Chapter 1 #2
"And if all those years have worn them down, sir? If they have a roof to keep and a magistrate to keep it from?" Hale shrugged, unbothered by the silence that followed. "Better to double check. Costs you nothing. It is what you always told us."
Benjamin was quiet for a long moment.
"I did say that," he admitted.
"You did, sir. Repeatedly. Usually while it was raining."
Benjamin let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"Very well," he said. "We shall do it your way."
◆◆◆
They reached the outer lanes as the light was coming up.
It was a small stone house wedged between a chandler's and a shuttered baker's, the step swept, the window boxes empty for the season but tended.
Somebody had painted the door within the last year or two.
Benjamin stood in front of it with his hat in his hand and found that his heart was going harder than it had at any camp gate he had ever walked through.
Hale placed himself half a pace behind and to the left, where a man stands when he intends to be seen.
Benjamin knocked.
There was a long silence, then movement inside — slow, unhurried — and the sound of a bolt being worked. The door opened perhaps a hand's width.
Thomas Miller had gone thin at the shoulders in a way Benjamin had not been prepared for, and white through the whiskers, and he kept one hand on the latch.
His eyes went first to Benjamin, then past him to Hale, and then to the carriage standing in the lane behind them, and Benjamin watched him take in the greatcoat and the boots and the size of the two men on his step and arrive at the conclusion that people of their sort had never once come to a door like his with good news.
"What is it you want?" His voice had gone tight. "It is barely light."
Benjamin made himself speak evenly.
"My man here tells me you once served in the household of the late Duke of Beaumont." He paused. "The traitor."
The word came out of his own mouth and cut him on the way through.
Something crossed the old man's face. He straightened, and some of the fear went out of him and was replaced by something older and more careful.
"I did," he said.
"You do not deny it."
"There is no sense denying what half this street already knows." The latch did not move under his hand. "I served him eleven years."
"And since?"
"Since, I have swept floors and mended what wanted mending, and paid what was owed, and troubled nobody.
" His chin came up. "If you have come to ask whether I have been sending letters or keeping company, the answer is no, and it has been no for twenty-three years, and you may write that down and take it to whoever sent you. "
"Nobody sent me." Benjamin turned his hat once in his hands. "I am told something else about you as well. That you still speak well of the man. That even after the execution, you have never once spoken of him as a traitor."
The silence that came then was different.
Mr. Miller looked at him for a long moment. When he answered, his voice was quiet and it did not shake at all.
"I will forever respect the man who treated me better than he had any cause to.
" He said it the way another man might state his own name.
"He had no reason on this earth to be decent to a servant.
He was decent anyway. Whatever they say he did, and whatever they hanged him for — that part was true, and no court has ever been convened that can make it untrue. "
He drew a breath.
"Now. I have said my piece, and I will not be saying it again, and I would like my breakfast."
He moved to shut the door.
Hale's boot went into the gap.
"Not so fast, sir."
And the old man came apart entirely.
"Get away from my house!" His voice cracked with the force of it, an old man's shout, ragged at the top.
"All those years you people have been at us — the questions, the visits, the standing in the lane — and I have got nothing left for you, do you hear me, nothing, and you will take your boot out of my door and get off my step this instant or by God I will—"
"Thomas?"
The voice came from inside, down the passage. Quick footsteps behind it.
"Thomas, what in heaven is—"
She came up beside her husband with a cloth still in her hands, and she was speaking, and then she saw who was standing on her step and every word she had went out of her at once.
She stopped.
The cloth dropped and neither of them noticed it.
She looked at his face. Not at the coat, not at the height of him, not at the carriage in the lane. His face. She looked at it the way a person looks at a thing they have looked at ten thousand times and never once expected to find in front of them, and her hand came up and covered her mouth.
"Oh — oh, Your Grace —"
The word broke in the middle.
And then she was through the doorway and she had both arms around him, her face against his chest, gripping the front of his coat in two fists as though he might be taken out of the lane again if she loosened her hold, and she was weeping in a way that had no dignity in it whatsoever.
Benjamin stood absolutely still.
Twenty-three years of men who did not touch each other, of hands shaken at arm's length, of an entire life conducted at the distance a uniform sets between people. His arms did not seem to know where to go.
Then they did.
He put them around her, and bent his head over her gray one, and held on.
Beside them, Mr. Miller had not moved. He was staring at the two of them with his hand still on the latch, and Benjamin watched the understanding arrive in the old man's face by degrees — first confusion, then something like fear, and then the thing beneath both of them, coming up slowly like a face rising through water.
"Benjamin," he said.
Then, hoarsely: "You are alive."
His hand left the latch. He took his cap off — he had not been wearing one, and he took it off anyway, some old motion his body remembered better than he did — and he bowed. Low, and unsteady, and holding the doorframe to manage it.
"Welcome home, Your Grace."
Benjamin looked at the top of his bowed white head, and at Hale withdrawing his boot from the door and stepping quietly back into the lane, and at the woman still crying into his coat.
"I am sorry," he said. His voice did not come out as he intended. "For the questions."
"There is no need—"
"There is." Benjamin turned the hat once in his hands.
"Twenty years I have checked a thing before I trusted it.
Every door. Every man. Every road out of every camp I ever slept in.
It kept me alive, and I have not yet learned how to stop doing it to people who never earned it.
" He made himself look at the old man properly. "You did not earn it."
Mr. Miller was quiet a moment.
"No," he agreed. "But I daresay I would have done the same, in your boots." He stood aside. "Come in out of the cold before your man freezes to that step."
"You had better come too," he said to Hale, and made a helpless gesture at the doorway that took in the house, the morning, the whole of it. "There is tea. You will want it after that."
"I appreciate the offer, sir," Hale said. "But somebody had best watch the carriage, and I find I have no wish at all to sit in the middle of this." He touched his hat to Mrs. Miller. "Ma'am."
And he went back down the step to the horses.