She looked at him briefly. "I would like that," she said, and did not make it into anything more than it was.
The library was six thousand volumes accumulated across four generations of Kincaids who had bought books the way other families bought land—compulsively and with the conviction that more was always better. It smelled of leather and old paper and the particular dusty warmth of a room that is genuinely used.
Adelaide stood in the doorway for a moment when she arrived the following Tuesday. She had come to return a map she had borrowed and found useful, and Rafferty had said, "Come and see the library." And she had come. And she looked at the room the way she had looked at the gardens, taking it in slowly.
"It's wonderful," she said, not performing delight, simply in possession of it.
"It is disorganized," Rafferty said, which was true. The shelving system had been started by his grandfather and completed by no one.
"It's marvelous when libraries are a little disordered. It means people use them." She moved to the nearest shelf and read the spines with one hand trailing. "Your grandfather had Vico," she said. "I've never seen a copy this old. He bought it in Naples, did he?" She turned it over in her hands with the careful attention she gave everything. "My father corresponded with a man who had met Vico's translator. He kept the letters." She paused. "I kept them."
"You keep everything," Rafferty said.
She looked at him. "Someone should." There was something in her voice that wasn't sorrow, exactly—something more settled than grief, more like a fact she had made peace with. "He kept everything because he thought the world was worth paying attention to. I keep it because he was right."
Rafferty looked at her—this woman who had fallen into his fountain while reading a letter, who had walked three fields to bring him a boundary transcript, who stood in his library holding a Neapolitan Vico like it was ordinary, which for her apparently it was—and thought: *I have been in this county for seven years, and I have not once paid attention to anything except the estate.* The thought was uncomfortable, which was unusual. Rafferty did not often feel uncomfortable.
Hegel appeared in the library doorway. He had, for reasons known only to himself, developed the habit of following Adelaide when she visited, and he had been managing this from approximately four feet of distance, attempting to appear as though proximity were coincidental. He sat down and looked at her with the full weight of his philosophical disposition.
"He likes you," Rafferty said.
"He has been following me at a very professional distance since the fountain," Adelaide said without looking up from the Vico. "He seems to be conducting a long-term assessment."