"It was her idea."
Margaret looked at him. He looked back. They were having, as they often did, a conversation that contained two conversations simultaneously, and they were both fluent in it.
"She's not wrong," Margaret said. "A woman defending herself is different from a man defending her. One is justice, the other is charity. I know and you understand the difference."
"I do."
She studied him for another moment. "You called her Eleanor."
He was quiet.
"You noticed that."
"I notice everything," she said with the perfect serenity of a woman who absolutely did. "Sit down, Nathaniel." He sat. "Tell me where you are," she said. Not unkindly, just directly, the way she always spoke to him when the social niceties had become irrelevant.
He thought about deflecting. He had deflected this conversation with himself for 11 days, had managed it reasonably well, had told himself that the afternoon hours in the library were about the work and the quiet and the useful arrangement of two people with compatible purposes. He had told himself a great many things.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I know that she's... I know that she is not like anyone I have met before. I know that when I'm in that room with her, I'm not..." He stopped, tried again. "I'm not performing anything. I'm not being the estate or the name or the man people expect when they drive past this house. I'm just..." He stopped again.
"Yourself," Margaret said quietly.
He looked at her. "I haven't been that in a very long time, grandmother."
She held his gaze. Her eyes were very bright. "I know, my love. I know."
The silence between them was full of things that didn't need to be said.
"What if she leaves when the library is finished," he said.
"Then you'll have let something real happen," Margaret said. "And that will matter regardless of what comes after." She unfolded her hands and folded them again. "But I don't think she'll leave when the library is finished."
"You don't know that?"
"No," she agreed. "But I know what I saw in her face when Mrs. Patton told me what she said after Samuel spoke to her in the library last week." She looked at him steadily. "She sat still for 10 minutes. Nathaniel, this woman who is never still. She sat still and looked at the east wall and thought about something she wasn't ready to name yet."
He was very quiet.
"She's not indifferent to you." Margaret said "she's careful. There is a difference."
The 11 days before the Alderson gathering were the strangest of Nathaniel's recent memory. On the surface, nothing changed. Eleanor came to the library in the morning. He came in the afternoons. They worked. They talked in the short, practical way they had developed about the documents, about the cataloging system, occasionally about things that had nothing to do with either. She had an opinion about the territorial disputes in the Northwest that surprised him with its specificity. He had a knowledge of soil chemistry that surprised her with its depth. They disagreed about whether Jefferson's agricultural writings were better understood as practical science or philosophical exercise. And the disagreement lasted three afternoons and was never fully resolved. And neither of them wanted it resolved because the conversation was better than the conclusion would have been.
But underneath all of it, under the work and the quiet and the practical talk, something was pulled tight. The way the air goes tight before a storm, the valley was watching. Mercer was watching. The Alderson gathering was coming. And in the space between the work and the watching, something was growing that neither of them had yet decided what to do with.
On the ninth day, Mercer escalated. Samuel came in from town in the early afternoon with his jaw set in the way that meant he had heard something he was working out how to say. "He's contacted the Staunton lending library." Samuel said he said it to Nathaniel directly which meant he had already decided Eleanor needed to hear it from him. "Told them there are questions about a Miss Eleanor Bennett's professional conduct. Said there had been complaints."
Nathaniel went very still.
"Complaints, invented ones, but enough to make the library director nervous." Samuel looked at him. "If they pull her professional reference, she loses her ability to take this kind of work, any kind of work in any household that checks."
"He's trying to take her livelihood," Nathaniel said.
"He's trying to make her disappear." Samuel said flatly. "The social talk wasn't enough. You answered it. So now he's going after something she can't answer in a parlor."
Nathaniel stood up from his desk.
"Where are you going?" Samuel asked.
"To tell her."