Chapter 12

She was quiet for a moment. Then: "He is seven now. He told me last week that he is going to be a surveyor.""Because of the maps?""Because of the maps," she confirmed. "He has decided the small flags are insufficient and has been making his own, more detailed version on a sheet of cartridge paper."Something happened in her face that was the full expression: not the composed, professional version, not the brief beginnings of the thing he had been watching for, but the genuine one—warm and specific, the expression of a woman who loves her work and her students and is not concealing it."It is quite good for a seven-year-old cartographer."He looked at her in the November office and thought about the first morning in the doorway, and the four months since, and the thirty-seven children who were forty in the new register because three more had arrived in October, and the composition books, and the afternoon sessions, and the geography lessons, and all the accumulated evidence of a woman doing something real with the specific quality of someone who has not been pretending to do it.He thought about what he had been before September: not bad, he did not think, but incurious in the specific way of a man who had arranged his life for efficiency and had not examined what efficiency was costing. He thought about the fourteen properties, and the quarterly accounts, and the long, comfortable machinery of a wealthy life that had been running itself while he supervised it; and about the specific quality of five days in Rothbury, and then three months of fortnightly returns, which was the opposite of the machinery running itself."Miss Burch," he said.She looked at him with the gray eyes that had assessed him on the first morning and had been assessing him with accumulating information ever since."I have been returning to Rothbury every fortnight," he said, "for three months. I have given my solicitor reasons related to the endowment revision, and I have given the village no reason at all. I would like to give you the actual reason." He paused. "The actual reason is that I find your company more clarifying than any other I currently have access to, and that the fortnights between visits are less satisfactory than the visits themselves, and that I have spent a considerable portion of those fortnights thinking about things you have said, and finding that the thinking is useful, and the things are worth thinking about."He held her gaze."I am thirty-four years old, and I have not said anything like this to anyone in recent memory, which is either relevant or irrelevant, and I am not entirely certain which."Agnes was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the November morning was doing what northern November mornings did, which was to be gray and persistent and entirely unsentimental."You are a Marquis," she said. It was not an objection; it was the opening of an account."Yes."

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