"I said a great deal. I said whatever was needful." Sir Roland lifted his head. "Consider what I was looking at, Laurence. Your father three years in his grave and you not a full year in possession. Your engagement broken off and the whole of York talking of it. You lying senseless with your head laid open, found at your own gate, and the only horse missing from your stables that night besides Wren's own mare was yours. A servant dead at the bottom of a pit, with your flask in his coat. What do you imagine the county would have made of that? What would the newspapers in Hull have made of it? The Ashcombes have held this land for two hundred years. I swore to your father, when he was dying, that I would see you safe. I saw you safe."
"By calling a sober man a drunkard."
"By letting a coroner's jury draw the conclusion that the smell of brandy invited. Grooms drink. Everyone knows grooms drink. It was the smallest, the most ordinary explanation in the world, and it hurt no one living."
"It hurt his daughter."
"His daughter," said Sir Roland, and for the first time his voice cracked, "was going to come to me. Do you understand? I had not seen her since she was four years old. Clara would not let me. I wrote, and Clara sent the letters back. When Clara died I wrote to Wren, and Wren sent them back. Twelve years. And then there was an accident, and the child was alone in two rooms in Newmarket with an aunt dying of a cancer, and the law gave her to me." He straightened. "I thought: here is a second chance. I could not save the mother. I could save the daughter. I could give her a home and a name and a decent marriage and a life that did not end over a saddler's shop. And I thought: what does a verdict matter to her, if she is safe? What does it matter what a dozen farmers in a back room at the Bell said about a man she will never have to think of again?"
"She thinks of him," Laurence said. "She thinks of nothing else. She has been sleeping in my hayloft for three weeks thinking of him."
Sir Roland closed his eyes.
"Then she has been ruined in your hayloft," he said, "and you have helped her to it. I will see her now. I will take her home, where she belongs, and you and I will never speak of this again."
"No, sir."
The old man's eyes opened.
"She is my ward," he said. "Until the twentieth of March next she is mine in law, as surely as that portrait is yours. If you keep her from me you are harbouring a minor against her lawful guardian, and I am a justice of the peace, and you know very well what I could do."
"I know. I'm asking you not to do it." Laurence took his hand from the mantel. "Sir, you have been more father to me than my own was, these last years. I owe you more than I can say. And I think you did a wrong thing for a reason you believed was good, and I think I let you do it because it was easier for me not to look. I'm going to look now. I'm going to find out what happened on the Wold road, all of it, whatever it costs. And I'm not going to bring a grown woman to you by the arm like a strayed heifer. If she'll see you, she'll see you. That is her choice. It isn't mine and it isn't yours."
For a long moment they stood on either side of the desk, the old man and the young one, under the painted gaze of the man who had bound them together.