He sat in the chair across from her. "She said, 'Yes,'" he told her.
"I know." She sat down her needle work. "Nathaniel, look at me." He looked at her. "I arranged the Alderson gathering," she said. "I arranged for the library position. I wrote to Eleanor's former employer in Staunton before I wrote to Eleanor to understand who she was and whether the work was genuine." She held his gaze steadily. "I want you to know that before you tell me, I interfered."
He was quiet for a moment. "You wrote to her employer."
"I did."
"And what did you learn?"
"That she was the finest cataloger they had worked with, that she had refused three offers of more comfortable domestic positions because she preferred work she could be proud of, that she was honest to the point of inconvenience and competent beyond any reasonable expectation." Margaret held his eyes "and that she had never once in 4 years given anyone cause to question her character."
"And then you arranged the rest."
"I arranged the meeting. The library did need cataloging. That was real." She paused. "Everything else was yours and hers. I did not arrange that."
He looked at her for a long moment. "You could have told me," he said, "who she was before?"
"Yes," she said. "I could have, and you would have arrived at that first meeting already decided, and she would have seen it, and it would have been exactly like every other introduction." She held his gaze. "She needed to find you the way she found you. Walking in with your mud and your survey documents, being someone she hadn't been prepared to meet."
He sat with that. He thought about Eleanor arriving with the worn leather bag and the blue dress and looking at the house with the professional, assessing gaze and saying, "How do you do?" in the same tone she'd used for the Jefferson Almanac. He thought about what would have happened if he'd known before that moment that his grandmother had vetted her, if he'd been prepared, if he'd been managing it.
"You're right," he said.
"I usually am," she said without any particular pride, just accuracy.
He looked at her, really looked at her the way he didn't often enough, the way he would regret not doing more when she was gone. And he said, "Thank you, grandmother, for not giving up."
Her face did something he rarely saw it do. Something that lived in the area of tears without quite being them. "You are," she said quietly. "The thing I am most proud of in this world, Nathaniel, not the estate, not the name. You," she paused, "I simply refuse to watch you disappear into it."
He reached across and took her hand. She held his. They sat like that for a moment. The way people sit when words have done all they can do. Then she said with perfect timing. "The East Wing inheritance stands. By the way, provided you do this properly."
"Samuel told you I heard the threat."
"I assumed Samuel would tell you."
"You assumed correctly." She patted his hand and let it go. "Good. Now go and be with that woman before she comes to her senses."
He stood. He smiled. A real one, the one that happened when nothing was being managed. "I'll be at a supper," he said.
"Bring her to supper," Margaret said. "Not as the cataloger, as something that doesn't have a name yet," Nathaniel said, "but that we mean completely."
Margaret looked at him for a moment. "That will do," she said. "For now."
He found Eleanor in the library. Of course, he found her in the library. She had an hour left of daylight and four pages remaining in the final cataloging notebook. And Eleanor Bennett was not the kind of woman who left four pages unfinished because something significant had happened in the kitchen garden. He came to the doorway and she looked up.
"Come to watch?" She said.
"Yes," he said. He sat at his end of the table. He picked up nothing. He just sat and watched her work.
She raised an eyebrow. "You're not going to work?"
"No, I'm going to sit here and be grateful that you know where everything is."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she went back to the last four pages. He watched her work. I thought about Harold Mercer, who had wanted to reduce her to a footnote in someone else's story and had instead created the conditions under which she had proven in front of the entire county exactly who she was. He thought about that and felt something that was close to gratitude even for Mercer because without the battle certain things would have taken much longer to name. I thought about his grandfather's library sitting unread for 30 years and what it had taken to bring someone in to give it the attention it deserved and how that someone had turned out to be the person who gave him the same attention. He thought about his father saying the house would always demand more than you thought you had and then you'd find it because you had to. He thought the old man was right. He just had the wrong subject.
Eleanor closed the last notebook. She kept her ink. She straightened the completed catalog. All four notebooks, every page dated and initialed, and set it at the edge of the table. "Done," she said.
He looked at her. "How does it feel?"