Chapter 16: Evander Is Not Staying Out

The blank sheets went into the biscuit tin that night, beside the unsealed letter, and Evander Quist carried the tin to bed under his arm.

The courier came in the morning.

He was a Chancellor's man in a grey cloak, on a lathered horse, and he would not give his packet to anyone but the auditor.

Calista watched from the kitchen window as Evander read it on the doorstep.

He read it twice.

He folded it very small, and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, and turned back to the house with his face arranged.

She saw the arranging.

She had spent three years watching the faces of a husband and a mother-in-law.

She knew the look of a man deciding what not to say.

"Is it bad?" she asked, when he came in.

"It is the Treasury's business."

"That's not what I asked."

"No," said Evander. "It isn't."

He ate his breakfast in silence.

Afterward, as the others cleared away, he stopped beside her at the dresser and said, low, "Lady Calista. Would you show me your mill?"

"It's a mill. It makes wool."

"I have read its books. I should like to see the building," Evander said.

"At night?"

"I should like to see it when no one is watching me look."

She considered him.

His spectacles had slid down.

He looked, she thought, like a man asking for a favour he was ashamed of.

"After supper," she said.

They went down the hill at nine, in the dark, with a lantern.

The village was shuttered and the river was loud under its skin of ice.

Fenrow Mill stood at the bend, a long stone building with a wheel at its end.

She let them in at the side door with her own key.

Inside it smelled of lanolin and cold iron.

The great frames stood in rows in the lantern light, shadowed and silent.

She had learned to walk among them at nine years old, holding her father's hand.

She did not need to look at her feet.

"This is the carding floor," she said. "That's the wash. The fulling is through there."

"It is smaller than I expected."

"It's big enough for two hundred and ten people to be paid on Fridays."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Dropped Three Women in One Night, Then We Took His Estate from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.