My Boss Invited Me To A High-Society Dinner As A Joke — He Had No Idea I Was About To Destroy His Most Respected Guest
Part 2
Supper had been laid in the long gallery, and the company moved toward it in eddies of strict rank and inclination.
I was placed by an oversight I did not believe was accidental near the foot of the table, squeezed between an elderly deaf canon and an empty chair.
I unfolded my napkin, feeling the eyes of the room continue to slide toward me and away like fingers testing whether a kettle was still hot.
The empty chair was filled late by the man in the dark coat I had seen at the door.
Dr. Arthur Evans sat down without looking at me, accepted soup from a footman, and addressed the canon over my head.
The canon simply smiled benevolently and nodded, completely unable to hear him.
I set my spoon down very gently on the white cloth.
He was thinner than I remembered, and his coat was better cut than any he had owned when he was my father’s pupil, but the voice had not changed.
It was the same voice that had read aloud from my own notebooks at my father’s deathbed, promising to see the work into print under my name.
It was the voice that had, six months later, allowed his own name to appear on the title page of a medical text I recognized word for word, save for a single altered comma.
I had written to him once, receiving only silence, and then I had written to the publisher, receiving only a bill for the returned correspondence.
He turned now to address the lady on his other side, the candlelight catching his profile as he fluently answered her question.
He claimed he was seeking a rare continental remedy for the severe wasting fever currently afflicting Mr. Davis’s younger brother.
He lamented with practiced sorrow that the necessary root was nearly impossible to obtain in England.
The word slipped out of me in a clean, small voice that traveled the entire length of the suddenly quiet table.
I named the exact root, the precise method of preparation in spirits of wine rather than water, and the strict ascending dosage required to prevent toxicity.
Dr. Evans turned his head, and I watched the recognition arrive in his face in agonizing stages, like a tincture changing color as it cooled.
First the puzzlement, then the dawning horror of a man who had spent a decade arranging his life so that my face would never appear at his table.
I informed the entire gallery that I had compiled the volume he claimed as his own, and that I had been secretly administering the proper dosage to the dying brother for three months without anyone knowing.
Mr. Davis slowly set down his glass at the head of the table.
The room fell dead silent as the wealthy estate owner crossed the floor toward me, and I braced myself for the consequence of speaking out of turn—would he throw me out, or would he listen?
Part 3
Gregory Davis slowly set down his crystal glass at the head of the long table.
The dining gallery fell completely silent as the wealthy estate owner stood and crossed the floor toward Megan Collins.
She braced herself, keeping her chin angled up, fully expecting him to signal his guards and have her thrown out into the November cold for speaking out of turn.
Instead, he stopped precisely three paces away from her, his intense gaze dropping to her trembling, work-stained hands, and then lifting to meet her eyes.
He demanded she repeat the exact dosage of the medicine she claimed to be secretly feeding his dying brother.
Megan did not flinch, reciting the complex chemical preparation with the absolute certainty of a woman who had written the textbook on it.
Before that night, Megan had spent seven years existing as a nearly invisible ghost within the sprawling Davis estate.
She was the low-level herbalist, the woman summoned only when a cook scalded a hand or a groom took a nasty kick to the ribs from a frightened horse.
No one in the grand house knew that she was the daughter of a brilliant but impoverished medical scholar.
Her father had been a quiet man with a vast library, teaching her Latin from dense medical texts and Greek from nothing at all.
During his final, brutal winter, he had gripped her wrist with desperate strength, demanding she never let the harsh world unmake the deep knowledge she possessed.
Megan had finished his massive medical manuscript three weeks after putting him in the cold ground.
She had sent the complete, painstakingly researched text to a publisher under no name, telling herself that anonymity was the only safety a woman in her position could afford.
She had not anticipated the ambition of Dr. Arthur Evans.
He had been her father’s pupil, a man who had stood by the deathbed and promised to see the work into print under her name.
Six months later, he had published the text under his own name, building a lucrative London career on her stolen brilliance.
Megan had written to him once, receiving only silence.
She had written to the publisher, receiving only a polite expression of regret and a bill for the returned correspondence.
Defeated, she had taken the menial job at the Davis estate, hiding her brilliance beneath drab caps and coarse aprons, determined to survive.
