Page 47 of Mail-Order Lady

Bea’s dark eyes studied the map. “He drew them when he was a boy.”

Robert’s.

She refocused on the map. How could a boy possibly have sketched such detail? Such intricacies? Her Robert had created this? And was it the family home in England? So many questions whirled through her mind, her voice trembled as she tried to voice the most important. “How old was he? And whose house is this?”

Bea went quiet. Her hands rested loose at her sides, the lamp swinging a little as she shifted her weight. “He was perhaps ten when he began them. Maybe eleven.” She tilted her head at the map in Clara’s hands. “His Grace—the boys’ father—would come to visit every few years. He spoke of the estate in England. Balfour Park.” A pause. “Robert liked to listen, then draw it later.”

Balfour Park.

She refocused on the drawing. The name settled over the shape of it, and something in her chest pulled tight.

A boy of ten, listening to a father who came and went, drawing the shape of a place he’d not seen since he was a young child. Probably too young to remember it.

She set her thumb along the edge of the wing where the notation read kitchen garden and traced the line without touching the ink.

Everything in her wanted to take this map downstairs and find Robert. To ask him about it. To tell him… What exactly? I imagined your house when I was a child? That didn’t feel like the best thing to say. Then she’d have to tell him about her stories.

She lifted the map to set it back in the trunk.

“Take it,” Bea said.

“I—”

“Take it. Show him. Or do not show him. But take it.” Bea lifted the lantern so light filled the trunk. “It has been in this attic for years. He does not need it up here.”

Did she dare?

A voice from somewhere below the attic floor cut through the quiet.

She couldn’t make out the words at first—just the pitch of urgency. Another voice answered, lower, and then the first one again, louder now.

Was that the word man?

She surged to her feet. Bea was already turning toward the attic stairs, the lamp swinging forward. Clara didn’t wait for her slower steps, just sprinted toward the door.

CHAPTER 13

The bird call chirped from the front of the house.

Robert had his hand on the rifle’s stock before the second note finished. Enoch.

The call carried two notes—a long rising one and a short one that broke half a beat short.

He slipped to the corner of the barn and peered around the edge.

A man rode into the yard. A single rider on a roan.

Even from this distance, Robert had no doubt. The rough coat. The longish hair, pulled back now into a queue at the back of his neck. He had to be the man from the livery. The one who’d ridden behind them for ten days.

The man who’d shot the cat. Probably.

His pulse kicked harder, and he prepared to step around the side of the barn if needed.

Enoch stood on the front porch. He hadn’t aimed his own rifle—just held it, the barrel angled down and to the side.

The rider pulled up in the middle of the yard. His hands stayed easy and visible on the reins, and he looked at Enoch with the calm of a man who had expected to find a rifle pointed at him and wasn’t bothered by it.

Should Robert make his presence known too? Maybe not yet. Better to keep this extra element of surprise, so long as he could hear what was being said.