He starts in the hall where the light is always slightly too formal, filtered through glass that flatters no one and makes even kindness look staged. The console table sits beneath a portrait of a Harrington who once had armies at his disposal and never had to learn the difference between hosting and bracing. Seth gives the arrangement a glance that ought to be enough, then finds himself stepping closer anyway.
Keys first. He slides them a fraction so they sit dead-centre, the metal catching the pale sheen of morning. Ridiculous, he thinks, and does it again because the first correction was, objectively, a hair off. The vase next, Sèvres, of course, because there is always something fragile and inherited in reach at Wrenford. He turns it so the least chipped side faces the wall, as if the wall cares, as if anyone else would notice the small bruise in the glaze. He would notice. He always notices.
The calling-card tray is worse. An anachronism, really: no one arrives with cards unless they’re being funny, and Toby would certainly be funny. Seth squares it with the edge, then with the grain of the wood, then with the axis of the carpet runner. He stops when the alignment ceases to itch behind his eyes.
Somewhere deeper in the house a clock ticks with infuriating confidence. He listens for other sounds: the hum of the boiler, the distant clink that might mean Mrs Pritchard is already moving about. Comforting, that. Staff routines are facts; guests are variables.
On impulse he adjusts the umbrella stand, a small correction that feels like a confession. He glances at the front door as though it might open of its own accord, disgorging people who will immediately see the threadbare bit of carpet by the skirting, the fine crack in the plaster, the strain he has managed to keep out of the accounts.
He smooths the lapel of his jacket, though there’s nothing wrong with it, and allows himself one private, sour thought: if welcome could be engineered, he’d have done it by now.
In the drawing room he does not look so much as he conducts an inspection by touch, as if his hands can feel what his eyes are too tired to admit. Fingertips skim the mantelpiece: cool marble, a fine grit of yesterday’s ash, no dust. Good. He drags the pad of his thumb along the edge anyway, because “good” is not the same as safe. The curtain, heavy as a reprimand, gets a swift tug so it falls in obedient folds; he releases it before the fabric can sigh and make him feel sentimental about cloth.
He crosses to the sofa and gives one cushion a single, brisk thump. It swells to attention. He lets it be. A second thump would be fussing, and fussing is what people accuse you of when they can’t accuse you of failing. He corrects the corner with two fingers instead, a gesture so small it could be written off as passing.
The room smells faintly of beeswax polish and old stone that never entirely warms. He tells himself it’s simply how houses smell, as though the place is innocent of memory. His jaw tightens at the thought, and he turns the silver frame on the side table a fraction so it doesn’t catch the light like an accusation.
The dining room is where his control becomes most useful and most invisible. He moves round the table with the soft, efficient steps of someone who has memorised every squeak in the boards. Chairs are pulled out and tucked in again until the gaps look equal without looking measured. He runs a fingertip along the edge of a place mat, flattening an imaginary ripple, then sets it precisely parallel to the line of the table as if the wood itself has an opinion.
One water glass has drifted half an inch. He nudges it back so it won’t catch the chandelier and throw light into someone’s eyes at the wrong moment. No sudden gleam to expose an awkwardness, no excuse for comment.
He stops, head angled, listening. Nothing. His own breathing feels indecently loud. He resumes at once, as though interrupted by a servant, not by the idea of being watched.
In the library he allowed himself the one indulgence that could still be filed under responsibility. He stacked the logs with a mason’s precision, kindling criss-crossed like a small architecture, then set the matchbox on the mantel in plain view. Available to anyone, used by no one but him. The router’s tiny lights blinked. He checked them, once, then again, as if poor reception might be taken personally.
Upstairs, the guest wing submits to his methodical sweep. Each sash window is left open to the same stingy inch, as if air itself must be rationed; lamps are squared to their shades, towels folded into mute, matching blocks. He adjusts a jug of water until the handle faces obediently out. One wardrobe refuses him, no soft click, so he keeps his fingers on the door, holding it shut, waiting for compliance.
In the corridor’s hush he pauses, head slightly tilted, as though the house itself might clear its throat and offer up the first review. The silence has a quality to it. Old stone holding cold, carpet swallowing sound, the faint tick of something wound and dutiful in a distant room. He can almost hear the sort of comment that never arrives on its own but always arrives once company does: a little close in here, isn’t it? or I assumed you’d have changed the curtains by now. There were holidays in his childhood when a smudge on a cornice was discussed with the grave intimacy of a medical diagnosis, when the wrong biscuits at tea suggested a deeper rot.
He forces his shoulders down. It is ridiculous to brace for voices that are not present, ridiculous to feel judged by wallpaper.
The habit doesn’t care.
He drifts a hand over the banister as he passes: not for balance, for reassurance. The wood is smooth where generations have worried it, and the polish is recent enough to smell faintly chemical beneath the beeswax. A maid’s work, his decision, his responsibility; the chain always ends at him, even when it starts elsewhere. He finds himself counting points of potential failure the way other people count blessings: the guest-wing tap that drips when turned too sharply, the radiator in the north bedroom that clanks like an accusation, the hairline crack in the landing mirror that catches lamplight and makes it seem larger than it is.
He stops at the window overlooking the drive. The beech trees stand black against the afternoon, branches fine as nerves. No cars yet. No laughter spilling into the hall. Just the long, slow approach of a week he is meant to enjoy.
His jaw aches. He realises he’s been pressing his teeth together hard enough to make a point. He loosens them, tests the quiet again, and is absurdly offended by how it refuses to reassure him. Quiet is not approval. Quiet is merely waiting.
His eyes moved of their own accord, as if they belonged to a different man employed solely to detect shortcomings: the skirting boards for dust, the picture lights for a dead bulb, the runner rug for the faintest ripple that might trip a guest and, worse, invite comment. He could read the house the way other people read faces. Minute shifts, soft failures beginning at the edges.
He heard, in advance, the voices that would arrive with the cars. Still using this carpet? Lila’s would be kinder, turned to humour; Toby’s would land like a compliment with a blade in it. Dara’s, Dara’s he couldn’t yet place, which irritated him more than it should. She would ask something practical and mean it, and the room would go very still around the question.
He rehearsed answers he would not give. Yes, we’ve been meaning to ( (No.) It’s original) (Not quite.) *I rather like it that way. Nothing left, at least, that could be blamed on him.
A portrait near the turning had been judging the landing for two centuries and, apparently, found the present arrangement wanting. The old Harrington, powdered hair, a mouth set to suggest disappointment was his chosen pastime, sat in oils with a look so bored it became punitive. The frame was off by a hair’s breadth. Hardly anything. Enough.
Seth stepped in as if to a quarrel. He set both hands to the gilt, felt the chill of it through his skin, and shoved it level. The movement was too sharp, too decisive, as though the angle were a personal insult rather than a slack hook. His fingertips blanched; a small fleck of gilt dust came away and caught on his thumb.
“Better,” he muttered, and immediately resented that he’d spoken at all.
The hook bit properly this time; the wire gave a small, petulant twang that seemed to vibrate up his arms and lodge behind his molars. Irritation flared, sharp and pointless, with nowhere to spend itself but the tight hinge of his jaw. He swallowed it until his mouth settled into its habitual line and his expression became, once again, politely blank.
He retreated a step, head tilting, as if the landing were a drawing he might appraise for symmetry. Satisfied, no, merely unable to justify further interference, he resumed, shoes whispering along the runner at a brisk, controlled cadence. His mind ran ahead of him, filing away hazards: a door that stuck, a draughty sash, a chair leg that wobbled. Anticipate, correct, pre-empt. If there were no flaws, there would be nothing for anyone to reach for. Least of all him.
The house, at least, was behaving.
In the library the fire sat laid with almost military neatness: kindling cross-hatched, paper tucked in like a secret, logs waiting their turn. Brass fenders shone without showing the cloth that had made them so. On the sideboard, decanters stood in a precise line, shoulders square, labels facing out as if they might be inspected by a visiting bishop. Even the glasses looked attentive, rims catching the grey afternoon and turning it into something like promise.
Seth moved through it all with the practised absence of a man who knew where everything ought to be and could not bear discovering it wasn’t. He nudged the smallest thing, an ashtray a fraction too close to the edge, a chair that suggested it had been sat in and not properly forgiven, and watched the room fall back into obedience. The competence was legible everywhere: in the scent of beeswax and old paper, in the straightness of the rugs, in the way the curtains hung as though they’d been trained since birth.
It should have been enough. It had, once, felt like control.
But the tightness behind his ribs remained, a stubborn, unromantic knot that did not respond to order. It sat beneath his sternum like a fist, as if his own body had taken offence at the notion of ease. He breathed in, polish, smoke residue, cold stone, and out, and nothing shifted except the familiar ache of fatigue along his jaw.
He tried the practical litany. Staff had been briefed. Caterer confirmed. Bedrooms aired. The guest wing stocked with towels that smelled faintly of lavender and industriousness. He could account for everything, except the part where, tomorrow, people would arrive and the house would change shape around them. Voices in the corridors. Shoes in the wrong places. Opinions, lightly offered and heavily meant.
He touched the mantel with his fingertips, as if the smooth marble might transmit reassurance. It didn’t. The rooms looked ready to receive the world, and he, absurdly, did not.
He could, if pressed, produce almost anything with a few clipped instructions. Another stack of logs would appear, seasoned and stacked as if they’d grown that way. A better wine could be coaxed out of the cellar; if the cellar failed him, a case could be fetched from Helmsford before anyone had time to complain. Fresh flowers, too. He could summon a car at an hour’s notice, locate an umbrella when the sky turned, a spare charger, a particular brand of tonic. The entire place ran on the premise that needs were met before they were voiced.
And yet the thing other people carried in with their bags, an easy slackening, a holiday permission to take up space, remained stubbornly out of his reach.
They would arrive and exhale, as if the house itself were obliged to take the weight from their shoulders. Seth, meanwhile, would tighten. He would be the hinge, the latch, the man ensuring the doors didn’t stick. He could supply comfort in objects, in temperatures, in tastes. He could not supply it in himself.
