part of a mile, understood that she was not offering him a choice. He got as far as the flagstones of her kitchen before his arm gave way. Out on the black shoulder of the moor, five or six horses were coming up the old drove road at a trot, and the sound carried the way sound does across heather at night, flat and close and much nearer than it was.

Torquil heard her set down the lantern. He heard a ring pulled and the groan of a trap in the floor, and then her hands were under his good arm, hauling with a strength that had nothing lady-like about it whatsoever. “Six steps,” she said, “do not fall down them. I cannot carry you up again.” He did not fall down them. It was, he thought afterwards, the last act of his own will for four days.

The cellar smelled of earth and apples and salt. She rolled him behind a rank of barrels into the hollow beneath the ledge where the peat was stacked, and pulled turfs down over him until nothing showed but a strip of face, and put a hand flat against his mouth for one hard second, which said everything that needed said it saying.

Then the trap shut, and the dark closed, and above him the hooves came into the yard. He heard it all through 18 in of board and flag. Boots the kitchen door. A man’s voice, loud in the way men are loud when they wish to be thought official. “Woman, there is a fugitive on this moor.” “There is nothing on this moor but weather,” she said.

Her voice did not shake. It was not even raised. “And you are letting mine in. We are searching every dwelling from Torcross to the water.” “Search, then. Mind the churn.” They searched. Torquil lay under the peat and heard them turn over her small poor life above him. A box dragged, a bed shifted, the dresser hauled from the wall.

Once a boot came down on the trap and stopped, and the dust of it fell on his face, and he did not breathe. What is below? Roots and last year’s apples. The ring is stiff. You will want both hands. There was a pause of perhaps 3 seconds, and in it the Duke of Corvenna learned what it is to have his whole life resting in the mouth of a woman whose name he did not know.

Leave it, the man said at last. It stinks. They went. He heard her bar the door and heard her stand a long while against it, not moving. Then the trap opened, and the lantern came down, and she knelt by him in the earth smell and began, without one word of preface, to cut his coat away from his shoulder. Her name was Morwenna Truewen.

He got that much on the second day, between the fever and the cold that came after it, and not much else, because she was not a woman who talked to fill a silence. She kept bees. Nine hives stood in the shelter of the wall behind the cottage, and she went out to them at first light and came back with her hands smelling of smoke.

Her father had been a lay preacher on that moor for 30 years and had taught her to read, and had died in the spring, and she had stayed because there was nowhere else, and because the hives were his. She fed Torquil broth with a horn spoon and made him sit up for it, and when he could not lift his right arm, she held the cup, and never once said anything to make a proud man feel his weakness.

She dressed the wound with linen torn from her own petticoat, and told him matter-of-factly that the ball had gone through the meat of the shoulder and out again, and that he had lost a great deal of blood and rather more sense, and that had he lain another hour in the wet, he would not have wanted a doctor but a spade.

On the fourth day the fever broke, and he found he could think again. “You have not asked my name,” he said. “No. Most would. Most have not had six-armed men in their kitchen.” She was at the fire with her back to him. “You will tell me or you will not. Vaunce, said Torquil, which was true and about a third of the truth.

Morwenna turned round. She had a plain strong face and grey eyes that were entirely too steady, and she was holding his shirt which she had washed, and which she now folded over her arm so that he could see the collar. There is a device worked in the linen, she said, a hound and a broken tower. My father showed me the Corvenna arms on the church board at Torcross when I was nine years old.

She laid the shirt on the chest. I have known since Tuesday. I did not ask because a man who has been shot at is entitled to keep his own counsel until he can stand. He looked at her a long moment. There were 400 people at Corvenna who would not have dared that speech, and half of London that would have sold him for less than the price of the linen.

Then you know what I am worth, he said. I know what you would be worth to them. She sat down on the settle. Your Grace, they came back the day after, and they will come again. So you had better tell me who wants you dead because I am the one who will be lying to them. So he told her. He told her about his father’s younger brother, Lord Ellis Vaunce, who had managed Corvenna through 11 years of a minority and had never once been asked to account for it.

He told her about the audit he had ordered in June and the conveyance he had found drawn in a lawyer’s hand and dated three years back transferring the whole of the Corvenna ward to rights to a company of which his uncle was the only real name. He told her that he had said nothing and had written quietly to a King’s Counsel in London and had set to ride there himself with the papers in his saddlebag alone because he had been fool enough to believe his own blood would not go so far. And the papers? Said Morwenna. On

the horse. The horse is somewhere on this moor or in his hands, likely in his hands. Then you have nothing. I have my word, said the Duke of Corvenna, and the word of a dead man is worth nothing at all, which is precisely why he wants me to be one before my Colmers. Morwenna Trewein sat very still. Outside, the wind came round the corner of the cottage and found the gap under the door, as it did every night.

“Eat your broth,” she said. “You are no use to anybody at that weight.” They came back on the 11th day. Torquil was standing by then, in a dead preacher’s coat, too short in the arm, and he was at the back window when the horses came up out of the comb, and he counted them, and saw that this time there were seven.

And at the head of them, on a grey he had known since he was a boy, riding easily, hat in hand to the weather, came his uncle. He went down into the cellar because she made him, and lying in the dark under his own helplessness was the hardest hour of his life. Lord Ellis Vance did not shout. He had never needed to.

Torquil heard the voice come through the boards, warm and reasonable and terribly familiar, the voice that had taught him to cast a line and to shoot and to sign what was put in front of him. “My dear young woman, I am looking for my nephew. I have heard he is dead.” “He is missing, which on this moor is nearly the same thing.” A pause.

