She also understood that she had been walking the Somerfield path for two months because the Somerfield path was pleasant in September, because the library was interesting, and she had borrowed a map and needed to return it, and Hegel kept following her and needed returning too, and because there were drainage records she could be useful about. These were all true things.
There was also a third truth, which was less comfortable: she had been looking forward to the east gate every morning the way she looked forward to letters from Clara—with a particular alertness, a particular readiness, and the knowledge that the day would be different once she arrived there.
She did not go to the east gate on the morning of the seventh of September. She went the next morning instead, and the one after, and Rafferty was not there. Hegel sat with her at the wall for twenty minutes, as though this were his established practice, which apparently it was, and she walked home through the early autumn fields and told herself it was a very good arrangement for a summer in Yorkshire, and that she had never expected anything else.
At eleven o'clock that night, Aunt Cress passed the library on her way to bed and found the books arranged in complete alphabetical order by author's surname—which was not how she had arranged them, and which had clearly required several hours of sustained effort. There was a single lamp still burning on the table. Adelaide was in bed and appeared to be asleep. Aunt Cress looked at the books. She looked at the lamp. She turned it off very carefully and went upstairs.
He did not go to London. It was, in the end, a straightforward matter. The correspondence with the Ashby family had been his mother's doing, conducted entirely without his knowledge, and had been in progress for four months before he discovered it—at which point he wrote a very short and very clear letter to the Marchioness, and the thing was over. His mother wrote back at length. He did not respond at equivalent length.
Hegel had been missing on a Tuesday morning in October. Not missing, exactly, because Hegel was not a dog who went anywhere without deliberate intention, but absent from his usual locations, which meant he was somewhere specific. Rafferty found him at the east gate, sitting with the patient certainty of a dog who has somewhere to be and knows when to start.
Adelaide Thornton came up the lane from the direction of the village at ten o'clock, with her coat on and her hair bundled against the wind, carrying Hegel's lead in her hand. She stopped when she saw Rafferty at the gate.
"He found me on the lane," she said. "He follows me. I was bringing him back."
"He does that," Rafferty said.
"He's done it three times now," she said. "I should have brought him sooner."
"You could have sent a note."
Something crossed her face—an uncertainty quickly gone. "I did not want to be a bother."