It wasn’t assistance he wanted. Assistance came with the wrong sort of attention: hands hovering, offers that sounded generous and landed like probes. Shall I? meant Why can’t you? and, worse, What’s the matter with you? Help would require him to name the thing that was missing, to translate the tightness in his chest into a narrative fit for other people’s mouths. He had no intention of turning himself into a cautionary tale with decent table manners.
He could accept competence, orders given, tasks done, because competence asked nothing back. But the moment someone tried to lighten his load with warmth, they expected access in return, as if a fire and a roof entitled them to the soft parts as well.
Nor was it pity he wanted. Pity would tilt the whole business into melodrama, as if keeping the place upright were a personal failing rather than an ordinary, grinding fact. It would invite lowered voices and those earnest, sideways looks that made him feel handled. Worse, it would make him discussable (Seth Harrington, holding on by his fingernails) until the week reeked of tact.
What he couldn’t conjure (couldn’t order up with a bell and a brisk word) was a single pair of eyes that registered the strain as intentional. Not Wrenford does this for us, as though the carpets and silence and steady temperature simply happened, but he has done this. That it took time, money he didn’t mention, and a vigilance that never quite slept.
Affection, for Seth, had never presented itself as a rush of feeling that demanded expression. It arrived as a list, quiet and inexhaustible, written somewhere behind his eyes and revised as people moved through the house. He noticed the draught at the turn of the west corridor and had the servants’ fire laid before anyone thought to complain. He caught the moment a guest’s laughter thinned at the edges, the fraction of a second when conversation became work, and arranged an interruption, tea, a walk suggested, a fresh bottle opened at precisely the right time, so no one had to admit to being tired or lonely or bored.
He could do that. He was good at that. It required attention, which he had in abundance, so long as it was pointed outward.
A tray appeared in the orangery just as the sun dropped and the glass began to lose its warmth; the housekeeper swore later she’d been on her way there anyway, though Seth had seen her still in the pantry when the notion formed. A small lamp was switched on in the library before anyone asked, turning the far corner into an invitation rather than a cave. The car came round to the door with the engine already running, not because someone had requested it, but because he had heard the faintest hesitation in a voice and refused to allow anyone, least of all a guest, to feel like a nuisance under his roof.
He laid these comforts like boards over thin ice. They would bear other people’s weight. They would not crack beneath him.
And if someone noticed (if they paused, looked, and recognised the intention behind the ease) it unsettled him in a way no complaint ever did. Complaints were problems with solutions. Recognition was a question, and questions were where emotion crept in, soft-footed and relentless, asking for a reply he didn’t have words for.
It was not generosity, really, whatever people chose to call it over soup and port with the faint air of granting him a virtue. Generosity implied a surplus. Of money, of warmth, of self. Seth had no surplus to hand out. What he had was a talent for arranging life so that nothing showed its seams.
Control was the thing he could offer without risking anything tender. If he knew where everyone was meant to be, if the fires were lit in the right rooms and the drinks arrived before thirst turned to need, then he could remain indispensable and, crucially, unexamined. Usefulness made a neat little moat: people waved to him from the far side, pleased and comfortable, and never tried the bridge.
Let them thank him for the wine being the right temperature, for the guest towels smelling faintly of lavender, for the car appearing as if summoned by thought. Gratitude had manners; it came with an ending. It did not require reciprocity.
Being known did. Being known meant someone might notice the hand that kept hovering, ready to catch a wobble: might ask why it was always there, and what would happen if it let go.
If he kept the week stitched together: breakfast at the same civilised hour, the caterer briefed, the wine laid out before anyone remembered to ask, umbrellas stationed like obedient sentries by every door: then there would be no excuse for anyone to look too closely at him. People who were comfortable became incurious. They complimented the view, the pudding, the crispness of the sheets, and moved on. That was the bargain he understood.
He ran contingencies in his head as he crossed the hall: rain on the day of the planned walk, a missing vegetarian option, the Aga deciding to sulk, Toby deciding to perform. He could absorb all of it, quietly, so long as no one paused long enough to ask, with dreadful sincerity, what would make him comfortable.
The nearest he allowed himself to gentleness was anticipation. He watched for the small collisions, an opinion sharpening, a silence turning brittle, and stepped in before they could draw blood. A question redirected, a seat changed, a joke offered up like a decoy. He made comfort arrive early, wrapped in practicality, so no one ever had to ask for it aloud. Or look him in the face while doing it.
So long as his care could pass for the Hall’s own unthinking elegance, fires that seemed to light themselves, trays that arrived as if by instinct, he could persuade himself he was participating in something softer than duty. A kind of closeness by proxy. He could keep his hands busy and his voice neutral, let tenderness be mistaken for good management, and never once admit he wanted it returned.
Wanting nothing, Seth had discovered, was the only appetite that didn’t come with consequences. It asked no favours, inspired no rescue missions, and (crucially) couldn’t be translated into a party game. You couldn’t mishear it and decide it meant more attention, please. You couldn’t dress it up as a challenge. There was nothing for anyone to take hold of.
Desire, in his experience, was a handle.
Ask for something even faintly human (time, consideration, quiet) and someone would inevitably treat it as an opening. A chance to prove themselves kind. A chance to diagnose. A chance to retell the story later, with themselves in the flattering role and him reduced to a lesson: Seth, poor devil, never quite recovered after, as if his private life were a historical event with footnotes.
He’d seen how quickly the warmest voices cooled once they’d been denied access. Concern soured into offence, as if he’d failed to cooperate with their generosity. Or worse: it stayed sweet, cloyingly so, and came threaded with assumptions about what he ought to feel and how publicly he ought to display it.
Wanting nothing kept him unremarkable. It let him move through rooms like part of the architecture, useful, solid, and safely impersonal. If he wanted nothing, he could not be bribed or shamed. He could not be coaxed into gratitude. He could not be manoeuvred into confessing what ached and where.
There were other comforts, he admitted: very privately, as if admitting it might summon an audience. The scratch of a match and the patient catch of flame; the reassuring heft of keys in his pocket; the way the house settled at night with old-wood sighs. These weren’t wants. They were routines. They belonged to the Hall, not to him.
He had trained himself to be satisfied by that distinction: to keep his needs so small they passed for manners. To hold his life at arm’s length and call it composure.
He had watched concern curdle into appetite often enough to recognise the moment it happened. A softened voice, an earnest tilt of the head. Then the questions began to arrange themselves like hands on cutlery. How are things, really? Are you managing on your own? And beneath the varnish of kindness, the quiet tallying: what’s held up, what’s rotting, what might be bought for the price of sympathy.
They leaned in as if tenderness were a permit. As if because they’d offered warmth, they were entitled to take stock of the drafts in the corridors, the places the plaster had hairline cracks, the ledgers that never quite reconciled. They wanted to know whether the roof still held, whether the land was mortgaged, whether the family name had any stains that wouldn’t come off with a good dinner and a competent anecdote.
He’d seen guests become auditors with the ease of practice, their curiosity dressed in the language of care. And if he didn’t answer, they looked wounded as though privacy were ingratitude. The exchange always came with terms, and the interest rate was intimacy.
And if they didn’t pry, they pitied; if they didn’t pity, they assumed his careful manners were an indictment of theirs. There was no version of him that didn’t become useful to somebody else. His silence turned into a tragic little tableau (poor Seth, all alone in that drafty mausoleum) or his competence into a sneer. Even kindness came with a script, lines he was expected to deliver on cue: gratitude, openness, a dash of charming self-deprecation to reassure them he knew his place in the room. Refuse, and they rewrote him anyway. Either way, his restraint became a story someone else got to tell, with him reduced to a prop.
The trap never altered, only the faces did. Keep his expression shuttered and they called him icy, ungrateful, as if feeling obliged him to perform it. Let one corner lift, let one answer turn vaguely honest, and eyes sharpened. A single too-direct question could bring up the old reflex: irritation cracking out like a shield, righteous for half a second, and then, always, heard as cruelty.
So he designs vanishing as a skill. A note to the housekeeper (just checking the west door, draft’s back) an inspection of the ha-ha that sounds dutiful rather than desperate, a “quick” walk to the river that no one can sensibly join in brogues. Better to be briefly missed than studied. Even if, once alone, the hush presses in and he has only himself to manage.
Seth ran the morning like a quiet campaign, the sort fought on carpet and in murmured exchanges, where victory was measured in things that didn’t happen. The housekeeper found him in the breakfast room before seven, immaculate in a way that suggested he’d been awake for hours. He listened while she ran through the practicalities, milk deliveries, the linen cupboard that insisted on sticking, the guest wing radiators that clicked like teeth, and he absorbed it all with the bland concentration of a man taking dictation at a trial.
“Eight-thirty for breakfast,” he said, as if he could impose appetite by decree. “But put the coffee on from eight. If anyone comes down early, let them feel clever for it.”
She gave him a look that might, in another house, have been amusement. Here it was permission. “Very good, Mr Harrington.”
In the hallway, he caught his reflection in the gilt mirror between two dead ancestors and looked away before he could start cataloguing flaws. He had no time for the self, only for systems.
The caterer rang at half eight with cheerful competence; Seth kept his own cheer in reserve and spoke in the language of contingencies. “No walnuts,” he said. “Or even the suggestion of walnuts. Yes, I’m aware that rules out half the canapés you’d like to serve.” He paused, listening, jaw tightening as though the line might bite him. “And nothing too… experimental. If it can be described as ‘interesting’, it will be.”
He wrote down the allergies, then the preferences that masqueraded as medical fact, then the preferences that were merely a way of announcing oneself. He could already hear the comments: Oh, how very organised. Organised, as if it were a hobby, as if the house would hold itself together on charm.
Outside, the groundskeeper’s van crunched on the gravel. Seth intercepted him by the stable yard with a map folded like a secret. “If you take the south drive first,” he said, “and leave the north for later, midday, perhaps. The beech avenue wants a sweep before anyone thinks to remark on it.”