The summons to the autumn assembly had been designed as a cruel joke by Gregory’s cousin, Brenda Walsh.
Brenda had instructed the steward to fetch the dirty herbalist and force her into a room of silk and velvet, purely to provide a spectacle for the bored, wealthy guests.
She had even sent down a hideous, badly patched green muslin dress from the attic storage to ensure the humiliation was complete.
But Megan had gone to her heavy iron-bound chest and unearthed a flat parcel wrapped in oiled silk.
Inside lay her mother’s best gown, a dress the color of wet slate, cut down for Megan when she was sixteen.
She had brushed out her hair, pinned it high, and walked into the blue drawing room with the absolute calm of a woman who had finally stopped pretending.
Her entrance had silenced the orchestra and frozen the sneer on Brenda Walsh’s face.
Megan had crossed the floor exactly as if she belonged there, dropping a precise, minimal curtsy to Gregory Davis.
The true shock of the evening had come at supper.
Megan had been seated at the foot of the table, treated as a curiosity, when Dr. Arthur Evans arrived late.
He had taken the empty chair beside her without a glance in her direction.
Evans was currently the most celebrated physician in the county, called in for a high-fee consultation regarding Gregory’s dying younger brother, Brian.
He had loudly lamented to the table that the only cure for Brian’s specific wasting fever was a rare continental root, impossible to find in England.
Megan had listened to the man who stole her life’s work casually dismiss a boy’s life because he lacked the actual knowledge to save it.
She had spoken up in a clean, small voice, naming the exact root and the precise method of preparation in spirits of wine.
She had publicly informed Dr. Evans, and the entire horrified gallery, that she had compiled the volume he claimed as his own.
More shockingly, she confessed that she had recognized Brian’s symptoms three months ago from the housekeeper’s descriptions.
She had been secretly cultivating the rare root in the estate’s glasshouse and slipping the proper dosage into Brian’s morning tonic, because she had no standing to treat him openly.
Gregory Davis stared at her now, the silence in the gallery stretching until it felt brittle enough to snap.
He did not yell, and he did not call for the guards.
He simply turned his sharp, terrifying focus onto Dr. Evans, who was currently sweating profusely into his fine collar.
Gregory ordered Evans to stand up and accompany them to the workroom immediately.
He informed the doctor that if Megan’s claims were proven true, Evans would not leave the estate except in heavy irons.
The entire party watched in stunned disbelief as Gregory offered Megan his arm.
She looked at his expensive wool sleeve for a moment, as if it were a foreign instrument whose use she was trying to recall.
Then she placed her hand on his arm lightly, the warmth of her fingers shocking him through the thick fabric.
They left the gallery together, leaving the county’s wealthiest families to eat their cold soup in the company of a scandal they did not yet know how to gossip about.
The workroom smelled strongly of cooled rosemary, lamp oil, and the sharp iron tang of a banked fire.
Megan went straight to the chest beneath the window, knelt, and lifted out a stoppered green glass bottle.
She also produced a small, folded paper containing the dried root she had been secretly growing.
Gregory stood in the narrow doorway, watching her hands, which were no longer trembling, and noting the intense, absorbed quietness of her working face.
Evans waited in the corridor, flanked by two massive footmen who had instinctively closed in around him without needing to be told.
Megan held up the bottle, explaining that the tincture was three weeks old and perfectly safe to administer in full doses immediately.
Gregory glanced toward the corridor, his voice dangerously soft as he demanded Evans verify her claims.
The doctor stepped forward into the lamplight, his face the color of old paper, his hands shaking violently.
He admitted, his voice cracking, that Megan was completely correct in every single particular.
He confessed that the massive medical volume he had built his reputation on was entirely her work.
Gregory asked him why he had stolen it.
Evans looked at the stone floor, muttering that she was a woman, that no one would have printed it under her name anyway, and that by the time he realized its value, he had already built his life on the lie.
Gregory was silent for a long, terrible moment.
He ordered Evans to remain in the room under guard, write a full, signed confession of his theft, and speak to no one.
Then he turned back to Megan, his eyes unreadable in the dim light.
He asked her to bring the medicine and come with him upstairs.
They climbed the grand sweeping back stairs together because the front staircase was heavily congested with departing guests, all buzzing furiously about the scandal.
