The first time was over the soup, when she said something to the clergyman about the history of the Somerfield estate and was, to Rafferty's surprise, completely accurate in all particulars, including several that he had not known himself. The second was when he said across the clergyman, "Where did you read that?"
She looked over, apparently unsurprised that he had been listening. "The county history. Your great-grandfather's estate diary, which is in the records office in Ripon. I was there with my father when I was fourteen. He was very interested in old diaries."
"My great-grandfather's estate diary," Rafferty said. "He had extremely strong opinions about turnips."
"Entirely serious ones," Adelaide said.
The third, fourth, and fifth exchanges were about turnips, which was not a topic Rafferty had expected to discuss at a dinner party or indeed anywhere. And yet, he found that he was interested in what she said.
The sixth was at the end of dinner, when the guests were gathering for the remove to the drawing room. Adelaide had picked up a book that had been sitting on a side table near her chair. She had noticed it mid-dinner and had been glancing at it with the peripheral attention of someone who wants to look but is refraining, and she opened it to its first page with the expression of someone meeting an old acquaintance.
"Hume," she said, almost to herself. Then she looked up and found Rafferty still standing nearby, his coat already on, prepared to take his leave. She held up the book slightly, a small explanatory gesture. "Aunt Cress has every volume. She doesn't read them, but she buys everything."
"Do you?" he said. "Read them?"
"Yes." She closed the book and put it back. "Though I have learned to do so only while stationary." A pause, very brief. "On account of fountains."
Rafferty looked at her. She was not performing the joke. She was simply in possession of it, offering it the way someone hands you something through a doorway without particular ceremony.
"Good evening, Miss Thornton," he said.
"Good evening, Your Grace." She smiled at him—it was a quiet smile, not the wide, public kind. It was the kind that had been kept back and then let out by accident. "Thank you for the excellent drainage conversation."