The trouble was subtlety was a skill Bran had never acquired.
“Your neighbors,” he began again, this angle a little more to the point.
Sir Abstrupus narrowed his eyes.
Bran forged on, as he was ever prone to do when pursuing a path. “Do you know them?”
“I’ve occupied the Roost since I built it seventy years ago?—”
Seventy years ago?
“So, yes, I know my neighbors.” Sir Abstrupus lifted a single, shaggy eyebrow. “What would you like to know about them?”
“Just trying to gather my bearings for the surroundings.” It wasn’t a lie—but not the exact truth either.
His host nodded with knowing approval. “That’s the soldier in you.”
Bran felt his hands wanting to clench into fists. He bit back the impulse to correct the assertion.
There was no soldier left in him.
A soldier was a man of use.
Bran was no longer a soldier—no longer of use.
“Well, there’s Fernsby to the west,” said Sir Abstrupus, “and the Widow Bonner next to him. No neighbors to the east, unless you count the mollusks on the beach or the dolphins in the sea.”
Though Bran had known Sir Abstrupus all his life as a distant presence—through tangled family trees, he was Bran’s distant relative and godfather—he hadn’t ever been able to like him, precisely. And strangely, he sensed Sir Abstrupus preferred it thusly. That he be viewed rather than known—or liked.
“Do you have one more neighbor?” Bran had to ask, if for no other reason than to confirm his sanity—or insanity, as the case might yet prove to be. “To your south boundary?”
“Ah.” Sir Abstrupus took another sip of lily-of-the-valley tea and winced. “Might you be referring to Lady Artemis Keating?”
The look in Sir Abstrupus’s eye held mischief.
Bran didn’t like it, but he had an answer.
He hadn’t completely lost his mind.
That was the good news.
The only good news.
His host gestured toward an empty chair. “Come and partake of one of Cook’s pickled onion scones.”
Pickled onion scone.“Are they delicious?”
Sir Abstrupus took a moment to contemplate the question, then said, “People set too much store by the concept ofdelicious.”
That was answer enough for Bran. “I need to get to the stables.”
“I shall save one for your tea,” Bran heard at his back, as he made his careful way through the orangery, his mind ticking along at a far faster pace than his feet.
Lady Artemis Keating …here.
Instinct bade him to go directly to his bedchamber, pack his belongings, and put fifty miles between himself and Yorkshire by dark.
But as he pulled the exterior door open and a crisp blast of morning air greeted him full in the face, the reality of his situation greeted him, too.
