Read Chapter 22: The Festival Betrayal

The air carried smoke from the roasting pits and the sweet tang of ale, and for one unguarded moment Maeve let herself believe the estate might yet survive. The harvest festival had drawn every tenant from the lower fields, their faces lit by bonfire glow, their laughter a sound she had not heard since before the famine had tightened its grip on the land.

She moved among them with a smile that cost her nothing, because for once it was sincere. The rent reduction had done its work. Children ran between the trestle tables, women traded breads and gossips, and the men drank deep of the small ale she had provided from her own stores. It was not abundance, but it was enough. Enough to see them through.

She found herself near the great oak at the field's edge, where the shadows pooled thick and the noise of the celebration softened to a murmur. She had meant only to catch her breath, to gather herself before rejoining her tenants, when she heard voices—low, urgent, male.

"You'll have your coin come Michaelmas, I swear it."

"Aye, and I'll have your word you'll do it proper. Not some half-hearted scorch that'll be put out before the flames take."

Maeve went still. The bark of the oak pressed cold through her dress as she flattened herself against it.

"It'll be done. The west fields, where the barley's yet to be cut. Sir Godfrey wants the harvest spoiled, not the buildings. He wants her broke, but he wants her alive to see it."

The first voice—the one promising coin—belonged to no one she could place. But the second, the one who swore to do the work, was Niall Duggan. She knew his voice the way she knew the sound of her own heart: he had been her husband's favourite among the younger tenants, a man she had trusted with the autumn ploughing, with the keys to the tool shed, with her own letters when they needed carrying to town.

The rage came hot and immediate, climbing her throat. She stepped out from behind the oak before she had fully decided to do so, and the two men startled like poached deer.

"Mrs. Kelly," Niall said, and his face went the colour of ash.

The other man—a stranger, thin-faced, with the look of a Galway tradesman about him—took a step back. "I'll be going, then."

"You'll be staying," Maeve said, and her voice was steel. "You'll be telling me every word Sir Godfrey has put in your mouth, or I'll have the magistrate here before the embers of this fire cool."

The stranger's mouth twisted. "You've no proof of anything."

"I've proof enough," she said, and she was bluffing, but she had learned from Ashworth that a bluff delivered with certainty could stand in for truth. "I heard every word. And I've witnesses in the celebration who saw you arrive, who saw you take Duggan aside. A magistrate will find that enough to start asking questions."

The stranger looked at Niall, and Niall looked at the ground, and then the stranger ran.

He was fast, darting between the shadows toward the tree line, and Maeve made no move to chase him. Her fury had settled into something colder, more precise. She turned to Niall, who had not moved, who stood with his hands opening and closing at his sides like a fish gasping on dry land.

"Sir Godfrey," she said. "Tell me how long."

Niall would not meet her eyes. "Since the spring."

"Since the spring," she repeated. "You've been taking his coin since the spring, and you stood at my door last month and thanked me for the rent reduction. You shook my hand."

"You don't understand," he said, and his voice cracked. "It's not me—it's the boy. My Michael. He's got the fever, and the doctor in town won't see him without coin up front, and Sir Godfrey's man found me when I was desperate. I thought—I thought if I played along, if I let them think I'd do it, I could take their money and warn you when the time came."

"And tonight? Were you planning to warn me tonight?"

Niall's silence was answer enough. Maeve closed her eyes, and when she opened them, the cold had settled into her bones.

"Go home," she said. "Go home to Michael. If the fever has truly taken him, send for Dr. Hennessy and tell him I will cover the cost. But if you set so much as a spark on my land, I will see you transported. Do you understand me?"

He nodded, and then he was gone, stumbling across the field toward the lights of the settlement, and Maeve was left alone beneath the oak with the hollow knowledge turning in her chest. Sir Godfrey had an informant among her staff, among her people, and she had been a fool to think the legal fight would end in the magistrate's chambers.

She searched the crowd for Ashworth. He stood near the bonfire, speaking with the blacksmith, and when he caught her eye he read her expression at once and began to move toward her.

She met him halfway. "He's got someone inside," she said, keeping her voice low. "A tenant. Sir Godfrey means to burn the harvest."

Ashworth's face tightened. "Who?"

"I've handled it. The man was coerced—his son is ill. But there will be others. Sir Godfrey will not stop."

"We should post watch on the fields tonight. I'll take the first shift—"

"You're a guest here, Mr. Ashworth. Not a field guard."

"I'm a man with an interest in the harvest not going up in smoke," he said, and there was something in his voice she could not quite name. "Let me help."

She nodded, because there was no room for pride between them now, not with the night closing in and the threat hanging over every stalk of barley. They divided the watches, and Maeve took the western boundary while Ashworth circled the storehouses.

The fire came anyway.

She smelled it before she saw it—the sharp, oily bite of burning grain. When she crested the rise above the farmyard, the granary was already swallowed in flame, orange light leaping against the black sky, villagers pouring from their cottages with buckets that would never be enough.

She stood at the crest and watched the winter stores turn to ash, and she understood at last that Sir Godfrey did not want to ruin her through courts or claims.

He wanted to watch her burn.