The estate did not require him to be sharper, faster, or more decisive. Which left him with attention to spare.
He closed the ledger and set it aside, his fingers lingering on the cover as though expecting resistance. There was none.
London had been loud. Demanding. Full of interruption and necessity.
Here, there was nothing to interrupt him.
He stood up and crossed the room, pausing by the window that overlooked the lower gardens. The gravel paths lay undisturbed, dew still clinging to the hedges. The air was clean, the morning properly begun.
The scene ought to have steadied him. Instead, he found himself listening. For footsteps that did not belong to the house. For a presence he had not expected to miss until it was no longer available to him.
He exhaled through his nose, slightly irritated at the thought.
Five days, and he had already chided the steward twice for an error that had not been repeated. He had taken the longer route out of habit and only realized why when he reached the bend and found himself alone.
There was no disorder here. No chaos to manage. No one to accommodate but himself.
And that, he suspected, was the trouble.
A clerk waited in the antechamber, papers in hand, his expression earnest. Edward took them, listened as the man explained an adjustment to the tenant schedule, and nodded at the right intervals.
All the while, his mind snagged on an absurd detail. Beatrice would have asked how the tenants felt about the change beforeapproving it. Not sentimentally, but practically. She had a way of noticing how policy landed.
He dismissed the clerk and returned to the desk, straightening the papers he had already straightened, and reached for his tea at last. It had cooled slightly. He drank it anyway, because wasting it would be inefficient, and because it gave his hands something to do.
He had arrived in Bath determined not to think. He had succeeded only in thinkingbetter—more carefully, more thoroughly—until there was no illusion to hide behind.
Beatrice had not written.
That, too, was nothing. Or it should have been.
He told himself her silence meant ease. Relief. That distance suited her as well as it suited him. He told himself that whatever had once existed between them had been a circumstance mistaken for sentiment.
And yet he found himself marking time by absence.
A knock sounded at the door before he could pursue the thought further. Sebastian had arrived.
Edward heard him before he saw him with his boots on stone, a voice in the courtyard already mid-complaint.
“I’m saying, if you insist on living like a penitent monk, you might at least offer wine strong enough to justify your choice.”
Edward did not look up from the papers on his desk. “You’re early.”
Sebastian leaned against the doorframe, his travel coat still on, his hair disheveled from the road, a grin plastered on his lips. “You say that as though you weren’t expecting me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“And yet you don’t look surprised.”
Edward closed the ledger. “You’re predictable.”
Sebastian gasped theatrically. “You wound me. I travel halfway across the country to check whether you’ve grown antlers in solitude, and this is your welcome?”
“You’re welcome to leave,” Edward said mildly.
“Five days,” Sebastian continued. “I’d begun to worry you’d barricaded yourself in with the ledgers and declared war on joy.”
Edward folded his hands behind his back. “Margaret must be desperate.”