Gregory carried a heavy silver candlestick, shielding the flame with his palm, while Megan carried the stoppered green bottle and the folded paper of dried root.
She had thrown a thick wool shawl over the slate silk dress, because the massive upper corridors of the Davis estate in late October were drafty enough to make even heavy silk feel like nothing at all.
Twice they passed scurrying footmen on the stairs who stopped, stared in open shock at the herbalist walking beside the master, recovered themselves hastily, and plastered themselves against the wallpaper to let them pass.
Once on the wide second landing, they passed a young housemaid carrying a basin of hot water.
The girl looked at Megan, looked again at the silk and the composed face, and dropped a curtsy so deep she nearly upset the sloshing basin onto the carpet.
Megan inclined her head slightly, exactly as if she had been receiving such respectful curtsies from the staff her entire life.
When they had turned the corner into the shadowed west wing, Megan made a small sound in her throat that was almost laughter, but was mostly something tightly wound and completely exhausted.
Gregory remarked, without turning his head, that she would have to get used to it.
She replied firmly that she had absolutely no desire to get used to it.
He nodded once, agreeing that she likely would not.
The heavy door to Brian’s private suite stood partially open, the warm air spilling out into the cold corridor.
The candles inside had been trimmed low to spare the boy’s aching eyes, a fierce fire burned in the wide stone grate, and a tired nurse rose hastily from a chair by the massive oak bed.
Gregory dismissed the nurse with a sharp, silent movement of his hand, and she scurried out, dropping a nervous curtsy as she passed.
Megan stopped at the threshold, taking in the room.
She had not set foot in the private family apartments in her seven years at the estate, though she had imagined them often.
They were smaller than she had supposed, much warmer, and the stacks of books on the bedside table were not what she would have predicted of a dying nineteen-year-old boy.
There was a battered, well-loved copy of an old adventure novel, a slim volume of poetry, and a heavy French treatise on the proper breeding of hunting dogs that lay open, as if it had been set down only a moment before.
Brian Davis lay propped high on three thick pillows, turning his head toward the door with the slow, excruciatingly careful movement of a man for whom every single motion now cost physical agony.
His face was the face of his older brother, but attenuated and hollowed almost past recognition.
He had the same long, sharp jaw and the same dark hair, but his pale skin was drawn so tightly over the bone that the candlelight behind him seemed to shine straight through his skull.
He looked at Megan, his eyes dropping immediately to the green glass bottle gripped tightly in her hand.
Something in his dull, sunken eyes sharpened instantly.
He noted aloud, his voice raspy and thin, that she was the quiet herbalist who made the vile morning draughts.
Megan confirmed it, standing perfectly still under his scrutiny.
Brian mentioned that the tonic tasted like nothing found on earth, a horrible, bitter sludge.
Megan agreed, offering no apologies for the taste of the medicine that had been keeping him alive.
A small, pained movement crossed his dry mouth that might, in a much stronger body, have been a real smile.
Brian looked past her to his older brother, who had set the candle on the massive marble mantel and was standing at the foot of the bed with his hands tightly clasped behind his back.
Brian asked him who this woman really was.
Gregory did not answer immediately, the silence in the warm room stretching out.
When he finally did speak, his voice had gone quieter and more raw than it had been all evening.
He told his brother that this was the brilliant woman who wrote the medical textbook Dr. Evans had been quoting to them for six long months.
He explained that she was the woman who had been secretly keeping Brian alive since February without telling anyone, risking her own position to do so.
He stated that she had tonight given up her meager livelihood and very probably her physical safety to expose a fraud in front of forty wealthy witnesses just to ensure Brian got the full, proper dosage.
Gregory finished by formally introducing her as Megan Collins.
Brian considered this heavy information slowly, his sharp eyes flicking between his stoic brother and the composed woman at the door.
He turned his head again to look at her directly, asking bluntly if the new, stronger dose would hurt.
Megan answered honestly, telling him that it would not hurt at first, but in exactly a week, his gums would begin to ache terribly.
She explained that the ache was how they would know the chemical compound was successfully fighting the fever.
She promised that they would halve the dose then, continue for another six weeks, and by Christmas, if she was right, he would walk to the window under his own power.
