“I—” Martin had been ready to protest that he could walk the mile to the cottage, but remembered that he was being cautious as well as honest. “Thank you, Daisy.”
When, finally, he arrived at the cottage, he felt like he had been gone longer than two weeks. He was surprised to see that the piglets were still small, the house unchanged. Even indoors smelled the same, like candle wax and timber. While Daisy put fresh sheets on the bed and lit a fire, he unpacked his trunk, laying his clothes on the back of a chair and stacking his books on the chimneypiece beside the volumes Will had left behind.
He hoped Will would visit sooner rather than later. He knew he was being selfish: Will had every reason to stay in London. Surely he would at least send a letter once he received Martin’s note, and that would be enough. Martin winced when he thought of that note. There wasn’t a single word in it that he’d take back, but he feared that he could have been more coherent in his phrasing. And now that he had had time to think about it, it seemed grossly presumptuous of him to insist on giving this cottage to Will and then resume living in it himself. But he had wanted to make sure that Will knew he had a place to live even if Martin died. He probably ought to have said that clearly in the letter. God knew he wasn’t any stranger to thinking about his eventual demise, but over the past few months he had stopped thinking about his death as something imminent, as something he could casually allude to in a hastily written note. The threat was still there, but it seemed both more remote, in that he wasn’t going to die this time, and more grave, in that he and the people he’d leave behind would have more to lose. It wasn’t the sort of thing that could be addressed in a handful of words.
“There you go,” Daisy said, wiping her hands on her skirt. “I’ll be back tonight with supper.” Then, to his surprise and mild consternation, she got to her toes and kissed his cheek.
“Anyone else would sack you for impertinence,” he said, his eyes stupidly hot, because it had finally sunk in that this girl was his sister. “You’re assuming a lot of my nepotism.”
“La, three shillings a week, what’ll I ever do without it.”
He rolled his eyes heavenward. “This child is my closest living relation. I am to be pitied.”
She cackled, kissed him again, and swept out of the cottage. He was beginning to believe that a sharp tongue and terrible manners were a hereditary condition. He changed into a dressing gown and slipped between the sheets, then read until he drifted into a sleep that was only slightly troubled by the fitful dreams of illness.
“I promise we’d have noticed a grown man lurking around the premises,” Ben said when Will arrived at Lindley Priory, Martin’s family home which was now being run as some kind of charity school for wayward youth. “What exactly did his letter say?” Ben held open the door to a room Will dimly recognized as Lindley Priory’s morning room, and which Ben evidently used as an office. Every surface was covered in papers, composition books, and toys in need of mending. It looked like a rag shop crossed with a lending library; Sir Humphrey had to be rolling in his grave.
“Just that he was coming home. I didn’t think he’d actually be at the Priory. But I thought he might be staying at the dower house or the inn, but no luck.” The dower house had been closed up, and the innkeepers knew Martin well enough to assure Will that they hadn’t seen him.
A few children ran careening past the door. Ben stepped into the corridor. “Carrington, Delacourt, and—oh, for heaven’s sake—Jamie, go outside if you mean to act feral.” Then he turned back to Will. “He hasn’t been back in almost a year. I don’t think this place holds many happy memories for him.”
Will almost laughed at the understatement. “He’s been ill, and he needed to go to the country.”
Ben frowned at him. “Walk around for a bit and see if anything occurs to you. I’ll see that a place is set for you at supper.”
Will climbed the steps to the minstrel gallery that surrounded the great hall. Lindley Priory had