"I know," Nathaniel said.
"Mercer will know you have this documentation now. He'll know the library is cataloged."
"Yes, he won't try this particular angle again."
Prescott looked at him steadily. "You understand what I'm telling you? He'll try a different one."
"I understand. The woman who cataloged the library," Prescott said. "Miss Bennett. Yes. She produced all of this in an hour."
"She cataloged it 3 weeks ago." Nathaniel said "she simply retrieved it today."
Prescott was quiet for a moment. He had known Nathaniel Whitmore for 12 years. He had the look of a man putting pieces together and arriving somewhere he hadn't expected. "She came to do a job," he said.
"Yes, and she did it."
"Yes, thoroughly."
Another pause. "Nathaniel," Prescott said carefully. "I've known you to be a measured man. I've never known you to be a foolish one. I'm going to ask you something directly."
"Go ahead."
"Is this personal?"
Nathaniel met his gaze. "It is."
Prescott absorbed this. "Does she know that?"
"She does. And she's not leaving when the library is finished."
Prescott looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded once with the gravity of a man who understood weight and was satisfied that the person carrying it knew what it was. "Then I'd advise you not to let Mercer get a second round," he said. "Move deliberately and soon."
"I intend to," Nathaniel said.
He rode home with the August sun going long and the fields running golden on both sides of the road. And he thought about what soon meant and what deliberately meant and what it looked like when a man who had built his whole adult life around careful management of risk decided finally that some things were worth more than caution.
He found her in the garden, not the library, the kitchen garden, where she had no business being, where she had apparently wandered at the end of the afternoon and been recruited by the kitchen girl to identify an herb that had grown up unrecognized among the rosemary. She was kneeling in the dirt, which she did not seem to mind at all, with the kitchen girl crouched next to her, and she was explaining with that clear, patient voice she used when explaining things she knew well, that what they had was, in fact, wild thyme, which was edible and excellent, and had probably seeded itself from the domestic variety three summers ago.
She looked up when she heard him come through the gate. "It's wild thyme," she told him.
"I heard."
She stood. The kitchen girl retreated to the house. Eleanor brushed her hands on her skirt and looked at him with the reading look. The two second assessment. "Prescott," she said.
"Prescott." He stopped in front of her. "Mercer's complaint will be withdrawn by end of week."
She nodded. She had expected nothing less. "And after that, he'll try something else."
"Prescott agrees. Yes."
She looked at him steadily. "We should discuss what that means for you, for the estate. He's not going to stop being angry, and angry men with money and influence are—"
"Eleanor," he said it quietly. "Stop." She stopped. "I need to say something," he said. "And I need to say it before I think about it so carefully that I find a reason not to." She was very still. "I have been," he said, "thinking about the order of things. You told me in the carriage last week that what you felt came first before anything offered or arranged or expected." He looked at her. "I want you to know that I understand what you meant by that and I want to be as honest with you as you were with me."
She waited.
"I do not want to offer you a situation," he said. "I do not want to offer you security or a household or a position in this county. Those things exist. They're real, but they are not..." He stopped. "They are not why I'm standing in the kitchen garden."
"Why are you standing in the kitchen garden?" She asked.