The man nodded, unbothered. Everyone was unbothered, provided Seth carried the bother on their behalf.
He kept his voice even, requests crisp, and his hands tucked behind his back when the strain crept up. His fingers found the edge of the hall table as he passed, thumb pressing into the polished wood until it hurt. An anchor, a warning. Out on the drive, a distant engine note rose and fell like a swallow’s call.
The first car. Already, the hours rearranged themselves around other people’s arrival.
In the library, Seth laid out the week as if it were a campaign map. The table took the papers without complaint: guest list pinned beneath a pewter paperweight, a rough sketch of the dining room copied from memory, and a grid of meals and walks and “casual” drinks that would, with only a little pressure, become obligations. He moved names about in pencil, not by sentiment but by physics. Who would draw whom into performance, who would turn a harmless remark into a referendum.
Lila Bramley went where she always did, near the people most likely to splinter. Warmth as a sandbag against floodwater. Toby, he placed at a safe remove from the weakest seams of the table; not at the end, never that, because an end gave him a stage. Close enough to be contained, far enough that Seth wouldn’t have to pass him the bread.
He wrote them down and stared at the ink as though it might act like a boundary line on a deed. As though a name, once fixed, stayed put. His jaw tightened. Paper was obedient. People, infuriatingly, were not.
The house’s little indignities surfaced the moment anyone tried to live in it like a modern place. One obedient bar of reception hovered by the orangery doors, as if it too preferred glass and light; by the river the phone became a dead weight, and in the thick-walled corridors it sulked into silence. The Wi‑Fi, loyal only in the library, held strongest beneath the gaze of oil-painted Harringtons who looked faintly offended by streaming.
Seth dealt with it in the only way he knew: pre-emption disguised as hospitality. In each guest room he left a cream card headed Useful Information, listing breakfast, drinks, muddy-boot rules, and the location of the one reliable router as if it were a scenic feature. He could already predict who would call it thoughtful, and who would bristle at being managed.
He rehearsed his exits the way other men rehearsed speeches: the mild glance at his watch and I must catch Mrs Ellery; the hand on the doorframe and I’ll check the south boundary before supper. Every escape route had its respectable errand, every errand a small, sanctioned silence. Better to be the efficient host in motion than the subject, pinned in his own drawing room.
By mid-afternoon the house acquired that peculiar, anticipatory stiffness: gravel combed into neat lines, the scent of laid kindling waiting in grates, and every long-case clock seeming to clear its throat. Seth placed himself in the hall’s sightline to the windows, angled as if he’d merely paused to consider a portrait. He listened for tyres, and, against sense, counted minutes until his guests could be installed and the watching could begin elsewhere.
Seth crossed the hall before Mrs Pritchard could so much as incline her head, boots silent on the flags where Dara’s wheels had made such a fuss. It was an old reflex learned in rooms where a pause became an opening and openings became stories. He arrived at the threshold with his face already arranged into its most inoffensive version of itself: courteous, composed, forgettable.
Up close, the newcomer didn’t look rattled in the way late arrivals were supposed to look. Travel sat on her like a jacket she could shrug off when she chose. Her coat was the sort of clean-lined, city thing that refused to pretend it had ever brushed a hedgerow; her hair was neatly contained, her eyes bright with the particular alertness of someone who’d already decided she wouldn’t apologise for taking up space.
“Ms Kingsley,” he said, because names mattered, and because calling her Dara without permission would be either intimate or patronising. Sometimes both. He held out a hand, palm angled precisely as if there were a diagram for this.
Her handshake met his with disconcerting certainty. “Seth Harrington,” she replied, as though she’d filed him correctly. Then, with a quick glance past him at the portrait-lined sweep of the hall, she added, “Your house is… beautifully intimidating. It’s like it might start critiquing my posture.”
The comment landed between them with a faint crackle: not reverent, not rude. An invitation to laugh without begging for approval.
Against his better judgment, something in Seth’s mouth twitched: almost amusement, almost relief. He felt it as a betrayal. He let the expression die before it could be noticed, and in its place returned the careful neutrality that had saved him more often than honesty ever had.
“I assure you,” he said, taking her coat with an efficiency that kept his hands busy, “the house restricts itself to judging the furniture. May I take your bag, or have you formed an attachment to it?”
Her suitcase arrived ahead of her like an overconfident herald, the small hard wheels rasping and chattering across the flags with every microscopic ridge. Seth felt several heads in the drawing room turn by instinct, the way people did when something modern dared to be noisy in an old house. Dara’s fingers tightened around the handle and, with a brisk little tilt, she lifted the front edge just enough to silence it. The movement was practised competence worn lightly.
She stood a beat on the threshold, not from hesitation but from assessment, eyes flicking up the staircase, along the carved cornice, over the ranks of solemn portraits that suggested the building had opinions. Then she stepped in fully, closing the distance with the contained momentum of someone who refused to be stranded in a doorway, half-guest and half-intruder.
Travel still sat in her shoulders, a faint forward lean, as though her body expected to be jostled. Yet her chin stayed level. She didn’t soften herself to suit the room; she simply brought herself into it, city-cut coat and all, as if entry were a decision rather than a favour.
“Ms Kingsley, Dara,” Seth said, as if the second name had escaped him by accident and been recalled through sheer discipline. The correction arrived too swiftly to be casual. He offered his hand with a kind of exactness that suggested he’d been taught the proper angle for welcome, and had never stopped believing in it.
Up close she smelled faintly of cold air and train heat, and her gaze didn’t skim politely over him; it took him in, quick and unapologetic, the way a competent person assessed a door they intended to open.
His grip was brief, dry, final. Kindness, if you wanted it to be; a boundary, if you’d learnt to look for them. Seth kept his expression mild, his shoulders squared against the hall’s watchful silence, and waited to see which reading she would choose.
Her grip was decisively firm, warm without being eager, and her gaze stayed bright: steady in a way that refused to seek leave from crests and cornices. “It’s… beautifully intimidating,” she said, the pause a small, deliberate tease, as though naming the weight of the place might make it lighter. The humour wasn’t thrown away; it hovered close to honesty, testing whether he would flinch.
For the briefest second something in Seth’s face loosens, the corner of his mouth tugging as though amusement might be permitted. It vanishes almost at once, pressed flat beneath manners. “We do try,” he said, dry as the hall’s stone. He stepped aside with practiced economy, one hand indicating the passage like a discreet instruction, already placing himself at her shoulder to steer her forward and keep the room’s curiosity from latching on.
Seth took in the sharp, city-made cut of her coat, the sort of tailoring that assumed pavements, not gravel, and the way she occupied the entrance hall as if she’d decided, on the drive up, not to be shrunk by cornices and crests. Most guests paused a beat too long on that threshold, glancing for permission, gauging whether to soften themselves into the house. Dara simply arrived. Her suitcase sat squarely by her heel like a well-trained dog, wheels still faintly ticking with the cold. No fluttering hands, no false laugh. Planted.
It was, infuriatingly, competent.
He felt the room’s attention tilt towards her with the subtlety of a draught. The familiar, half-bored interest of people who had been drinking long enough to require novelty, but not long enough to be kind about it. Seth kept himself between her and the drawing room, a piece of furniture with a pulse, and watched her take the temperature without looking like she was doing it.
She wasn’t dressed for this sort of place, not really. Not in the sense they meant it: no country tweed, no softening into “rustic” to make the aristocrats comfortable. Her coat had crisp seams and a belt pulled with intention, as if she’d built a life where clothes were for work and movement, not camouflage. Even her hair suggested mornings with deadlines rather than maids and bells.
He wondered, unwillingly, what it took to walk into a hall like this and decide you would not apologise. Courage, yes. Or practice. Or the sort of stubbornness that mistook itself for cheer.
“Do you have a preference for rooms?” he asked, because giving her a choice sounded hospitable and was, in truth, a small test. Most would protest, insist on whatever was easiest. The confident ones would pick wrong and then act wounded.
Dara’s eyes flicked to him, not pleading: measuring. “One with a door that shuts,” she said lightly, and then, as if catching his expression before it could settle into offence, added, “And a plug socket that actually wants to work. I’m low-maintenance. In theory.”
Low-maintenance, he thought, was what people called themselves when they absolutely weren’t. But something in the way she said it, half joke, half warning, made his jaw ease, just a fraction, before he remembered to clench again.
Her gaze moved with brisk precision, not the slow drift of someone seduced by grandeur but the neat sweep of a person gathering data. Portraits first, ancestral faces in gilt that stared with practiced confidence, then the staircase with its polished bannister and the way it funnelled everyone’s attention towards whoever had the nerve to stand at the foot of it. A quick glance at the clock on the hall table, as if registering how long, exactly, she’d been made late.
Then: people.
The drinks tray was its own small court, orbiting bodies arranged in familiar constellations. Dara’s eyes counted without counting. Who leaned in, who held back; who had claimed the best light; who laughed a shade too brightly; who wore ease like inherited jewellery. There was no awe in it, no hope either. Just appraisal, the same expression Seth had seen on men in town councils and bank meetings, the ones who smiled while deciding what you were worth.
When her gaze returned to him it didn’t soften, but it sharpened, as if he were another fixture to be assessed: not handsome, not hostile. Simply an obstacle with manners.
The rattle of plastic wheels over ancient stone carried obscenely well, as if the hall itself disapproved. Conversation in the drawing room didn’t stop (nothing so crude) but it tightened, the way a cuff tightens when someone realises it’s too small. Seth watched the ripple with the practised detachment of a man reading accounts: Lila’s head angled, sympathetic and ready; Toby’s mouth already assembling a comment; an older friend’s glance flicking to Dara’s shoes and away, like a reflex. One laugh arrived half a beat late, an overcorrection.
He moved without seeming to, stepping into the line of sight as though to offer guidance, when what he offered was shelter. If the room was going to decide what she was, it would have to get past him first.