Brian asked what would happen if she was completely wrong.
Megan looked him in the eye and stated that if she was wrong, she would have done him absolutely no harm, and she would have simply wasted six weeks of his time.
She told him firmly that he had a great deal more than six weeks left to him, and that she would never have spoken up at the dinner if she were not absolutely certain of her chemistry.
Brian closed his eyes for a long moment, the tension slowly draining from his skeletal frame, and then opened them again.
He demanded she give him the dose.
Megan crossed to the massive bed, moving with the practiced efficiency of a true physician.
She uncorked the bottle and carefully measured the dark tincture into the small horn spoon she had carried in her apron pocket for three months against exactly this desperate moment.
She steadied his trembling, bony hand with her own warm fingers, and she put the spoon to his dry mouth.
He swallowed the bitter liquid without making a single face, his eyes locked on hers.
She straightened up, firmly corked the bottle, and set it on the polished table beside the French treatise on hunting dogs.
She told him he would need three more doses in exactly eight hours, and that she would come up to administer them herself.
Brian looked at his brother and stated simply that he liked her.
Gregory replied, his voice rough and low, that he liked her as well.
Megan did not look at Gregory, keeping her eyes fixed very steadily on the closed green bottle.
The fortnight that followed was the longest, most intense fortnight of Megan’s life, and she strongly suspected it was the longest of Gregory’s as well, though he never said so aloud.
She moved her daily work, by Gregory’s strict order, from the damp, freezing room above the kitchen garden to a beautiful, small disused parlor on the first floor that had once been a music room.
Her heavy chest of carefully labeled remedies and raw ingredients was carried up after her by two bewildered footmen.
The slate silk dress was carefully returned to its tissue wrapping, and a large quantity of plain but exquisitely well-made wool and linen dresses appeared in her new clothes press without any explanation.
She wore them without making a single remark, because she had decided, somewhere on the dark back stairs the night of the chaotic assembly, that she would no longer waste energy refusing kindnesses that cost her nothing.
She kept her hair scraped back in its practical, severe bun.
She kept her hands stained with the resins and acids of her daily chemical work.
She allowed the new dresses only because they fit perfectly, and because the fine fabric did not catch the sticky rosemary resin the way her old, rotting wool had done.
Brian improved significantly on the fourth day, his fever breaking in the early hours of the morning.
By the seventh day, his gums had begun to ache terribly, exactly as she had warned, and she immediately halved the dosage.
By the tenth day, he was sitting up fully in bed to read the French treatise on pointers, demanding attention from anyone who would sit still long enough to be read to.
This was usually his older brother, but increasingly often it was Megan herself, who had begun to come up in the quiet evenings for half an hour with the morning’s preparation already carefully measured and stoppered against the dawn.
Dr. Arthur Evans was completely gone.
He had been sent away on the second day in a hired carriage to York, clutching a devastating letter from Gregory to the powerful chairman of the medical society.
Gregory had given strict instructions that the letter, detailing Evans’s massive fraud, be read aloud to the entire body at its next formal meeting.
Gregory had sent another letter directly to the publisher in Edinburgh, requiring a fully corrected, immediate reprint of the medical text under Megan Collins’s true name, entirely at the publisher’s expense.
He had offered to send a third letter to a vicious local magistrate at Megan’s discretion, ensuring Evans would face criminal charges.
She had not sent the third letter, thinking about it for two long, sleepless nights.
On the third morning, she had walked into the music room where Gregory was waiting for her with the sealed, unsent letter sitting on the table between them.
She had picked it up, held it firmly in the candle flame until it burned to ash, and stated simply that Evans would spend the rest of his pathetic life knowing exactly what he was, and that was enough revenge for her.
Gregory had not argued with her decision to spare Evans the criminal courts, merely watching the paper curl and blacken in the flickering flame.
He had noted quietly, after a long, intense moment, that she was a much more generous woman than he would ever be in her position.
She had answered him firmly that she was not remotely generous, she was simply exhausted from carrying the anger, and she wanted to put it down.
Gregory had nodded slowly, as if she had just handed him a vital piece of information he fully intended to remember for the rest of his life.
They had naturally fallen, during those tense two weeks, into a quiet pattern of working together that neither of them had explicitly named.
