He walked the estate that afternoon, which was something he did when the problem was internal. Estate work stopped being useful when the problem wasn't the estate. He walked the boundary wall, which was repaired now and unremarkable. He walked past the east gate. He walked through the kitchen garden, stripped and bare, and along the gravel path beside the east wing, which he had walked in August with Adelaide beside him, and which was in November very simply a gravel path.
He walked past the library windows, which were lit from inside, and looked in from the grounds for a moment— his own library, his own shelves, Hegel on the rug by the fire, six thousand books in considerable disorder. She had said it was marvelous when libraries were a little disordered. She had said it meant people used them.
He stood outside his own library window in November, in the cold, and thought: *She knew more about what I had here than I did.* That was the thing when he let himself look at it neatly. It was not just that he missed her visits—though he did, in the specific way you miss a habit you have not yet named—it was that Adelaide Thornton had come into his estate, and his library, and his argument about a boundary wall, and the rain in the Haverstock gazebo, and she had looked at everything, everything, with that concentrated, particular, fully present attention, as though all of it were interesting enough to deserve it. And in looking at it that way, she had made him look at it that way, too. He had been in this house for seven years. He had not, until June, thought much about whether he was in it or merely resident.
He went inside. He wrote to Mrs. Holbrook that evening. Mrs. Holbrook replied the next morning with the direction to Thornton Rectory and a brief additional note that read: "She takes her father's study in the afternoon if the weather is poor. It usually is."
It was, Rafferty thought, the most precise and useful intelligence he had received all year.
He drove to Thornton on the first clear day of December, which was the eighth. It was four hours by road in reasonable conditions; the road was reasonable. Rafferty had sent no letter ahead, which was a departure from his usual method. He always wrote ahead, he always arranged things, but a letter seemed wrong. A letter could be answered in writing, which meant she could answer it with courtesy and composure and without having to say what she actually thought, and he had understood over the past six weeks that composure was something Adelaide Thornton could deploy very effectively when she wished to. He did not want her to be composed. He wanted to be in the same room as her and say what he should have said in October.
Thornton Rectory was a modest house behind a church on the east side of the village—stone-built and sensible, with a kitchen garden that was put to bed for winter and a front path edged with a box hedge. The December light was failing by the time he arrived, pale and thin and already leaning toward evening.
He knocked. A girl of perhaps fourteen answered the door, looked at him with frank curiosity, and said, "Are you the Duke?"
"I am," Rafferty said.
"Adelaide is in the study," she said, and stood aside in the manner of someone who has been told to admit visitors and finds the Duke an acceptable variety. "I'll tell her."
"Thank you," Rafferty said.
He was shown into a hallway that smelled of the winter specific to old stone houses—slightly damp, cold smoke, the ghost of old cooking. A dog appeared from somewhere, sniffed his boot with professional attention, and went away again. From a room at the back of the house came the sound of a fire and someone moving among papers.