Dara’s attention settled on him at last, brisk and unromantic, as if he were a timetable to be deciphered. Controlled posture: check. Clothes cut to signal money without announcing it. Manners precise enough to make a guest feel they were being processed rather than received. He looked like the sort of man who could offer hospitality and still leave you owing him something for it.
Seth held her gaze as though it were merely another courtesy to be returned, his face arranged into neutrality so complete it invited no purchase. He could feel the house behind him, rules, ritual, reputation, settling onto his shoulders like a coat. Yet her steadiness, that unapologetic refusal to shrink, tugged at something inconveniently like admiration. Either she’d upend everything, or she’d make it bearable. He couldn’t tell.
Seth crossed the threshold with the smooth inevitability of a man who had been trained, from boyhood, to absorb arrivals the way stone absorbs rain. He placed himself at precisely the correct distance and let the mechanics take over.
“Ms Kingsley,” he said, not because the room required it but because the room listened for it. “Seth Harrington. Welcome to Wrenford.”
The name was a key turned in a lock: it clicked, the atmosphere aligning itself around the expected shape of him. His mouth arranged itself into the expression he kept for Christmas and funerals and visiting dignitaries; pleasant enough, certainly, and entirely uninformative. He didn’t offer to take her coat, staff would, didn’t ask after her journey in any way that might invite detail. He simply indicated, with a faint tilt of the hand, where the drawing room opened like a stage set.
His attention moved over her with the same impersonal thoroughness he gave the sky before moving hay bales: not rude, not quite friendly, assessing. City tailoring. Sharp shoulders, practical fabric. Hair done with speed rather than ceremony. Luggage that spoke of trains and taxis, not a booted car at the end of the drive. There was a brightness to her that, in this house, would either be read as confidence or a sort of social illiteracy; Seth couldn’t decide which judgement annoyed him more.
Behind her, the hall held its breath. He could feel Toby’s anticipation like static. Lila (bless her) would be calculating how to soften whatever came next without making Dara feel managed. Seth had hosted enough weekends to know the danger lay not in open rudeness but in that thin, smiling condescension that could be denied later with a raised brow and a “surely you misunderstood.”
He offered the next line on instinct, the one that kept everything moving. “I hope you’ve found us without too much trouble.”
And then he waited, polite, composed, as though he weren’t watching for the smallest shift (tone, posture, humour) that might turn a supposedly restful week into a small, expensive catastrophe.
Dara didn’t give him the half-step backward the others always did, the reflexive yielding that made the hall feel like it belonged to him by inheritance alone. She stepped in as if she meant to occupy the same air, offered her hand without hesitation, and closed her fingers around his with brisk certainty. No fluttering, no apologetic pressure. Her palm was warm from travel; her grip said she negotiated for a living.
“Beautifully intimidating,” she added, letting her gaze travel up the staircase, the portraits, the polished severity of it all. The smile she wore was bright enough to be misconstrued as cheek, but her tone carried the faint, deliberate lift of someone naming the obvious before it could be used against her. A pinprick, yes, but also a courtesy: she’d acknowledged the elephant and thereby refused to be trampled by it.
Seth felt the microsecond of collective pause behind him: the draw of attention, the private weighing. The house liked soft exchanges, polite fog, phrases that could be taken back. Dara’s words sat cleanly on the flags, unsmudged, impossible to pretend unheard.
Her eyebrows rose, just slightly, as if daring anyone to correct her.
A small disturbance passed through the room: glasses paused half-raised, eyes flicked and returned, conversation re-seated itself with the practised neatness of people pretending not to notice. Curiosity, certainly. Tidied into smiles, softened into murmurs of how marvellous it must be to arrive in such weather. Seth caught the shift the way he caught a draught under a door. She hadn’t offered deference; she’d offered commentary. And not privately, either. She’d pitched it for the whole house, bright and clean, forcing everyone to take it on the chin or swallow it.
Humour as armour, then. Not coy, not self-effacing: weaponised cheerfulness with the safety off. Brave, or reckless. He couldn’t decide which would be more inconvenient.
For an instant, the tension in Seth’s jaw eases. Her phrasing, so neat, so unapologetic, lands with an accuracy that surprises him, and a pulse of genuine amusement threatens to show itself. The corner of his mouth lifts, almost; a soft breath slips out, dangerously close to a laugh. It feels like giving away a tell at cards, and he dislikes how much he wants to.
He caught it in time. The almost-smile was gathered up and put away, his face settling into its familiar, unremarkable arrangement of courtesy. “One does what one can,” he said, dry as the sherry and utterly safe, as if her remark had been a neutral observation about the weather. He released her hand with controlled neatness, the brief warmth noted: then locked, like silver, in a drawer.
At the edge of the hall, the threshold stalled them in a way that felt absurdly pointed. Dara’s suitcase sat where it had been abandoned, two ridged wheels on the stone flags, handle pushed down as if in apology, while the murmur of welcome drinks arranged itself around the obstacle with careful civility. No one looked at it. That was the trick. Everyone looked past it so determinedly that it might as well have been lit.
Dara followed the line of non-attention and understood, with a small tightening behind her ribs, that this was not about luggage. It was about whether she would wait to be managed.
She could have laughed it off again. Made a remark about aristocratic luggage protocols, offered to drag it herself, performed competence so no one could mistake her for helpless. But the hall had its own gravity. The stone, the portraits, the faint drag of expectation. She held her posture as if it were a contract and kept her smile in place, feeling it turn a shade too bright.
A woman in black, housekeeper, probably, was in the middle of shepherding a tray of glasses through a cluster of greetings, trapped by someone important enough to be listened to. A younger man hovered with the air of being useful, then was pulled away by a question and a laugh. Dara’s bag became, by sheer stillness, the punctuation at the end of her entrance.
Seth registered it all without appearing to. His gaze moved the way a hand might over a chessboard: the occupied staff, the guests’ rehearsed blindness, the softening of voices that meant this will be discussed later. He felt a flare of irritation: not at her, precisely, but at the entire mechanism of the house turning a triviality into a test.
“Forgive me,” he said, pitched for Dara alone though anyone nearby could hear, “the hall enjoys making a ceremony of nonsense.”
He stepped past her as if the decision had been made long ago, reached for the suitcase, and lifted it with brisk competence (no pause, no show of effort, no invitation for commentary) before anyone else could decide to be generous in a way that would cost her.
Seth took in the hall the way he took in weather: automatically, with the faint irritation of a man who could name the pressure drop before anyone felt it. Mrs Hargreaves pinned in conversation by Lady Merton; the footman borrowed by Toby for some theatrical aside; Lila half-turned, already preparing to rescue Dara with charm; a couple of old friends watching with that lazy curiosity people reserved for new money and new faces. And Dara herself: smile held, shoulders squared, refusing to fidget the way the room would prefer her to.
A suitcase on stone ought to have been nothing. Here it became a stage mark.
He could have called for someone, of course. He could have made it a small joke, allowed a dozen hands to rise in benevolent offer, and watched Dara forced to choose between gratitude and defiance. The house loved that sort of choice; it polished it until it shone.
No.
He moved at once, before anyone could manufacture the wrong kindness or the right cruelty. Not chivalry. Not a gesture. Merely the quickest solution, like shutting a door against a draught.
“I’ll take that,” he said, as if issuing a quiet correction about where one left umbrellas, and closed his hand around the side handle before Dara could decide whether to argue.
The case had the dense, unforgiving weight of a life packed for contingencies. He felt it in his shoulder at once. His jaw clicked, a minute tightening at the hinge, but his face remained politely unremarkable: no wince, no rueful smile to invite comment. If he made a thing of it, the hall would make a thing of her.
Dara’s brows lifted, a flicker of surprise sliding quickly into calculation. “It’s not full of bricks,” she murmured, light enough to pass as humour.
“Evidently,” he replied, and shifted his grip with practised ease, as though the inconvenience were simply another item the house required him to carry.
He pivoted towards the guest-wing corridor with the economical decisiveness of a man closing an argument, shouldering himself between her and the likely offers of help. His pace made it plain: this was procedure, not performance. The temperature dropped as they left the soft, crowded heat behind; conversation dulled to a distant smear, and their footsteps on the runner became the loudest thing either of them could pretend not to notice.
Once they were beyond the hall’s sightline, the air altered. Less perfumed, less performative. Seth kept his eyes ahead, mapping the house by habit: a draughty turn, a patch of worn runner, the polite hazard of a door that liked to swing back. He chose speed over nicety, and the choice made a corridor of quiet. Dara, for the first time since arriving, was simply beside him.
Dara didn’t so much follow as draft behind him, refusing to be managed by pace. The suitcase wheels rattled, then caught, then resumed with a steady determination that sounded like defiance in a corridor built for silence. She stepped over a threshold without looking down, as if she trusted the house to move out of her way, and when it didn’t she adjusted, no apology, no fluster, just a quick lift of the case and on again.
Seth felt the rhythm of it in his shoulder: pull, bump, pull. He did not look back. Looking back invited commentary.
Dara, apparently, had never met a quiet she didn’t want to interrogate.
“So,” she said, not breathless, not hushed in the reverent way people got when they realised they were standing on money and dead relatives. Merely interested. “How old is it?”
It landed in the space between them like a coin dropped to test depth.
He could have given her the version strangers were meant to have, “Georgian, with later bits”, and left it there. That was how one kept things smooth: vague, unassailable, politely boring. Instead, something in him (irritation, perhaps, or the relief of a question that wasn’t about him) made the truth present itself with absurd ease.
“Mid-eighteenth century,” he said. “The central block. The east rooms were added in the 1880s. The service corridor we’re in is older than it looks; it was altered when electricity went in.”
Dara’s “Mm,” was quick and approving, like a person ticking boxes. Her gaze moved with his words: cornice to skirting, hinge to handle, taking in the join where old plaster met newer work. She didn’t soften into admiration; she sharpened into analysis.
“So it’s… layered,” she said. “Like someone kept trying to update it without admitting they were terrified of changing it.”
Seth’s mouth tightened. Annoying, that she could say it. More annoying that it wasn’t entirely wrong.
