She looked at me for a moment, then she said quite evenly, "Mrs. Holt mentioned to me last evening after dinner that she hoped I was not drawing conclusions from the Duke's attentiveness, that he is widely understood to be in a very particular set of negotiations with Lady Carston's family." She folded the letter neatly. "I am not interested in being a diversion or a moment's novelty, however kindly meant. I think it is better for everyone if I go home to my kitchen garden."
I stood up. "I will get my brother."
"That is not necessary."
"It is," I said. "Give me ten minutes, please."
She looked at me steadily. I could see her weighing it. She was not a person who made decisions lightly or reversed them easily, and I was aware I was asking her to extend a trust she had not quite decided I deserved. Then she set down her pen, folded her hands in her lap, and said, "Ten minutes."
I found Edric in the study, already at his correspondence at half past six in the morning, which said everything about the last 12 years of his life. He was at his desk in his shirtsleeves, and he had the focused containment of a man who has arranged his days so efficiently that no hour is wasted, which I had always found in private slightly exhausting to observe.
He looked up when I came in. I said, "Miss Fairfield is leaving on the early coach. She is in the morning room."
He set down his pen. "Leaving?"
"Mrs. Holt told her something about Lady Carston's family and negotiations, whatever that is. She has decided she is a diversion and that it is better to go home."
He was on his feet before I had finished the sentence. He took his jacket from the chair and put it on without any particular hurry, but without pause, which was the way my brother did things when he had decided on them.
At the door, he stopped and turned back. "Mrs. Holt—"
"—is a guest until Tuesday," I said. "I know. Deal with Miss Fairfield first."
He went.
I did not follow him. I had done my part. I went upstairs and dressed and took my time about it, and when I came back down, there was no coaching bag in the morning room and no folded note on the blotter.
I found them on the terrace—not together, exactly. They were standing side by side at the stone railing, looking out over the south lawn where the groundsmen were beginning their morning work, and there was a distance between them that had been carefully left there. But they were both looking at the same view, and neither of them was in a hurry to end the conversation.
I could not hear them from where I stood in the doorway, and I did not try. I have some limits.
What I learned afterward, in the way one learns these things in a household—from a remark here, a discarded sentence there, the quality of a silence over the breakfast table—was this:
He had told her that there were no negotiations with Lady Carston's family. That there had never been negotiations, and that he wished people would stop imagining them into existence, and that Mrs. Holt's information was as reliable as Mrs. Holt's judgment, which was to say, not very.
He had told her that his grandmother had met her in April, and had spoken of her more warmly than she had spoken of any guest in his recent memory, which was notable, because his grandmother's warmth was not a casual currency.
He had told her that he found her directness something he had not known to expect, and could not find a way to be without, now that he had become briefly accustomed to it.
He had told her that he had not expected, coming down to his own garden party, to spend an afternoon reading about soil composition in the company of someone who made honest conversation feel like a thing he had been waiting to have for a very long time.
He had told her that he was not certain what she was willing to give him credit for, but that he would like the chance to deserve some.
He had then asked her, with the precision he brought to everything, whether she was willing to extend her visit by two days. And when she had said nothing immediately, he had said, "I am aware that I have not given you particular reason to trust that this is straightforward. I am telling you that it is. That is not a thing I say without meaning it."
She had looked at him for a moment with that level, observant quality I had noticed that first evening—weighing, not performing. And then she had said that she supposed two days was not very long.
She had extended her visit.
My grandmother received this news at breakfast with the expression of someone who is deeply unsurprised but willing to be pleased. She ordered a second pot of tea to be brought. She looked across the table at me and said nothing.
"You should have been a general," I told her.
"I have often thought so," she agreed. She was not at all modest about it. I did not expect her to be.
In the weeks that followed, and then the months, I watched something happen to my brother that I can only describe as an opening.
I do not mean that he became a different man. He was still precise, still economical with noise and sentiment and display, still likely to answer a social pleasantry with something uncomfortably accurate. But there was something in the way he moved through his own house when Miss Fairfield was in it—which happened three times in the autumn and twice more before winter—a loosening of the posture he had been holding for 12 years that I had not seen before and had not expected to see.
She came to Drevenmore for a week in October at my grandmother's formal invitation. And she spent a portion of every morning in conversation with the estate steward about the lower fields, which were plagued by that year's particular pattern of standing water. And she made, I was told, two suggestions that the steward had not considered and immediately adopted.