Nathaniel looked at her for a long moment. "And what do you think, Mrs. Patton?"
She met his gaze steadily. She had worked for this family for 19 years. "I think she was here before 6:00 in the morning on her second day and she spent the whole of it arguing with a stack of mold damaged Latin texts about whether they were worth saving. That's not what a woman on the make looks like in my experience."
Nathaniel said nothing for a moment. "Who is saying this?"
"Harold Mercer brought it up at the dry goods store from what I understand. His wife passed it along."
Harold Mercer, 52, second largest landholder in the county, had a daughter of marriageable age, had introduced that daughter to Nathaniel two years ago in a manner that could only be described as strategic. Nathaniel had refused politely.
Finally, he picked up his pen. "Thank you, Mrs. Patton," he said.
She left. He sat very still at his desk. I was thinking about Eleanor Bennett arriving before 6:00 in the morning. He was thinking about the way she had said, "I'm good at it" without apology or false modesty. He was thinking about a woman who argued with mold damaged Latin texts about whether they were worth saving. And he was thinking about Harold Mercer, who had never once in his life looked at anything without first calculating what it was worth to him. He picked up a fresh sheet of paper. He did not write to Harold Mercer. He wrote to his grandmother instead.
"Grandmother, regarding the matter of Miss Bennett's continued engagement with the library. I believe we should ensure that her work is completed with every appropriate support this household can provide. She is, as far as I can determine, exactly what she says she is. N"
He folded it, had it delivered to the east sitting room where his grandmother sat in the evenings. An hour later, a note came back.
"My darling boy, I know. M."
He read it twice. He sat back in his chair. He thought about a woman who looked at a Jefferson almanac like it was worth looking at, and at a wealthy landowner like he was just a man who'd tracked mud in from the fields. And somewhere in the middle of a summer that had felt until 4 days ago like a season he was simply waiting to get through, Nathaniel Whitmore felt something shift. Not loudly, not dramatically, just shift. The way the first real thing shifts when it arrives, the note.
Nathaniel sent his grandmother on the fourth evening was not something he thought about again until the following morning when he came downstairs to find Eleanor Bennett already seated at the breakfast table, not in the dining room, in the kitchen, seated at the long work table where the household staff took their meals, drinking coffee with Mrs. Patton and talking about bread, not about anything else, just bread, specifically whether the flour from the new mill down the valley was any good for biscuits or whether Mrs. Patton was right that it ran too fine and dried everything out.
Eleanor had an opinion on this, a fairly strong one, delivered without apology. "The finer grind absorbs differently," she was saying, wrapping both hands around her coffee cup. "You'd have to adjust the liquid or the fat. It's not the flour's fault. It's that the recipe assumes a coarser grain."
Mrs. Patton gave her the look she reserved for people who had just said something she agreed with but hadn't expected to. "That's exactly what I told Mr. Whitmore's mother in 1803. And she thought I was making excuses."
"You weren't making excuses. You were doing chemistry."
Mrs. Patton laughed. A real one, the kind that didn't happen often in this house before 8 in the morning. And then she looked up and saw Nathaniel in the doorway, and the laughter settled back into its usual professional distance.
Eleanor turned to look at him. "Good morning, Mr. Whitmore." Same tone as always. Like finding him in doorways was a thing she had filed away under expected inconveniences, and moved on from without much additional thought.
"Miss Bennett," he said, "you're early again. The light is better in the morning."
She stood, picked up her coffee, and moved toward the hall that led to the library. "I'll be out of your way," and she was gone.
Mrs. Patton was watching him with an expression he chose not to interpret. He sat down at the kitchen table, not the dining room. The kitchen table, which was not something he had done since he was 12 years old. "Coffee," he said. Mrs. Patton poured it without comment. He drank it in silence and thought about a woman who did chemistry without knowing she was doing it and didn't need anyone's credit for the result.
The valley started talking seriously on the sixth day. Not the quiet speculative talk that Mrs. Patton had mentioned. Real talk, the kind with teeth. Samuel heard it first at the feed store. He was there picking up an order when Thomas Greer, who was the kind of man who could not hold information inside himself for more than three consecutive minutes, leaned over the counter and said in a voice pitched just low enough to sound like confidence and just loud enough to reach everyone within 8 ft.
"Heard Whitmore's grandmother brought in a girl from Staunton. Smart one, they say. Library work, they call it." He paused, loading meaning into the pause the way certain men load bullets. "Real convenient timing, ain't it? What with him refusing every proper lady in the county?"
Samuel did not change his expression. "Thomas," he said, "You ever actually been inside our library?"
Thomas had not. Samuel knew he had not.
"Because Miss Bennett," Samuel continued, picking up his receipt from the counter, "is in there at 5 in the morning arguing with a deteriorating Latin manuscript. I've seen it myself, but you go ahead and finish that thought." He walked out.
But walking away from talk didn't stop it. Samuel knew that. Walking away from talk never stopped it. It just meant you weren't there to do anything about it when it turned. He went straight home and found Nathaniel at the fence line on the north property doing work that was technically the foreman's job, but that Nathaniel took on himself when he needed to think.
"People are talking," Samuel said.
"People always talk about Miss Bennett." Nathaniel drove a post without answering.
"Nathaniel, I heard you. Mercer is behind it. He's telling people she's here to work her way into a better situation. That grandmother brought her in on purpose." Samuel stopped. "He's implying grandmother arranged it like a... like a scheme."
The post driving stopped. Nathaniel straightened up. He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when the anger was real and he was deciding what to do with it. "Has anyone said this to her face?" he asked.
"Not that I know of."