But on the walk back through the gardens that evening, he found himself glancing at the fountain as he passed. The water was perfectly still. The stone figure stood as it always had. The rose had been left on the bench beside the path and had started gently to wilt.
Three weeks later, Rafferty accepted his second social invitation in seven years. It was a dinner at Mrs. Holbrook's house in the village—a small gathering, eight people, organized by a widow of excellent sense who had been an institution in the neighborhood for longer than Rafferty had been in the county. Oldwin had not said a word about it. Rafferty had said yes before he could think of a reason to say no, which was a departure from his established method. He told himself it was the drainage culvert. Mrs. Holbrook's late husband had been a man of property with strong opinions about groundwater management, and her records room was reputed to contain surveys going back to the 1750s. It was not, in any sense, a social call. It was research.
Adelaide Thornton was Mrs. Holbrook's niece, which he had not known until he arrived and found her standing in the hallway, arguing companionably with a very old and indifferent portrait of a man in a powdered wig.
"He looks exactly like my cousin Gerald," she said, not to anyone in particular.
"Gerald Thornton," said the older woman beside her, who was presumably Mrs. Holbrook, "is perfectly respectable and does not deserve to be compared to Admiral Stanhope."
"I said he looks like him. I made no comment on his character." She turned and saw Rafferty in the doorway, and something crossed her face—a brief, unguarded surprise, and then something else that she moved past so quickly he couldn't name it. "Your Grace."
"Miss Thornton," he said.
"You know each other?" said Mrs. Holbrook, whose eyes had the cheerful sharpness of a woman who has noticed everything and intends to notice more.
"We met at Lady Vickery's garden party," Rafferty said.
"He owns the fountain," Adelaide said pleasantly.
Mrs. Holbrook looked between them. "How delightful," she said.
The dinner was eight people around a table that sat ten comfortably, which meant there was room to breathe and room for conversation to go in unexpected directions. Rafferty was placed at Adelaide's left, separated by one guest—a pleasant, retired clergyman who talked primarily to the woman on his other side, which meant that across the space of an hour and three courses, he and Adelaide spoke six times. He counted. He did not mean to count.