“And which bit is the original?” she asked, tilting her head slightly, as if the house might confess if she looked at it properly. “Not the grand entrance. This feels like the spine. Where does it start?”
“The west wing,” Seth said, as if the question were a clerk’s request and he were obliged to file the correct answer. “What’s now the west wing. The original house was smaller: two storeys, five bays. Built 1742 to 1748, depending on which ledger you trust. The entrance was repositioned when they added the hall in 1769. The east wing is later, Victorian, 1883. There was a fire in ’51; mostly chimneys and roof, but it’s why the panelling doesn’t quite match.”
He waited for the inevitable little gasp of admiration, the polite “how extraordinary,” the reverent eyes. He’d learnt to endure them like draughts: unavoidable, best ignored.
Dara merely gave a short nod, absorbing it the way she might absorb a quarterly report. Her attention drifted, not to him, but to the seams: where the skirting thickened, where a doorway had been widened, where the plaster had a faintly different grain.
“So if I wanted to see ‘1740s’,” she said, “without all the… corrective work, where would I go?”
Seth’s jaw tightened.
“You don’t,” he said. “Not without going into staff corridors and rooms that aren’t for touring.”
They passed a cluster of portraits hung in a tight, genealogical scrum: stern men in wigs, a woman with a neck like a swan, a boy in velvet who looked faintly appalled at being painted at all. Dara slowed half a step, suitcase still trundling, and tipped her head as though she were assessing a shop window.
“Are these all actually yours,” she asked, with a cheerfully offhand emphasis that made the word sound like a practical question, “or are some of them… strategic ancestors?”
Seth’s gaze flicked up, unwillingly. He’d grown up under those eyes; he knew each one’s name, scandal, and preferred drink. The question was impertinent, yes. Also (worse) competent.
“They’re family,” he said. “Mostly.”
“Mostly,” Dara repeated, lightly. “That’s a very honest museum label.”
On principle, it needled him: the bright, offhand tone that treated heritage like inventory. His reflex was to stiffen, to correct her, to reassert that certain things were not up for comment. Then, inconveniently, he clocked what wasn’t there: no simpering admiration, no careful deference. She wasn’t angling for favour. She was simply naming the performance, and it was a relief he hadn’t asked for.
Dara didn’t let the corridor silence settle into ceremony. “So where do people actually go?” she asked, glancing at a pair of closed double doors. “And where do they go and then get quietly murdered in conversation afterwards?” She tapped a console table with one finger, as if testing whether the house was real. “Is anything here allowed to be… normal?”
It felt uncomfortably like an interview. Seth heard himself answer regardless. Because with her there was no room to hide behind pleasantries.
Outside the guest room, Seth halted with the air of a man completing a task rather than escorting a person. The corridor smelled faintly of beeswax and old stone; somewhere below, a laugh rose and fell as if it had rehearsed the acoustics.
“Dinner is at eight,” he said. “Drinks beforehand in the drawing room. If you’re late, nobody will mention it, but everyone will notice.”
Dara shifted her suitcase upright with her foot, attentive in a way that felt, alarmingly, like competence. Seth continued, because stopping would invite questions.
“The drawing room is the one with the gilt mirrors and the furniture that looks as though it ought to bite. The library”, a small, almost involuntary softening on the word, “is generally safe. People pretend not to eavesdrop in there. It’s not true, but it’s a useful fiction.”
He nodded along the corridor. “That door leads to the family sitting room. It looks inviting. It is not for guests unless invited.” His mouth tightened a fraction. “The blue salon is used for… lingering. If you have no appetite for being assessed, avoid it.”
“And the assessment is on a scale of one to… guillotine?” Dara asked, mild.
“It depends on what you say about the paintings,” Seth replied before he could stop himself. When her eyebrows lifted, he added, clipped, “Shoes: the housekeeper would prefer no mud past the back stairs. The fact that some people treat it as a moral issue is not her fault.”
Dara glanced down at her boots as if considering their criminal record. “Noted.”
“There’s patchy reception,” Seth went on, gesturing without looking, as though the dead zones were part of his own anatomy. “This corridor is. Temperamental. The east wing is worse. If you need Wi‑Fi, the library’s reliable. Don’t ask me why; the house has principles.”
He heard how it sounded, like an invitation smuggled into a warning, and disliked himself for it. He reached for neutrality, for polish. “Breakfast is from eight. If you prefer something earlier, tell Mrs Pollard. She will conjure it and make you feel faintly ashamed for existing.”
Dara’s smile didn’t widen, but it steadied. “I’ll try to exist quietly, then.” She tipped her head towards the wall as though measuring thickness. “One practical thing: where can I make a call without announcing my entire life to the building?”
Dara took it all in with the brisk concentration of someone being briefed before stepping into danger. Not awed, not offended. Simply filing away each rule as though it were street sense. Seth watched her do it and felt, absurdly, as if he’d handed over a set of family keys.
She didn’t fill the pauses with polite noise. She gave him small nods in the right places, a faint tightening at the mention of rooms that weren’t for her, and the occasional flick of her gaze down the corridor as if she could already hear the house listening.
Most guests, in his experience, either performed gratitude or performed belonging. Dara performed competence.
“Right,” she said, as if concluding a meeting rather than an escort. Her fingers stayed on the suitcase handle; her posture said she could turn and go the moment she chose. Then, without apology or social cushioning: “One practical thing. Where can I make a call without broadcasting it to the entire building?”
The question landed cleanly. No flirtation, no jab, just logistics.
Seth’s first response was a petty urge to be obstructive. His second, more treacherous instinct, was to solve it.
Seth paused, jaw working once, as though he could bite back the impulse. It was ridiculous, this reflex to make things run smoothly for someone who’d only just arrived: someone who’d asked plainly, without deference, as if efficiency were a shared language.
“There’s a stretch by the back stairs,” he said at last, nodding towards a side passage that looked identical to all the others and yet felt, to him, like a known fault line. “Nothing gets through. Not calls, not texts. The house swallows it.”
Her expression sharpened, relief, not awe.
And then he heard himself undo the advantage of being unhelpful. “If you need something stable,” he added, briskly, as if issuing an instruction rather than a kindness, “the library Wi‑Fi is dependable.”
Dara’s smile shifted as if they’d just agreed the house was absurd and would proceed accordingly. “Thank you,” she said, and the gratitude landed without fuss. Then, lightly, as though it were merely banter: “I’ll find you later for the short version of how to survive Wrenford Hall.” She held his gaze a beat too long, filing it away like a time slot.
Seth inclined his head, an economical dismissal dressed up as courtesy, and stepped back into the corridor before she could add another practical request. The air cooled against his cheeks, the house settling around him like judgement. Three paces on, it caught up with him: he’d offered solutions, not refusals. Worse, he’d let her set a future appointment as if it were sensible. He hadn’t even declined it.
Dara turned slightly in her chair, then corrected herself with a neat, almost comic precision: elbows lifting off the linen as though an invisible protractor had tapped her. Seth registered the adjustment before he meant to. Most people arrived at Wrenford with either reverence or entitlement; she arrived with active observation, as if the room itself were giving off data.
“I hope this isn’t a stupid question,” she said, and there was no faux-humility in it, only calibration. “Does the place flood in winter? Or did you redo the drains when the terrace was relaid?”
The question cut cleanly through the usual dinner-table circuitry. Who’d been where, who was seeing whom, who had failed spectacularly at something fashionable. It was, in its way, an intimate question: not about history, but about what went wrong and how you’d fixed it.
Across the table, Toby’s eyebrows rose in delighted approval, as if Dara had just lobbed him a toy.
Seth took a sip of wine to buy himself a moment. He could feel the muscles at the angle of his jaw threatening to tighten, the old instinct to make everything smaller, less discussable. Yet the absurdity of taking offence at drainage made him almost smile.
“It’s not stupid,” he said, voice even. “The lower lawns used to sit under water for half of January, which was charming if you’re a duck and less so if you’ve a foundation.”
Dara’s attention held, steady and unembarrassed. She nodded once, encouragingly, the way people did in meetings when they actually wanted the answer and weren’t merely waiting for their turn to speak.
“We had the north run replaced two years ago,” Seth went on, because the facts were safer than feelings and, infuriatingly, she had asked a factual question. “French drains along the terrace edge. The Victorian pipework was. Optimistic. And the ha-ha collects silt; you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Actually,” Dara said, eyes brightening, “I would. Water always finds the weak point. Did you do it section by section or just… rip the plaster off in one go?”
Toby made a small sound as if to announce to the table that here, finally, was a narrative worth polishing. Seth didn’t look at him. He kept his gaze on Dara and, against his better judgement, answered her properly.
The question had landed neatly in the one place dinner-table conversation rarely reached: the unglamorous seam where a house either held together or didn’t. Pipework. Schedules. The weary arithmetic of water pressure and winter ground. Seth felt, to his surprise, the relief of it. No opinion required, no smile demanded, no invitation to perform inheritance as charm.
And yet the old reflex came up all the same, quick as a shutter. Wrenford was his responsibility in a way no one at this table could truly touch; every answer was a loose thread someone might tug, every practical detail a route to the softer underbelly. He could already hear the questions he’d learned to fend off: how much, how often, why not simply,
But Dara’s voice hadn’t shifted into that falsely gentle curiosity people used when they meant pity. It was the tone of procurement meetings and deadlines: direct, brisk, almost mercifully impersonal.
He watched her for a beat, the set of her shoulders, the way she held his gaze without making it a challenge. Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t fishing for a scandal. It was, infuriatingly, competence.
Dara didn’t let the subject drift back to engagements and gallery openings. She simply continued, brisk as a clipboard. How many people were in on an ordinary day; whether the laundry was done on site; what you kept in-house and what you sensibly contracted out. She asked about the caterer as if he were a supplier, not a minor aristocracy in an apron.
“And the rooms,” she added, glancing past him towards the panelling, the chandeliers that looked indifferent to time. “Do you rotate them? Like: keep some closed to save on heating and cleaning, or is that… frowned upon?”