She came up to Brian’s warm suite at dawn, carrying the fresh dosage.
Gregory always met her on the landing with a single flickering candle, his dark hair messy, having barely slept himself.
They sat together in the heavy leather chairs by the fire for the quarter hour it took the bitter dose to fully settle in Brian’s stomach.
They did not always speak, finding a comfortable silence that Megan had never experienced with another human being.
When they did speak, the conversation took the small, ordinary shape of two intensely private people who had a great deal of grim work in common and not very much time for decorative ornament.
She told him in short, clipped sentences about the hidden south frame and the drafty loft, and the rare medical plants she had been desperately growing in secret for six years against contingencies she had not been able to name.
He told her, his voice low and raspy, about the complex, failing estate accounts, the demanding tenants, and the three famous London physicians who had been politely paid off and sent home to fail elsewhere.
She eventually told him about her brilliant, quiet father, the way his hands shook at the end, and the terrible silence he left behind.
He eventually told her about his own demanding father, the heavy expectations placed on him, and the crushing weight of the sudden inheritance.
On the eleventh evening, she came into the converted music room with a massive, heavy stack of papers wrapped in twine.
It was the unfinished, massive second volume of her medical textbook, the work of five grueling years that no one in the world but herself had ever laid eyes on.
She set it down on the polished table directly in front of him, telling him fiercely that he should know exactly what kind of radical work he had lent his powerful name to defending.
He had looked at the massive stack of paper, and then he had looked up at her, his eyes unreadable.
He had not opened it that night while she was present.
He had opened it, she learned much later from the exhausted servants, at three o’clock in the morning, and had read continuously until dawn.
He had come down to breakfast with red, strained eyes and a strange quietness that had absolutely nothing to do with grief for the first time in a brutal year.
Megan did not, in those two exhausting weeks, allow herself to closely analyze what was slowly happening between them.
She had spent seven brutal years training herself not to notice anyone who was not noticing her, hiding her brilliance like a shameful secret.
The defensive habit did not magically unlearn itself in a fortnight, even surrounded by warmth and respect.
But she found, walking the sprawling corridors at strange, early hours, that she was no longer jumping in surprise when she met his tall frame on the dark back stairs.
She found, sitting in the worn leather chair by Brian’s roaring fire, that the small, warm weight of Gregory’s constant attention had become, entirely without her permission, the thing she was most acutely aware of in any room they shared.
The new laboratory was already being built.
Gregory had ordered a master builder up from York within the week, and the massive, disused brewhouse beyond the south garden was being completely stripped and refitted before the first hard frost hit the ground.
Megan walked out to inspect the noisy progress twice a day, wearing a pair of stout leather boots and a heavy wool coat that had appeared in her room, exactly like the dresses, without any explanation.
The hardened men who worked there had quickly taken to calling her Miss Collins, addressing her with a particular, deferential care she did not know quite what to do with.
She had officially ordered highly expensive, specialized glassware from Newcastle, charging it directly to the estate accounts.
She had written, proudly signing her own name, to a brilliant young girl in Whitby whose desperate letter to her father seven years ago she had never been able to answer.
She had received in reply a letter so full of hope that it had made her sit down right on the music room floor and cry silently for half an hour, which she had not done in nine years and did not intend to do again anytime soon.
The girl would arrive in late December to begin her studies.
She would have a warm room, a proper apprenticeship, and the full protection of the estate.
She would have, Megan fully intended, the exact thing Megan herself had never had: a name on her own brilliant work from the very first page.
On the fifteenth morning of the treatment, Brian walked to the window.
He did it completely without announcement, moving while Megan was carefully measuring the morning dose into the horn spoon.
He simply set aside the heavy metal calipers he was playing with, put his bare feet firmly on the cold floor, and stood up, moving slowly but steadily.
He crossed the four long paces from the massive bed to the frosty casement, laid his pale hand flat on the cold glass, and looked out at the kitchen garden.
Megan, with the spoon hovering in her hand, did not move a single muscle, terrified she would break the spell.
Gregory, sitting in the heavy chair by the fire, froze entirely, his breathing stopping in his chest.
The three of them stayed in that frozen, miraculous tableau for a full, endless minute.
