It took an hour and a half to establish that the wall was conclusively on the Somerfield side by eight inches, which meant that Somerfield was responsible for its maintenance and always had been. This was not in itself a victory for Rafferty, but the dispute was over, which was worth more than the wall.
"Thank you," he said to Adelaide when Oldwin and the Vickery steward had gone to pace the boundary with the careful solemnity of men who have been given a task.
"My father kept everything," she said. She was still looking at the enclosure transcript, turning a page with the careful touch of someone who knows old paper. "He was a terrible farmer and a moderate clergyman, but he was an extraordinary keeper of records. He believed that everything mattered and that everything should be written down."
"He was a clergyman?"
"Rector of Thornton village for thirty years." A small pause. "He died in the winter of 1812. He had sixty-three years of his own journals and the complete records of the parish going back to 1640." She looked up. "I kept all of it."
Rafferty looked at her in the summer light, with the documents spread on the wall between them, and thought: *She is the kind of person who keeps things, who holds on to what other people let go.*
"The culvert problem," he said, "on the lower meadow. Your father's records wouldn't have anything on the drainage pattern in that field?"
Something shifted in her face—a very slight brightening, the way a room brightens when someone opens a door. "I would have to look," she said, "but probably, yes."
They walked back to the house together, not by arrangement, simply because they were both going in the same direction. The walk took twenty minutes across the Somerfield grounds, through the kitchen garden, past the walled orchard, and along the gravel path that ran beside the east wing. Adelaide looked at everything as they went—not rudely, she didn't stop or stare, but with a constant peripheral attention, the way a person walks through a place they are already reading.
"You've never been inside Somerfield," Rafferty said.
"I have not. Lady Vickery's garden party was in the grounds."
"You should see the library." He said it and then said nothing else, which was, he realized, an invitation delivered in the form of a statement of fact—which was either efficient or extremely inadequate. He was not sure which.