It was all phrased with an accountant’s neutrality. Not prying. Not reverent. Mapping, as though Wrenford were a system with inputs and failure points, not a shrine, and, irritatingly, not him. Seth found himself answering before he’d decided to.
Across the table, Toby’s smile took on that too-bright edge. Like a knife briefly catching candlelight. He echoed Dara’s wording with a little theatrical lift, “How many people to keep it all going,” and let it hang as a joke no one quite dared to claim. His gaze flicked to Seth, inviting the room to admire the machinery and condemn the man for owning it.
Seth gave Toby nothing. No glance, no flinch, only the steady refusal of attention. His molars met; the ache at his jaw was immediate and oddly clarifying. He turned, instead, to Dara’s face and allowed himself the narrower honesty she’d offered: practical, bloodless. If she wanted workings, he could give workings. Numbers. Routines. Boundaries. Anything that didn’t require him to bleed.
Seth let the question settle, not as a challenge but as an implement laid on the table. He selected it with the same care he used choosing a key from a crowded ring. Something that would turn smoothly and open only what he allowed.
“The core’s Georgian,” he said, as if reciting inventory to an insurance assessor. His gaze moved, briefly, over the cornice line and the seams where eras met. “The south front is original. The eastern wing. The panelling in the library is older than the house; it was brought from a smaller place and installed when my great-great-grandfather decided he needed gravitas.”
He didn’t glance at Toby. He didn’t glance at anyone, really, except Dara, and even that was economy: acknowledgement without invitation.
“The roof’s been re-slated in sections,” he went on. “You don’t do the whole thing unless you’re either reckless or newly wealthy. Windows are… a work in progress. Some are still the old sash; some are replacements made to match because the originals were past repair. The plumbing is modern where it must be. The wiring, ” a faint tightening at his mouth, quickly smoothed away “, was updated when my father took over. Not perfectly. Enough.”
There was a pause while plates shifted, a low murmur from the far end of the table. Seth kept his hands neatly folded, as though physical stillness could hold the room in place.
“We close off the west corridor in January,” he added, as if remembering a line item. “Less heat, less cleaning. The drawing room stays open, the library, the kitchen wing. You can’t run a house like this on sentiment.”
The words landed with a dryness that might have been humour if anyone dared to treat it as such. Dara’s expression didn’t soften into pity; it sharpened into understanding. Seth felt it, her attention, direct and unsparing, and, against his will, it unsettled him more than Toby’s needling ever managed.
He gave numbers the way other men gave warmth. Not kindly, not unkindly: simply as a fact of the weather.
“Just under twelve hundred acres altogether,” he said when Dara asked about the land, and then, before anyone could decide whether to be impressed, “Two hundred and change under grazing. The rest is woodland, gardens, and a great deal of effort at looking effortless.”
His fork moved with the same measured efficiency as his sentences. He named the paths as if they were items in a ledger: the riverside track kept clear fortnightly in summer, the higher footpath cut back only when the brambles got ambitious. Gutters twice a year, more if the beech drops early. The ha-ha inspected after heavy rain. The folly steps re-pointed last spring because someone, he didn’t say who, had let the mortar go.
He spoke in intervals, leaving no gaps for sentiment to spill into. Even the rooms became units: which were closed in winter, which remained “in use”, how many fires were practical, how many were theatre.
Dara watched his mouth tighten on certain words, as though each figure had a cost he refused to name.
“How many people?” Dara asked, and there was nothing coy in it. Only a brisk inventory-taking, as if she were imagining the rota.
Seth didn’t hesitate. Hesitation was where feeling lived.
“A housekeeper,” he said, counting without fingers. “A groundskeeper in most mornings. Cleaner twice a week for the guest wing when it’s in use. The caterer is local; we book her as needed. And there’s a chap in Helmsford who will come at short notice when something decides to break theatrically.”
He kept it clinical: functions, frequencies, contingencies. No names. No histories. Labour reduced to neat headings, as though affection might be mistaken for weakness.
“It’s mostly routine,” he added, and the word went down like a key turning, quiet, final, refusing to open.
Toby’s voice warmed by half a degree, all concern and performance, searching for a seam he could worry open. Seth heard it anyway (the faint drag toward confession) and his own diction snapped into harder lines. “Repairs,” he said, not “issues”; “a maintenance schedule,” not “the budget.” Each chosen word was a shutter drawn down, as though precision could keep the house’s tender places from showing.
“It was rebuilt in the eighties,” someone said, airy, authoritative, and wrong, “after the fire. The west wing’s practically modern.”
Seth’s knife paused. “Nineteen twenty-two,” he corrected, not sharp, not gentle. “After the roof went, not the whole wing. And the west side is three bays deeper than most people remember, which is why it forever looks as though it’s sulking.”
He didn’t look up to see who flinched. The fact sat there, neatly placed, like a closed door.
Toby shifted forward as if the candlelight had personally invited him. His forearms came to rest on the linen with practiced ease, a man settling into his favourite anecdote. He gave Dara a smile that was almost kind. Cultivated warmth, the sort that promised translation without demanding gratitude.
“Oh, it’s fascinating, isn’t it,” he said, voice pitched for the room rather than for her. “The way these places function like. Well. Like swans. All serene above water.”
Dara’s brows lifted, amused despite herself. Seth watched the smile touch her mouth and felt, irrationally, as though Toby had taken a chair that wasn’t his.
Toby’s eyes slid to Seth, then back, as though checking his mark and returning to the audience. “Because you see the portraits, the panelling, the lovely sense of inevitability.” A delicate gesture with his wineglass, encompassing the ceiling, the mouldings, the whole inherited performance. “And you don’t see the frantic paddling underneath. The lists. The rotas. The quiet army of people whose names you’re not meant to know.”
Seth kept his expression in working order. He could feel his jaw set, the familiar ache at the hinge. He did not rise to it; rising was what Toby wanted. A flare. A crack. Something the table could feed on.
Dara tipped her head. “I’m not sure I said anyone’s name shouldn’t be known.”
“No, no.” Toby laughed, quick and light, as if she’d made an adorable mistake. “Of course not. You’re asking sensible questions.” And then, smoothly, “It’s just that the ‘sensible’ questions are usually the ones nobody wants asked at dinner, aren’t they?”
He turned it gently, like a key, and Seth heard the lock click, Dara as earnest outsider, Toby as benevolent interpreter, Seth as the thing to be interpreted. Toby’s gaze flicked to Seth again, bright with mischief dressed as insight.
“Must be exhausting,” he went on, still smiling. “Keeping all this. ”
He let Dara’s practical curiosity dangle for a beat, then tugged it into something sharper, something with an edge he could hand round the table like a canapé. “Because it’s never just ‘how many people’,” Toby said, lightly, as though he were confessing a charming truth. “It’s how many people it takes to keep the illusion that no one is trying.”
His gaze skimmed the room, portraits, gilt frames, the heavy curtains that drank the candlelight, and returned to Dara with a conspiratorial tilt. “A whole apparatus,” he went on. “Polished silver appearing as if by benevolence, fires that simply happen, lawns trimmed to the millimetre so we can all pretend nature is obedient. And the labour is (what?) meant to be tasteful. Quiet. Preferably nameless.”
A soft laugh from someone, uncertain whether they’d been invited to join in.
“It’s the old trick,” Toby added, voice still warm. “You inherit the façade, and everyone else inherits the work of holding it up. Tradition as scaffolding. Money as mortar.” He lifted his glass a fraction, as if to toast the idea. “And if a bit crumbles, well: one calls it ‘character’, doesn’t one?”
A few of the guests shifted in their chairs, napkins adjusted, glasses lifted and set down again as though their hands needed something to do. The easy sprawl of talk tightened into a single thread, drawn taut across the table. It was the peculiar hush that arrived before pudding had even been mentioned, after-dinner in advance, when people persuaded themselves they were merely observing, not participating. Someone cleared their throat and thought better of speaking. Someone else smiled too broadly at their plate.
Dara could feel the attention moving, a slow, collective pivot, the way a room turned towards weather. Toby’s tone stayed mild, conversational, but it carried the satisfaction of having arranged the furniture. Seth, opposite, sat very still; his face remained composed, yet the line of his jaw had gone hard, as if he were holding something in place.
Seth set his knife down with measured care. “Two full-time inside,” he said, as if reciting from an inventory, “a groundsman three mornings a week, and a local firm for larger work when it’s required.” His eyes did not flick to Toby. “We maintain what can be maintained, conserve what ought to be conserved, and manage the rest within reason.” Immaculate. Bloodless. Unhelpful to anyone craving a scene.
Toby’s smile didn’t falter; it simply narrowed, as if the lack of outrage were another kind of confession. “Good God,” he said, in a tone that pretended to be kind, “it must be exhausting. Holding it all upright. Day after day. Not just the roof and the hedges, but the whole… idea.” He tipped his head, pity dressed as politeness. “One can see why you’re so. Disciplined about it.”
Dara let the remark sit on the table between the candles and the wineglasses as if it were a dish no one had ordered. Toby’s kind voice had the peculiar shape of a hook; she’d heard versions of it in boardrooms and on panel stages, sympathy offered at volume for the benefit of an audience. The easiest thing would have been to give him the small, obliging laugh: one soft sound to tell everyone she understood the game and would play along.
She didn’t.
She took a sip of wine instead, buying herself a moment, and kept her face neutral. No bright grin, no widening eyes. Just a steady look that didn’t reward him with complicity.
“That’s a slightly theatrical way of putting it,” she said, as calmly as if he’d misquoted a figure. Her voice stayed light, but it carried an edge of correction. “It’s a building. Not a moral duty.”
Across from her, Seth didn’t move, which was its own kind of movement. His posture remained immaculate (shoulders squared, napkin precisely folded) yet something in him tightened as if the air had turned colder. Dara watched him with the detached focus she saved for problems she actually intended to solve. People had habits when they were under strain: they talked too much, they got cruel, they performed. Seth did none of those. He simply became… controlled, as if control were the only thing keeping him intact.
