He went to his study.
He sat at the desk and opened the ledger and looked at the numbers and they meant nothing to him, which was unusual. Numbers had always been reliable. They did not shift dependingon context or change their meaning based on the expression on someone’s face. They were simply what they were, and he had always found this quality restful.
He closed the ledger.
He looked at the window. The east lawn was visible from here, the groundskeeper moving along the back wall with the deliberate pace of a man who had a great deal of work ahead of him and was not in any hurry about starting it. Harper watched him for a moment and then looked away.
The only fun I had. In a long time.
He had not expected that. He had expected the usual Joseph, careful and composed and precise, the boy who had learned to want things quietly and justify them practically. He had not expected the confession, delivered without any of the usual scaffolding, just the plain fact of it sitting there in the library.
He thought about what he knew of Joseph’s days at Sedgewick. The Latin before breakfast and the geography primer and the correspondence practice and the riding lessons and the ledger exercises. The long, ordered procession of hours that he had constructed with the best intentions, the hours of a boy being prepared for the life he was going to have.
He had thought it was sufficient.
He picked up his pen and put it down again.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he said, and it was Mrs. Peel, which he had not expected.
She came in with the composed purposefulness she brought to everything and set a cup of tea on the corner of his desk without being asked, which was not something she normally did.
“Mrs. Peel,” he said.
“Your Grace,” she said, and did not immediately leave, which was also not something she normally did.
He looked at her. She looked at him with the expression of a woman who had something to say and was deciding whether it was her place to say it.
“Is there something you needed?” he said.
“No, Your Grace,” she said. “I only wanted to mention that Miss Hosmer has not eaten since yesterday evening. I left something outside the library door this morning but I don’t believe she touched it.”
Harper looked at her.
“I thought you might wish to know,” Mrs. Peel said, in the tone of someone who had delivered their information and was now returning responsibility for it to its rightful owner.
“Thank you,” Harper said.
She nodded and went out, and he sat with the information she had left behind, which was small and specific and sat in his chest in a way that was neither small nor specific.
She had not eaten.
He looked at the window. The groundskeeper had reached the far corner of the east wall and was crouching to examine something at the base of it, and the morning was going on around all of it with its usual indifference, and Harper sat at his desk and thought about three days and a library and a woman who had looked at him with the pleasantest expression he had ever seen and given him absolutely nothing behind it, and he thought about what it cost to maintain that, how much of a person it required, and he thought that he knew, because he had been doing something similar for considerably longer and from the inside it was not comfortable.
He stood up and did not have a plan. This was unusual for him. He generally did not move toward things without a plan, without having assessed the situation and identified the correct approach and prepared for the most likely responses. He found operating without a plan deeply uncomfortable, and he was operating without one now, and he went down the corridor anyway.
She was not in the library. The chair was empty and the teacup from earlier had been taken away and the room was simply a room again, with no particular quality to it.
He checked the sitting room. Empty.
The small garden door at the end of the east corridor was open a crack, which meant someone had gone through it recently, and he pushed it open and went out.
She was on the bench under the apple trees.
She had a book, because she always had a book, but it was closed in her lap and she was looking at the garden with the particular quality of attention that was not really looking at anything. She heard him coming across the grass and looked up, and the pleasant, unrevealing expression arrived on her face with the practiced speed of a reflex, and he thought about what it cost and felt something tighten in his chest.
He sat down on the other end of the bench.
