Adelaide looked at him for a very long moment. Then she laughed—the real one, the unguarded one, the one that had startled Hegel into perfect behavior by the fountain in June. The small study in Thornton Rectory rang with it, warm and entirely honest. And Rafferty thought: *This is what I drove four hours for. This exact sound, in this exact room, from this particular person.*
He took her hand, which was warm and ink-stained at one finger from the morning's records work, and she looked at their hands together with the same attention she gave everything—fully, as though this, too, were worth paying attention to.
"I keep things," she said.
"I know," he said. "I'm counting on it."
They remained in her father's study for another hour, talking about the library, about the boundary records, about Hegel's campaigns, about nothing in particular. The girl who had answered the door looked in twice and was told each time that everything was perfectly fine, which she appeared to accept with the resigned wisdom of someone who has grown up around books and paperwork and the general unpredictability of adults.
Thomas Thornton, Adelaide's brother, came in at seven o'clock from his evening calls, found a duke in his study, and handled it with the admirable composure of a man who had been raised by a record-keeper and understood that things sometimes showed up unexpectedly. He invited Rafferty to dinner; Rafferty accepted. The dinner was simple, and the conversation was, for the first time in Rafferty's experience, comfortable in the specific way that means it will be possible to have this conversation for a long time.
He drove back to Somerfield in the dark, which took four hours, and thought for the entire four hours about approximately nothing important, which was the most pleasant thing he had experienced all year.
They were married in the spring at Thornton Church, which seemed correct—her father's church, her father's village, the register her father had kept for thirty years. The record in that register would be, Rafferty thought, exactly the kind of thing Adelaide would keep. She would keep it for a very long time.
Hegel was present at the wedding, having been included in the procession to the church on the grounds that his exclusion would have been philosophically unkind. He sat at the end of the family pew with the particular expression of a creature who has been conducting a long-term assessment and arrived at last at a satisfying conclusion. He had known since June. He had simply been waiting for the humans to reach the same finding in their own time—which they generally did, provided someone sat at the gate every morning and made the direction clear.
The people of Somerfield said afterward that the Duke was easier in himself after the winter—not softer, exactly, but more present, more in the room he was in. They noted that he left his study door open; that he laughed at things quietly once or twice in public; that his wife read while walking and had once walked into the topiary, which she maintained had moved; that she was usually right about things and said so without apology; and that she said what she thought, which was, according to the household, both exhausting and an improvement.
They noted that the Duke's Basset Hound had adopted her completely and could be found at her feet at any hour of the day or evening, conducting, presumably, the follow-up assessment. And that the fountain at Somerfield Park stood from that autumn onward twelve feet to the left of its original position, where it had always, in some important sense, belonged.