"I am deciding my own feet," Raff said. His voice was low and tight. "There is a difference."
Sir Ridley looked from one to the other and then at Jemima. "Miss Crowle, would you be so kind as to take a turn in the knot garden. This room is about to become unfit for guests."
Jemima went, pausing only to squeeze Leonora's hand. The door shut.
"Sit down," Sir Ridley said to Raff. "Both of you—sit. I will not have a second court scene in a fortnight, even indoors."
They sat. The map of the parish lay between them like a joke.
"Harrow," Sir Ridley said, "if you leave now, Pewsey wins the shape of the story. He becomes the man who cleared a stable. You become the man who fled. My daughter becomes the girl who caused flight. I have spent enough of my life letting stories be shaped by men who were not in the ditch with me. You will not go to Lydeard like a culprit. You will stay and be ordinary. Ordinary is harder to sue than drama."
Raff's hands flexed on his knees. "And if ordinary is not enough? If they file?"
"Then I will answer," Sir Ridley said. "With Crowle's letter. With my own testimony. With the truth of Corunna if I must strip myself in open court to show what a debt looks like. I do not wish to. Wishing is irrelevant. Mathias Harrow did not wish to lose his fingers. He cut me free anyway."
Leonora watched her father as if seeing a road appear in fog. "You would do that. Publicly."
"I would hate it," Sir Ridley said. "Hate is also irrelevant. I have remembered what I swore. Late. Badly. But memory, once returned, does not ask whether you are convenient."
Raff was silent. Then he said, "I will stay. Not because you order it. Because she asked me not to decide her throat, and because you have finally spoken like the man my father described when he was not cursing officers in general."
Sir Ridley's mouth twitched. "Mathias cursed me?"
"Frequently," Raff said. "Affectionately. It is a talent among sergeants."
Leonora laughed, once, helplessly, and some of the room's iron softened.
That night she walked alone as far as the lime avenue. The crowns of the trees moved against thin stars. She thought of Pewsey's cream paper and Keddy's ink and her father's cracked pocket-book. She thought of Raff's cottage door and the way he had stood in the library ready to erase himself for her sake, and how she had refused the erasure. Agency, she was learning, was not only the power to go toward someone. It was also the power to forbid a sacrifice that turned her into a reason instead of a person.
When she returned, Mrs. Glynn was waiting in the hall with a candle.
"Well?" Mrs. Glynn said.
"We are still here," Leonora answered. "All of us. It is not a victory. It is better than a vanishing."