Fischer was at the door when the carriage came through the gate on the afternoon of the third day.
He was not, in the general run of things, a man who stood at doors waiting for people. The sight of him standing there, upright, composed, told her before she'd fully stepped down from the carriage that something had happened.
"The estate's fine," he said, before she could ask. "No crisis."
She waited.
"Yesterday evening," he said. He glanced at Lucy, who had the good sense to murmur something about unpacking and disappear through the side door. "Little Samuel came into the garden. It was snowing rather heavily."
"How long."
"Just under an hour. I went out after twenty minutes—he knew me, which was something. He wouldn't come in. Said he was waiting." A pause. "I asked him what for. He said—" Fischer stopped. Then, carefully: "He said he was waiting for someone who would come back."
She stood in the cold entrance hall and held that quietly.
"He went in eventually," Fischer said. "Of his own accord. He was cold by then, and I think the cold—came back to him, in some sense. He slept quite late this morning. The earl came out around nine, quite usual."
"He didn't say anything about the evening."
"He never does." Fischer looked at her with the expression he wore when he was saying something that cost him more than he would show. "I thought you should know."
"Thank you," she said. "For staying with him."
Fischer nodded once, in the way that indicated the conversation was complete, and moved away down the hall.
She took off her coat and went upstairs.
The study door was open—just open, not ajar, open properly, in the way that said whoever was inside had chosen to leave it that way. She knocked on the frame.
Samuel turned from the window. He had been looking at the garden—she could tell from the angle of his posture, the particular way he held himself when looking outward rather than at a document.
He looked at her, and something in his expression—which was, as usual, carefully managed—moved slightly. Shifted. The way a building shifts in extreme heat: imperceptible from outside, but you can feel it if you're paying attention.
"McMillan will help," she said. "A week for his assessment."
"Good." He hadn't moved from the window. "That's—good."
"Fischer told me," she said. "About last night."
He said nothing. He had returned to his half-profile position, facing partly toward her and partly toward the window, and she understood that this was his way of being in two positions at once: present, and defended.
"Are you all right," she said.
"Yes." A pause. "The house was quiet. I find it—" He stopped. "When you were gone, certain things felt—" He stopped again.
"You could have written," she said. "I left Fischer a contact."
"I know." He finally turned fully toward her. "I didn't want to interrupt anything important."
She looked at him. He looked back at her. In the pale winter light from the window he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep—tired in the way that people are when they've been managing something alone for longer than they should.
"Dinner," she said. "Tonight. I'll ask Margaret."
Something settled in his posture. "Yes," he said. "Tonight."
"I'll call you," she said.
She walked out, and in the corridor she paused for a moment with her hand flat against the cool stone of the wall and breathed in and out, once, slowly.
He had been waiting. Some version of him had been standing in the snow garden, waiting for her, and he hadn't called it by its name, and she hadn't called it by its name, and they were both choosing, for now, to leave it unnamed.
She had no particular objection to that. Names made things harder to take back.