Rafferty mentioned the drainage completion to Oldwin in the third week of November. They were in the estate office reviewing the ledger, and outside, it was beginning to snow.
"The culvert design," Rafferty said, "Miss Thornton's suggestion originally."
"It was," Oldwin said, not looking up. A pause. "She hasn't been in the neighborhood since October."
"No," Rafferty said.
"Mrs. Holbrook said she went back to Thornton, the family house. Her brother and his wife—her brother, Thomas Thornton, is in orders. Took the Thornton living when their father died. The house is his." Oldwin turned a page. "Mrs. Holbrook has the direction, I believe, if anyone needed it."
Rafferty said nothing. Oldwin very carefully did not say anything either, which was, Rafferty had worked with him long enough to know, the most articulate thing Oldwin could do.
He put down his pen. "What I said at the gate," he said.
Oldwin looked up.
"I said something at the gate in October," Rafferty said, "something I did not mean the way she heard it. I did not correct it." Oldwin waited. "I should have corrected it," Rafferty said.
Oldwin looked at him for a long moment with the expression of a man who has spent twenty-two years watching a careful, self-contained, very private person fail to say things that needed saying, and who has developed over those years an almost infinite capacity for not pointing this out.
"You should," Oldwin said.
Rafferty looked at the snow outside the window. It was coming down in proper flakes now, settling on the stone ledge of the estate office in a thin white line. Inside the room was the smell of coal and paper and the steady tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. He had been, for the past six weeks, extremely productive. He was also, he acknowledged to himself, sitting in his estate office in November, unable to explain why the lower meadow drainage felt like less of an accomplishment than it should, given that it was a genuinely well-executed piece of engineering.