“WHO MADE THIS APPLE TART?” THE DUKE ASKED — THEN HE SAW THE WIDOW NO ONE HAD EVER THANKED

Chapter 5

By six the next morning, Ravensmoor Hall had not fully woken, and the Duke’s study was already buried.

Alaric had the records laid out across the whole of the desk and half the window ledge besides — the coroner’s note, the estate report, the parish burial register, two pages of the northern road survey, and the thin bundle of paper that was supposed to account for the death of the man who had run half the business of Ravensmoor Hall for nine years.

It was thinner than it should have been. That was the first thing. One sheet of observations, one signature, one line of conclusion: a horse that had slipped, a fall near the boundary marker, no witness present. Papers the deceased had reportedly been carrying, ruined beyond reading by rain that same night. No inquest. No examiner called from Ripon. No testimony taken from any of the four farms within sight of that road.

The second thing was the signature.

Alaric had stared at it for a long moment before he let himself believe what he was seeing. Silas Corbin, written in a neat, unhurried hand at the bottom of the sheet, as steward of record — the same man who only that autumn had grown so smoothly into Edmund Thorne’s old duties, as though water had simply filled an empty space left behind by something that had been removed on purpose.

He sent for him at nine.

Silas Corbin arrived composed and faintly wounded, in the manner of a man who has been roused from important work to discuss a thing already settled. He was perhaps fifty, silver at the temples, one of those men whose clothes always looked newer than everyone else’s in the same room. He stood with his hands folded and his eyebrows doing most of the talking.

“Your grace wished to see me.”

“I did. Three years ago, Edmund Thorne died on the north road. You wrote the report.”

“I did, your grace. A sad business. The road runs along the escarpment there — in October it is a trap for any horse. When a man rides it late and alone, and the ground is wet—”

“Why was he riding it late and alone?”

Corbin’s eyebrows went up a fraction. “That I cannot tell you. Mr. Thorne kept his own hours. He was a thorough man, but he was inclined to go his own way, and he did not always trouble to inform the office.”

“You were the office.”

“I was the office,” Corbin agreed, with a small, agreeable tilt of the head, “and Thomas Thorne did not always inform me either.”

Alaric let the silence sit for a moment. Corbin filled it, as men like Corbin always do.

“I will say this much, your grace, and I say it with regret, because I liked the man. In his last weeks he seemed — unsettled. Distracted. He would come in with mud to the knee and no explanation. He asked twice for the ledgers of the northern tenancies, which it was not his place to ask for. I put it down to overwork. Perhaps I should have put it down to something else. But a man cannot be saved from his own temperament.”

Unsettled. Alaric did not like the word. It was the kind of word a careful man reaches for when he wants a death to sound like a weakness rather than a crime.

“Thank you,” he said. “You may go.”

Corbin paused at the door. “May I ask what has prompted this, your grace? Only that I would not want the parish to think there is any question where there is none.”

“You may not,” Alaric said.

When the door had closed, he said it aloud to the empty room, because there was no one left who would say it for Edmund Thorne now:

“He was the steadiest man on this estate.”

That afternoon — under the entirely proper excuse of discussing the north orchard’s yield for the coming season — he rode down to the south lane.

Wren Cottage stood at the end of it, small and straight-backed behind a low stone wall, with one chimney and a lean-to scullery and a pear tree gone bare against the front. Alaric had seen it from the ridge a hundred times in his life and had never once gone in through the gate. He sat on his horse outside it for longer than he intended, aware that he was about to do something that could not be quietly undone — and then he heard, from inside, a sound he had not heard in his own house in three years.

Someone was humming. Small, low, badly out of tune, entirely unselfconscious — the sound of a person working.

He dismounted, and knocked, and the humming stopped.

Mrs. Prudence Ashcombe, the elderly widow who kept the next cottage along, was already inside when he entered, seated by the window with her knitting, which meant propriety was satisfied and nothing improper could be whispered of the visit. Grace, he thought, was not the same thing as welcome, but it would do.

The cottage was small. Every corner of it spoke of care. Copper pans gleamed on their hooks along the wall. Jars of preserve stood in neat rows beside stacks of borrowed household ledgers — other people’s accounts, kept for families too proud to hire a proper clerk. Dried lavender hung near the window, and the whole room smelled faintly of clean sweetness and wood ash and apples.

Beneath the stairs, a pair of boots waited. Polished. Not worn.

One chair at the small table stood empty, and Rosalind Thorne, moving about her kitchen in the middle of the afternoon, walked wide around it without appearing to notice that she had done so.

Alaric looked at that chair, and understood — with the particular clarity of a man who had kept his own house exactly as his wife had left it, and had told himself a hundred times that he meant to move the chair at the end of the long gallery and never once had — that she had not kept this cottage as Edmund left it because she could not let go.

She had kept it because it was the one room in her life that still belonged entirely to her.

“Would you show me the orchard?” he asked.

She looked up at him, startled, with flour to the wrist.

“I find I remember it poorly,” he said, “though I was raised beneath those very trees.”