Toby’s smile held, waiting for her to soften it into a shared joke.
Dara met his eyes and let the silence stretch half a beat too long. “Also,” she added, “if we’re going to talk about exhaustion, there’s plenty to go around in every postcode.” She tipped her head, a polite concession that offered him nothing. “Let’s not turn the table into a therapy session.”
Not for Seth, anyway. Not with Toby holding the microphone.
Instead, she watches Seth with the same unsentimental attention she gave a delayed shipment or a client about to misread a clause: not for entertainment, not to be moved, but to find the stress-point before something buckled. His glass is held a touch too perfectly: thumb aligned along the stem as if a millimetre mattered. The fingers don’t shift. The hand doesn’t relax. At the knuckles, the skin pales, betraying the effort his voice refuses to acknowledge.
He speaks with that maddening, controlled courtesy (each word placed as neatly as the cutlery) yet his body tells a different story. Stillness, Dara thinks, is not calm. Stillness is restraint.
There’s a faint tic at the corner of his mouth, quickly smoothed away, and his gaze stays level as if looking anywhere else would be an admission. Not contempt, exactly. Not superiority. Something more defensive than that: a man refusing to give an audience the satisfaction of watching him bleed.
Dara’s own shoulders ease, oddly. Competence, she can work with. Pain, she can respect. Performance, she has no patience for. And Seth, however frosted, doesn’t feel like a performer.
Seth’s jaw worked once, almost imperceptibly. An economical clench and release, like a man grinding down a word before it could escape. He didn’t glance away; he didn’t lift his brows in the easy, aristocratic dismissal Toby was angling for. Instead he held his expression in place, impeccable as a pressed shirt, while the tendons at his throat tightened with the effort of it. His hand stayed on the glass stem, steady to the point of accusation, and Dara caught the faint whitening at his knuckles as though courtesy required physical force.
It wasn’t indifference. It was containment.
She found herself watching the discipline the way she watched a tight deadline being met: impressed, slightly uneasy, and unwilling to pretend it cost nothing.
Toby seized the pause like a stage cue, launching into a glossy little monologue about old money and newer rot, about roofs and reputations propped up by “people you never see”. Lila’s mouth tightened; someone gave a cautious laugh. Dara didn’t. Her eyes stayed on Seth, steady as a hand on a railing, making it impossible to turn him into an anecdote while he was still sitting there.
What Dara read in Seth’s restraint wasn’t hauteur so much as triage: a man keeping the seams of himself pressed flat while the table’s attention worried at them. The knowledge didn’t make her gentler; it made her more exacting. If Toby wanted to turn him into a lesson, she’d have to look harder, listen properly: refuse the easy story and find the true one.
Sound swelled against Seth’s nerves, cutlery clinking, a chair leg scraping, someone’s laugh flaring a beat too bright, until it all blurred into a single, needling pressure that made him sit straighter without meaning to. The dining room was built for voices, for a certain kind of ease that assumed you enjoyed being looked at; tonight it felt like a bell jar, each small noise amplified and held.
He let his shoulders settle a fraction, as if relaxation could be performed into reality. The old trick: breathe through the nose, answer as though nothing had changed. He counted the beats between one sentence and the next, smoothing them down. There were rules for this. Rules implied choice.
Toby’s patter rolled on, charming and faintly poisonous, the sort of commentary that made other people complicit by laughing. Seth kept his eyes on the table linen, the crisp white field between plates, and chose not to look at the staff moving at the edges. Not because he didn’t see them, but because noticing them too openly would become part of Toby’s story. The people you never see. The people you pretend not to.
He took a sip of wine that tasted of nothing. His fingers remained at the stem of the glass, precise, refusing to show the tremor he could feel starting behind his ribs, the muscle-memory urge to stand and leave under the excuse of checking on something (anything) that belonged to him alone.
“How many,” Dara had asked, softly now, as if the table’s appetite for spectacle had already put her off, “people does it take?”
The question wasn’t a trap. That was what unsettled him. It had weight without relish, curiosity without the sting of a verdict. Still, the room held its breath in the way it always did when someone asked about money without using the word.
Seth’s tongue pressed to his teeth. He could answer with numbers. He could answer with a joke. He could answer with a mild rebuke. The danger was answering with truth.
Dara didn’t join the noise. She let Toby’s performance wash over her without lending it the mercy of a laugh, and instead watched Seth with a kind of patience that made the table feel suddenly less crowded and more exposed. He had met every variety of scrutiny (curiosity dressed as compliment, admiration that wanted a favour, pity disguised as concern) but this was different. Her attention wasn’t soft. It was clean.
He could feel it like a draught along the back of his neck. Not an assessment of his manners or his lineage, but of the small, involuntary things: the way his jaw worked once, twice, as if he were grinding down words before they could escape; the slight hitch when the conversation tilted towards labour and money and the unmentionable mechanics of keeping stone upright. She wasn’t looking for a crack to wedge open, exactly. She was watching to see where the cracks already were.
Accuracy was worse than judgement, because it offered nowhere to hide. It made his careful composure feel less like armour and more like a transparent cover, something anyone with the right angle could see through.
And, infuriatingly, she did not look away.
Dara’s voice threads through the general clatter, pitched low enough that it ought to be private, and therefore isn’t. “How many people does it take, really?” Not the airy, admiring sort of question (no polite gasp at cornices, no theatrics about history) just the plain arithmetic of upkeep. It strikes him beneath the breastbone, a tight, reflexive clench, as if his body has taken a blow his mind refuses to name. His shoulders want to angle away, to present less of himself, to let the portraits and plasterwork answer on his behalf. He tastes the old irritation, at intrusion, at pity, at being turned into an explanation, then, beneath it, something more unsettling: the sense she’s asking because she genuinely wants to know.
He felt the table recalibrate. Toby’s gaze clicked into place, bright with the prospect of sport; Lila went momentarily still, the way a person does when bracing for a glass to fall. Conversation carried on, but with a collective tilt towards him, each laugh landing a fraction too late. Seth kept his expression smooth and uninformative, yet his jaw tightened without permission, a small betrayal pulsing at the hinge.
He bought himself a second the way he’d been taught: eyes to the wine, a quiet inhale, the mild lift of one brow that suggested accounts and staffing rotas rather than anything personal. Inwardly he ran through escape routes, garden, library, the blessed neutrality of weather, and safer replies. Dara’s calm, unblinking patience made every retreat feel conspicuously like capitulation.
Seth let the question settle on the linen between them, neither swatting it away nor showing his teeth. It wasn’t admiration dressed up as enquiry; it was work, numbers, the unromantic spine of any operation. The sort of thing he thought about at three in the morning when the house was cold and the ledger colder. He treated it with the same courteous attention he would have given a request for the salt. Because to treat it otherwise would be to admit it had struck something tender.
He lowered his eyes to the bowl of his wineglass. The stem was cool, slick beneath his fingers, a small, controllable detail. Around him, forks scraped and someone laughed too brightly at a joke he’d missed, the sound landing and skittering as though the room were fractionally off-level. Toby’s voice hovered at the edge of it all, poised. Ready to turn any honest answer into a parable with a villain.
Seth could have made it a story. He could have said Oh, one simply doesn’t count, could have given her the safe, vague nonsense people traded when they were pretending nothing required effort. Or he could have iced her out, turned to Lila, asked about her latest project, let Dara feel the sting of not belonging.
Instead he looked back at her.
Dara Kingsley sat as if she’d chosen the chair rather than been placed in it, shoulders easy, gaze level. No coyness. No hunting for a weak spot to press. She was waiting in a way that suggested she’d accept the truth without theatrics. It was infuriating, how competent she was at it: how she made sincerity seem like a practical option.
Seth’s expression stayed mild; he let the pause read as thought, not refusal. He felt the faint ache at his jaw where he’d been clenching, the muscle protesting like a warning.
When he spoke, his voice came out even, almost conversational, and he was aware, too late, that he was giving her more than politeness: he was giving her his attention, unarmoured for the space of a breath.
He ought to have slid sideways into something safer, stonework, provenance, the weather over the ha-ha, anything that could be admired without being counted. But Dara’s question was built like a plank: plain, load-bearing, impossible to pretend you hadn’t seen it.
“Three,” he said.
The word dropped between the candlesticks with a quiet finality. Not about three, not it varies. Three. Someone, further down, let out a small involuntary sound, half surprise, half judgement wrapped in etiquette. Seth didn’t look to see who; he could feel the room doing its arithmetic without him.
He kept his hand steady on the glass, as if this were no more personal than stating the day’s temperature. “Mornings are the worst of it,” he added, because he could hear how the number would otherwise metastasise into myth. “Heating, boilers, gutters: things that fail quietly until they don’t.”
A faint crease appeared between Dara’s brows; not pity, exactly. Attention, sharpened and oddly respectful, as though she’d been handed a specification and was already imagining the work behind it. Seth caught the softening at the corner of her mouth and felt, with a flash of irritation, how exposed competence could be when someone treated it as real.
Toby’s laugh came too quickly, the sort that arrived pre-packaged with a meaning. “Three,” he repeated, drawing it out as if tasting it. “Well. That’s practically a Regency novel, isn’t it? One footman valiantly polishing the silver while the roof caves in around him.”
A few people smiled on instinct; it was easier than deciding what they thought. Toby leaned back, letting his gaze sweep the portraits and the high plasterwork as though the room itself were his prop. “It’s mad, really,” he went on, voice pitched for the far end of the table. “All this, ” a vague gesture at the chandeliers, the linen, the inherited certainty, “balanced on a handful of early mornings and the heroic invisibility of other people’s hands.”
His eyes flicked to Dara, inviting her to join the joke. Then to Seth, inviting him to play villain or martyr.
Seth didn’t oblige him. He set his glass down with care and said, mildly, “Not a footman. Housekeeper. Grounds. Maintenance.” A neat triage, as if he were sorting invoices. “Routine is gutters, drains, boilers. Repairs are what happens when you pretend routine is optional.” His gaze lifted, cool. “And the public footpath means boundary checks, weekly, not when one remembers.” The correction was bloodless; the jaw beneath it wasn’t.
