The first time Eleanor saw him, he was standing beneath the front portico, listening to a farmer plead for another month before his family was removed from a cottage. Adrian did not raise his voice. He simply told the man that Greymere could not forgive a debt it had no money to carry, and the farmer walked away with his cap crushed between his hands. Eleanor watched from the schoolroom window and wondered how a man could look so controlled while causing so much despair.
But a week later she saw Adrian kneel beside Thomas's bed when the boy had a fever. He stayed there until dawn, holding a cup of water and reading from a book of ships in a voice so low Eleanor could barely hear it. In the morning he looked almost embarrassed when she thanked him. That was the first time she understood that his severity was not the whole of him, although understanding did not make it harmless.
“Thomas should be stronger by now,” Adrian told her once outside the nursery. “He cannot spend his whole life hiding from questions.”
“He is not hiding from questions, my lord,” she answered. “He is hiding from what happens after he answers them.”
Adrian regarded her for a long moment. “You speak with remarkable confidence for someone who has been here only a fortnight.”
“And you ask remarkable courage of a child who has lost almost everyone he trusted.”
He left without replying. That evening, however, Thomas found a new box of colored pencils on his table, and no note demanding that he speak in thanks. Eleanor could not prove who had sent them. She suspected she knew.
The trouble began with a book of county maps. Thomas had been sketching the stream beyond the eastern fields when he drew a small stone bridge that did not appear on any recent estate survey. Beneath it he wrote the words MOTHER SAID KEEP THE BRIDGE. Eleanor recognized the location. William Finch had once taken her there to show her the cottages supported by the Winter Relief Fund, and she remembered that the land around the bridge had been given to the fund in trust, not owned outright by the Earl.
When she asked Thomas where he had learned the phrase, the boy turned his pencil over and rubbed out the words. He did not look at her again that afternoon. Eleanor wished she had let him keep the secret until he chose to share it, but the drawing had awakened something her father's notebooks had never allowed her to forget. If those cottages belonged to a charitable trust, why was the steward preparing to sell the surrounding land to a canal company?
She began with questions the tenants themselves could answer. Mrs. Agnes Marsh, who washed linens for Greymere and lived with her two grandchildren near the bridge, showed Eleanor a notice demanding that the cottage be vacated by Michaelmas. The notice stated that relief funds had been exhausted and that the cottages would be transferred with the eastern meadow. Agnes had paid every small contribution asked of her and could not understand how charity had become a reason to remove her.