Then Brian turned his head and told Megan, with a small, private smile that was beginning to look exactly like his older brother’s sharp grin, that she had promised this by Christmas.
Megan replied, her voice thick and tight, that she was simply being conservative with her medical estimates.
Brian laughed, a real, clear sound, and noted that she was actually just being modest, which was an entirely different vice altogether.
That night, Gregory came to the music room at an hour when she had not expected him.
She was sitting at the polished table, the second volume open in front of her, furiously correcting a complex passage on the preparation of foxglove that she had been meaning to revise for two long years.
He stood in the doorway for a long moment without speaking, and she finally set down her ink-stained pen, her heart kicking against her ribs.
He crossed the room slowly, standing at the corner of the table with his large hand gripping the back of the empty chair, looking down at the page she had been correcting.
He noted that his grandfather had died of an overdose of foxglove, prescribed by a wealthy physician in London who happened to be Arthur Evans’s father.
Megan told him quietly that she knew, and that she had thoroughly read the inquest reports.
He looked at her, a strange, intense light in his eyes, noting that of course she had read them.
She held his gaze as the candle between them began to gutter slightly in the draft.
She trimmed the wick without looking away, the small, competent movement of her stained hand drawing his gaze in a way that made the back of her neck flush hot.
He told her he came to ask her a question.
She told him to ask it, demanding to know what he wanted.
Gregory fell completely silent, the question clearly much larger than any he had been asked in years, and he had not, in the practical hurry of the chaotic fortnight, prepared a polished answer.
She quickly listed her strict demands, terrified of what he might say.
She stated firmly that she wanted her name on the massive book, and she wanted the second volume finished and officially printed.
She stated she wanted a proper laboratory, not a dark room above a kitchen, fully equipped with glass, an accurate balance, and a modern microscope.
She demanded an apprentice, and the absolute right to choose the girl herself.
She stopped abruptly, not realizing she was going to say the rest, but the words tore out of her throat anyway.
She told him, her voice cracking, that she just wanted to stop being so incredibly afraid, because she had been afraid for nine years and she wanted to put it down.
Gregory considered her for a long, heavy moment, his eyes dark in the candlelight.
He told her, his voice rough and completely stripped of any aristocratic polish, that she could put it down right here.
He informed her that the laboratory would be built whether or not she ever crossed the threshold of any room of his again, and the book would be printed regardless of her answer.
He stated that none of this depended on the other question he had not yet asked her.
She looked at him, the silence stretching out between them until it hummed in the air.
Gregory took a slow breath and told her that he was not a romantic man, and he had not been a kind man for a very long time, but he had been better this fortnight than he had been in a year, entirely because of her.
He stated clearly that he wanted to go on being better, and he wanted to do it in a house where she was not a temporary guest, but his wife.
He offered her marriage, knowing full well she did not need his money or his protection anymore, but simply because he had come to the end of any honest reason not to ask.
He told her she could refuse, or she could take an entire year to answer, and she would keep the laboratory and her freedom either way.
Megan stared at his large, strong hands resting on the table.
She looked at her own hands, which were deeply stained at the cuticles with the harsh resin of the morning’s chemical preparation, hands she had not imagined placing inside another person’s for nine lonely years.
She told him quietly that she would not be quick, that she had been completely alone for a long time, and that she would need to learn how to be looked at again.
Gregory stood perfectly still, his chest rising and falling, and told her to take absolutely everything she needed.
He swore the answer could be yes a year from now, or tomorrow, or never, and he would go on coming to this room in the evenings regardless.
She took a shuddering breath and told him firmly that it would not be quick, but it would definitely not be no.
He let out a ragged breath he had not realized he was holding, making absolutely no move to grab her hand, waiting with the deliberate patience of a man who finally understood the difference between wanting a thing and earning it.
Megan moved her hand slowly, crossing the small distance across the polished table, and set it firmly on top of his.
Her hand was rough, resin-stained, and incredibly warm.
They sat that way for a long, quiet time as the first thin snow of November began to fall against the glass outside.
The anonymous first edition of her own medical book lay open on the table between them, its pages finally resting in the light, as the woman who had walked into the drawing room in slate silk prepared to step into the life she had fought so bitterly to build.
THE END
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Disclaimer
This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. If you would like to share your story, please send it to [email protected].