The scrape of a chair. “There is a man abroad here who has taken his ring off him, a vagrant, we think, dangerous. If any word should come to you of where the body lies, there would be 50 guineas in it, and no questions.” “50 guineas is a great deal of money to a woman with nine hives. It is. I have had it written out and cried at Torcross paper. Keep this.

Show it to any who can read.” When they had gone, she came down the six steps and put the handbill into Torquil’s hands without a word. It was printed and signed beneath in ink, in his uncle’s own hand, in the loops he had known since childhood. “50 guineas for information leading to the discovery of the body of His Grace, the Duke of Corvena. He looked at the date.

Then he looked at it again, and his hand began to shake, and Morwenna took the paper out of it before he could crush it. What is it? The date. His voice came out of him strangely. The 17th. Morwenna, I was set upon on the night of the 19th. He had that cried in the market 2 days before there was any body to look for.

She sat back on her heels among the earth and the apples. “Then we keep it,” she said, “somewhere better than a cellar.” And she went up and put it inside the hollow of a straw skep behind the hives, under the wax, where nobody in this world goes looking who has not been stung. October came on the moor.

He grew strong slowly and hated every day of it. And in the growing strong, he found that he did not, in fact, hate the days. He learned to cut peat left-handed badly, and she let him, and never laughed except once. He carried water. He sat on the wall in the low sun while she worked the hives in her veil and her gloves of soft leather.

And when a bee came and settled on the back of his hand, she said, “Be still.” And he was still, and it went away, and she looked at him across the smoke and smiled. The Duke of Corvena, who had been shot at by his own blood and had not flinched at it, found his heart going harder at that smile than it had gone in the cellar.

One evening, she read aloud to him because his eyes still swam, and he watched her mouth make the words by rushlight, and thought about the fact that she had lied to seven-armed men with her chin up, and had never once asked what she would get for it. “You will go back,” she said without looking up. “When you can ride.” “Yes.” “Good.

” She turned the page. Her voice was perfectly level, and it was the first time he had heard her put effort into making it so, and something in him turned over at that, painfully. The magistrate came on the last Tuesday in October with a warrant and a constable and four of his uncle’s men behind him.

Torquil watched them come up the track and knew that the choice had arrived and that he had about 90 seconds in which to make it. The warrant was for Morwenna Truin on the sworn information of Lord Ellis Vance for harboring the vagrant who had murdered the Duke of Corvenna and taken his ring. He heard the constable say her name. He heard her answer, “I am she.

” in that flat calm voice. If he stayed below he might reach London in a fortnight with a lawyer at his back. If he went up he would be one weak man in a dead preacher’s coat with no papers and no proof before a magistrate who might well be bought calling himself a Duke. Torquil Vance did not spend even one of the 90 seconds upon it.

He came up out of the trap and stood in her kitchen doorway with his shoulders strapped beneath a borrowed coat and said, “Put that warrant down. I am Corvenna.” The room went entirely silent. What followed was ugly and brief. One of his uncle’s men swore he was an impostor and a murderer besides and there was a moment, a very bad moment, when the magistrate looked from the shabby coat to the four armed men and back again and Torquil saw the whole thing swing like a gate in the wind.

And then Morwenna Truin walked out to the hives in front of them all and put her bare hand into a straw skep and came back with a handbill folded in a scrap of wax cloth and laid it flat on her own kitchen table. “Sir,” she said to the magistrate, “Read the date. Then ask that gentleman’s master how he came to advertise for a body two days before there was one.

” The magistrate read it. He read it twice. He was a slow man but not a stupid one and he had a clerk with him and the clerk had the register of what had been cried at Torcross market and upon which day. The rest belongs to the assizes and not to this more. Lord Ellis Vance was taken at Corvenna eight days afterwards in the library and the conveyance was set aside at the spring sitting and he never came into that country again.

Torquil was carried off to all of it within the hour in a magistrate’s chase with 15 things to say and no time to say a single one. He got as far as her gate and turned round. Morwenna stood at her door with the wind pulling her hair loose. Go on, she said, you have a house to save. He came back in March on foot alone with no outriders and a good coat that fitted him. She was the hives.

She did not run to him. She straightened, set down the smoker, pushed the veil back from her face and stood with the more going gold and brown behind her and her mouth was not quite steady which was the first time he had seen it so. You are well, she said. I am well. Tool stopped an arm’s length from her which was as near as he trusted himself.

Morwenna, I have spent the winter in rooms full of men congratulating me upon my deliverance. Not one of them lied to seven riders for my sake. Not one held a cup to my mouth when I could not lift my own arm. He drew breath. I have 400 people who owe me their rent and one woman in the world to whom I owe my life. I have not come to pay her because it cannot be paid.

I have come to ask her to marry me. She looked at him a long moment, the bees going about their business between them in the cold bright air. You will be laughed at, she said. A duke and a more woman who smells of smoke. They laughed at me for being shot by my own uncle. It did me no harm whatever.

He put out his hand palm up and waited and did not close the distance himself. Say yes or say no, but say it plainly. You have never said anything to me any other way. Morwenna Truin put her hand into his. There was propolis on her fingers and a healing sting on her wrist and it was the finest thing he had ever held.

Yes, she said, they were married at Torcross in May, and the whole parish came up over the tops for it. And afterwards, the new Duchess of Corvenna walked out to the hives in her wedding clothes and knocked upon each skep in turn with a little iron key and told the bees, as her father had taught her, that there had been a marriage in the house and that they were to stay.

Torquil stood in the heather behind her with his hat in his hand and listened to his wife talking to nine straw baskets on a hillside, and thought there was not a room in all of Corvenna, nor a title in the gift of the crown, worth one hour of that windy, ordinary afternoon.