The Duchess War

“I knew that already,” she said. “Why else do you suppose I am here?”

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—