High Society novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Nothing Here Is for Sale

The woman from Truro sat in the morning room with her hands folded over a carpet bag.

She was sixty, broad, brown as a loaf, and she looked at the gilt chairs like a woman waiting to be told off.

Selby's runner stood behind her in a mud-splashed coat.

I had not slept for three hours, and I had one stocking on inside out.

Hugh sat across from her with a face.

"Madam," the runner said, "tell His Grace what you told me."

"I told you I'd nursed babies in Truro forty years," the woman said.

"And?"

"And I never nursed any duke's baby, sir."

The runner smiled at us.

It was a small, pleased smile, and I understood the trap.

Hugh had invented a Cornish nurse, and Selby had found a real one.

She was an honest woman who had never heard of Charlotte, and she was going to say so in front of a magistrate.

"Thank you," Hugh said. "Is that all?"

"No," said the woman. "That's not the half."

The runner's smile slipped.

She opened her carpet bag and took out a folded paper.

"That gentleman wrote me a letter first," she said.

"He wanted me to swear I'd nursed a Lady Charlotte, dead at two of the croup."

"There's no Lady Charlotte in that churchyard, and I told him so."

"He said it'd be a kindness to a great lord if I swore anyway."

"And he'd give me twenty guineas."

She put the letter on the table.

The runner's hand twitched toward it.

Hugh's hand got there first.

"Your Grace, that is a private paper."

"It has the Earl's seal on it," Hugh said. "I would call it a very public one."

I looked at the woman.

"Why didn't you take the twenty guineas?" I asked.

"I'd have had to say it in church," she said. "And I've never lied in church."

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