Chapter 10

"Come back, then," she said. "On Thursday, the older children are doing geography. You may find it useful.""I will find it useful," he said, with a certainty that was not about geography.She returned to the slate, and he left the classroom as the first of the children appeared at the end of the green, and went back to the King's Head, and told Hartley to make the arrangements for a return visit in two weeks.And Hartley, who had been Rothwell's solicitor for eight years and had seen him make decisions about his fourteen properties with the clean efficiency of a man who did not revisit them, looked at him with the careful expression of a man who has identified a change in the weather, and is noting it for the record."The foundation?" Hartley said.

"The foundation," Rothwell confirmed, and did not elaborate, because Hartley was a solicitor and not a confessor, and the full account was still being written.

He came back on Thursday, as he had said, and the Thursday after that, and the one after that. October arrived and then November, and Rothwell's visits to Rothbury had become—in the village's accounting, in Hartley's patient calendar management, and in the assessment of anyone who was paying attention—a fact of the fortnight rather than an event of the inspection.The foundation's endowment revision was completed in October and signed in November. It was, in the language of legal documents, a permanent and irrevocable endowment sufficient to fund the Rothbury Foundation's operations in perpetuity, adjusted for increase of population and cost, administered by a board of trustees that included Agnes Burch as the founding trustee with permanent voting rights.This last provision had been added at his instruction when Hartley had produced the first draft without it. Hartley had looked at him when he specified this addition."A permanent vote?" he said."She built it," Rothwell said. "She should have the power to protect it."Hartley had made the amendment without further comment, which was how Hartley communicated approval.Agnes had received the final document with the same composure with which she received everything—the composure that was, he now understood, not absence of feeling, but the specific discipline of a woman who had learned to keep her interior life from being used against her.She had read the entire document before commenting, which had taken twenty minutes, and had then asked three precise questions about the administration clause, the investment provision, and the definition of "sufficient"—all of which were the right questions—and had then said, "This is sound.""I had it reviewed by two separate counsel," he said.

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