The house had its own way of keeping Christmas and New Year, she discovered. Not the way of houses that performed the season for guests or kept it out of obligation; this house kept it in the way of something done because it had always been done and there was something that would be lost if it stopped.
Fischer sourced the same variety of juniper he had sourced for forty consecutive Decembers. Margaret's kitchen produced a particular cold-spice biscuit that was not for any celebration specifically but that appeared in tins in the hallways during the last two weeks of the year, and had done so for as long as anyone could ask. Lucy brought holly from the same hedgerow she had visited every winter since she arrived, and there was a particular candle that appeared on the hall table on the twenty-fourth and burned from then until New Year's morning, and no one had told Ella about any of these things in advance because no one had thought to—they were simply things the house did, and she was part of the house now, and so she discovered them as they occurred.
She did not change any of them. She made one quiet adjustment to the kitchen supply order that saved a pound and a half without touching anything Margaret actually needed. She left everything else as it was.
Fischer said, one morning in passing, "You manage this place like it's a real place."
"It is a real place," she said.
He nodded as though this was a satisfactory answer to a question he'd been holding for some time.
Samuel came back from two days at the northern estate on a Tuesday afternoon, arriving with the particular quality of a man who has been outdoors in cold weather and hasn't entirely shaken it off yet—colour in his face, something slightly less controlled in his expression. He was in the entrance hall when she crossed through it, and he stopped when he saw her.
"The northern estate," he said. "This afternoon, if you have time."
"Study at three," she said.
She came at three. He had the northern estate's tenancy ledger open to the thirty-seventh parcel.
"I spoke to a family there," he said. "The Martins. They remember the previous tenant leaving. They said two men came to help with the removal—no one local, no one anyone had seen before. City accents." He paused. "The timing overlaps with when the false document would have been in preparation. Someone needed to establish a presence on the estate—for access, or for surveillance, or both."
She thought about this, tracing the lines of it. "If they were planning to use the treason charge in conjunction with the entailment—to strip the title entirely, not just the northern property—they would have wanted to know the estate's vulnerabilities. The wall. The access points. Where the staff is deployed at night."
"Yes," he said. "I've been thinking the same thing."
"Then the application to the arbitration committee needs to move quickly," she said. "Before they're ready to act."
"Evans should have my letter by now." He looked out the window. The grounds were iron-hard and snow-covered, the sky the particular low grey of midwinter afternoon. "I don't know if he'll help. I haven't spoken to him in three years."
"He'll help," she said.
He looked at her. "You don't know that."
"His father and yours were friends," she said. "He knows what this house is. He knows what the charge would mean." She paused. "Some things you help with because they're right, not because you're confident of the outcome."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"How was this year," he said suddenly. The question seemed to surprise him slightly—as though he'd thought it and then said it before he could decide not to.
"For you or for me?"
"I asked."
She considered it honestly. "Strange," she said. "And better than I expected. Both." She looked at him. "For you?"
"Better," he said. "The things that were stuck—some of them have started to move." A pause. "You being here made a difference. Not in the logistical sense. In the—" He stopped. She watched him search for the word and not quite find it. "Just: a difference."
She held his gaze. "Then next year," she said, "we finish what we've started."
"Yes," he said.
"Dinner tonight?" she said. "I can tell Margaret."
"Yes," he said, and this yes was different from the first—simpler, and warmer, and not the answer to the question she'd technically asked.