He had not, in fact, mentioned the drainage.
He turned to go and heard, as he reached the hall, the sound of her saying something to her aunt that made Mrs. Holbrook laugh. He drove home in the dark with the windows of the carriage cracked open. The night air tasted of summer grass and the particular cleanness that comes before rain.
Hegel, who had been waiting by the front door of Somerfield, and who greeted Rafferty's returns from social engagements with a dignified reserve that suggested he had not been sleeping in the hall the whole time, raised his head and looked at him with an expression of professional inquiry.
"The soup was adequate," Rafferty said.
Hegel put his head back down. Rafferty went to his study and did not, for once, open the ledger.
The boundary dispute between Somerfield and the Vickery property had existed in one form or another for forty years. The question was a wall—specifically, which side of a crumbling stone wall was responsible for its maintenance and whose field it technically enclosed. It was the kind of dispute that produces not lawyers, but a great deal of correspondence between stewards and one family gathering on either side of the wall in early August to look at it with expressions of combined grievance. Oldwin had located survey maps from 1780. The Vickery steward had located survey maps from 1802. The two sets of maps disagreed politely about the wall's position by approximately six inches.
Adelaide Thornton appeared on the Somerfield side of the wall on a Thursday morning with a folder of documents under her arm and grass on her shoes, having apparently walked across three fields to get there.
"Miss Thornton," Rafferty said.
"I heard about the wall," she said. "Aunt Cress has the original parish enclosure records from 1780. She also has the transcript of the argument between your great-grandfather and Sir Henry Vickery’s grandfather, which is extremely entertaining, and which resolves the question of the wall entirely, if you're interested."
Rafferty looked at her. She looked back, waiting with the practical patience of someone who has arrived with useful information and is prepared to either hand it over or take it home.
"I am interested," he said.
They spread the documents on the wall itself, which was the most convenient flat surface available. Oldwin appeared and bent over the parish records with the reverence of a man encountering ancient truth. The Vickery steward, who had been called across from the other side, looked at the enclosure transcript and said, "Well," very quietly, which was everything.