Dara kept her gaze on him, not Toby, and something in her expression shifted: less defensive, more exacting, as if she were running fresh figures and finding him oddly credible. Not sympathy. Appraisal. The kind he was used to in a boardroom, not at a mahogany table under ancestral faces. Seth felt it land and, irrationally, resented his own honesty: the unvarnished hours, the vigilance. For a beat, the Hall wasn’t legacy but labour, newly visible.
Dara perches on the wrought-iron chair by the orangery window, one leg tucked beneath her as if she can anchor herself to the place by sheer friction. Beyond the glass, rain combs the gravel into darker ribbons and turns the lawns into something slick and theatrical. Inside, the air smells of damp soil and citrus leaves, the kind of green, living perfume that ought to be restorative. It isn’t, not today.
Her coffee has gone from promising to merely warm, then to a sort of punishing tepidness that makes every sip feel like an accusation. She rolls the paper cup between her palms anyway, as though heat can be coaxed back by persistence. On her phone, a loading icon rotates with the lazy confidence of something that knows it has won.
“Come on,” she mutters, thumb tapping and then tapping harder, as if rudeness might shame the signal into returning. She tilts the screen towards the window, towards the sky, towards the nearest possible source of civilisation, and gets nothing for her effort except her own reflection: sharp-eyed, slightly too bright, performing competence at herself.
She tries to turn it into a joke before it can become a feeling. “I’m genuinely allergic to dead zones.” The words come out light, but there’s a slice under them: an edge of impatience that isn’t really about Wi‑Fi. Silence in a grand house has a way of making a person audible to herself. Every small worry she’s kept on a leash all week, about being watched, about saying the wrong thing, about being the novelty guest, pads closer when there’s nothing else to do but sit.
Her phone spins. She exhales through her nose, half a laugh, half a warning. “Brilliant. Of course.”
She considers going back inside, into the safer noise of other people’s conversation, but that means walking in with her irritation visible, and Dara Kingsley does not, as a general rule, walk into rooms empty-handed. She takes another sip of lukewarm coffee and pulls a face at it, then looks out at the rain like it might offer a better option.
The orangery door eased inward with a faint drag of swollen wood, letting in a thin gust that smelled of wet wool and gravel. Seth Harrington stepped through as if he’d been sent for. Coat collar up, hair damp at the edges, that careful composure tightened against the weather. He didn’t look at Dara. Of course he didn’t.
He crossed to the far end with the clipped, economical stride of a man conducting an inspection rather than entering a room where another human being existed. His attention went straight to the frame: fingers to the brass latch, a measured lift and press, a small frown as he nudged the pane until it sat more snugly. The movements were deft, practised. Estate management as choreography. A reason to be here; an alibi.
Dara watched him over the rim of her cup, waiting for the inevitable polite nothing. He kept his gaze trained on hinges and condensation, the citrus leaves, anywhere harmless.
Then her last complaint, half-joke and half-splinter, reached him. He stilled with his hand on the latch, shoulders held in a pause too precise to be accidental, as though something in the words had hooked beneath the armour and tugged.
For a beat, Seth looked as though he might simply withdraw. Offer her the courtesy of being left alone with her annoyance. His hand lingered on the latch, fingers whitening slightly against the brass. His jaw shifted once, a small, contained grind, the tell of a decision made under protest. Speaking meant engagement; engagement meant risk.
He kept his eyes on the rain-streaked glass rather than on her face and, when he finally did speak, there was none of the usual varnish. “There’s proper Wi‑Fi in the library.”
Proper landed with faint, proprietary precision, as if the word were a key he rarely lent out. Not an invitation exactly. A concession. A quiet admission that he’d heard her, worse, that he’d understood.
Dara blinked, as if her eyes had to refocus on a version of him that offered solutions instead of frost. She could have needled him (asked why a room full of thriving citrus was apparently a technological graveyard) but the quiet in his voice felt like a boundary, not an opening. “Right,” she said, and rose, smoothing her jacket with unnecessary care, taking her coffee like a prop she wasn’t ready to relinquish.
Seth gave the smallest nod, barely a dip of acknowledgement, then turned as if the matter were settled by physics. He didn’t look to see whether she complied. Still, he set off at a pace that was just a touch too unhurried to be accidental, long strides moderated into something she could match. Dara followed, coffee warming her palm, surprised by the clean relief of an offer with no hooks.
Seth moved off at once, shoulders set, as though motion itself would prevent this from becoming a conversation. He didn’t glance back to check she was following; the assumption was oddly intimate, like being included by default. Yet he also didn’t take the obvious route. Instead of the broad central corridor, the one that ran like a spine through the house and carried every footfall up into the portraits, he angled left into a narrower passage with a runner that swallowed sound.
Dara matched his pace, coffee slopping dangerously close to the rim. She had the absurd impression he was escorting her through a museum after hours: avoiding rooms that invited commentary, choosing the routes with fewer witnesses. A door ahead stuck slightly when he tried the handle; he didn’t tug, didn’t swear, didn’t make a show of it. He simply altered course without breaking stride, as if the house had spoken and he’d accepted the correction.
He opened another door before she reached for it. Not with any flourish: just a quick, economical movement that kept her from juggling cup, phone, and handle. The gesture was so mild it almost failed to register as manners. Consideration, filed under maintenance.
“You’ve got a lot of… systems,” Dara said, keeping her voice pitched low because his back seemed to request it.
A pause. “Routines,” Seth replied. “It’s only manageable if it’s predictable.”
Manageable. Dara’s eyes travelled the details he probably didn’t see any more: the faint chill along the skirting, the way the plaster near a window bowled ever so slightly, a hairline crack disguised by paint. Money didn’t live here like it did in London; it sat in the walls and watched you. Predictable meant controlled.
“And the predictable bits,” she said, “which ones actually matter?”
This time he did look back, briefly, and the expression wasn’t warmth, exactly. More an assessment that landed on something like respect. “The bits that keep the place running,” he said. “The rest is… presentation.”
The word sounded as if he’d rather it weren’t true. Dara huffed a quiet laugh, not unkind. “Ah. Theatre.”
He didn’t correct her. He just held the next door as she passed, and the silence between them shifted from strained to chosen.
The library took them in with the discreet solemnity of a place used to keeping confidences. Warmth clung to the panelled walls as if the timber itself had remembered every winter, and the rain at the windows had been reduced to a milky blur, the world politely excluded. The fire was not roaring (no dramatic blaze for visitors) but a steady, competent core of heat that made the air smell faintly of ash and old paper.
Seth moved with the unselfconscious certainty of someone navigating in the dark. He crossed to the desk, set his hand briefly on the leather blotter as though checking it was still where it ought to be, then nudged the green-shaded lamp into life. The click was quiet, final. Light pooled over the desk in a controlled oval, gilding the edges of correspondence trays and the brass of a pen stand that had seen better polish.
He didn’t say, here you are. He simply made the room usable, as if comfort were a practical problem to be solved rather than a kindness to be offered.
Dara’s coffee steamed in her hand; her phone sat uselessly in the other, suddenly vulgar in all that calm.
Dara paused on the worn threshold, as if the room required a different sort of entry. The library smelled of soot and binding glue and something medicinally clean that made her want to mind her elbows. She stepped in anyway, letting the door thud softly behind her, and found her voice automatically dropping, not from reverence exactly, but because the quiet seemed to have mass.
“Is the Wi‑Fi any better in here?” she asked, absurdly polite.
“A little,” Seth said, equally low, as though they’d wandered into a church that happened to shelve first editions.
It struck her then: how the tightness in him unlatched. His shoulders, squared like a formal jacket, eased by a fraction. Without the need to perform, he became all function: calm, precise, almost gentle, like the room had taught him how.
Her phone sulked in her palm, the screen frozen in a petulant spin. Dara pulled a face at it. “Brilliant. Love a house with… vibes and no bandwidth.” Seth’s breath left him in the thinnest exhale. Almost a laugh, quickly reclaimed. He didn’t comment; he just tipped his chin towards an armchair tucked nearer the router, then, with a small, precise gesture, indicated the patch where the heat held and the draught didn’t. Guidance offered like that landed with an unsettling intimacy.
When she finally looked up from the stubborn, buffering screen, she found him not looking at her at all, but at the window: at the rain threading down the glass in slow, orderly tracks. Something in his face had unknotted, the sharpness blurred at the edges. He didn’t hurry to speak. He let the hush sit between them like a settled cloth, and Dara felt the terms tilt: not hospitality performed, but a rare share of the quiet he kept for himself.
Dara let her eyes travel, slow as the rain outside, along the ranks of books that seemed to have been placed not to be read but to be relied upon. Leather spines, gilt titles dulled by decades of hands, the occasional paper jacket like a modern intruder. Then her gaze lifted, inevitably, to the portraits above the shelves: men in hunting pink and women in satin, all of them painted with that particular expression of benign possession, as if the room existed because they’d once said it should.
They watched without watching. Sentries, but tired ones.
Dara took a sip of coffee and tasted it go lukewarm. She’d been careful since arriving: careful in a way she didn’t usually bother with, saving her opinions, filing away the little rules she kept tripping over. Don’t swear too loudly. Don’t ask what something costs. Don’t stand in the wrong doorway as though you might get in the way of a life that had been running long before you walked into it.
She realised, with a jolt of irritation at herself, that she’d started doing it in here, too: lowering her voice, holding her shoulders a certain way, pretending that she wasn’t scanning for cues like a person in a foreign city without a map.
Her glance flicked to Seth, to the way he belonged to the room by virtue of knowing its silences. He’d offered it to her as though he were lending out a limb.
Without trying to soften it, because softness in this house sometimes came out patronising, she said, quietly, “Do you ever get tired of performing it?”
The word seemed to strike him physically. Seth’s shoulders went rigid, not in offence exactly but in instant readiness, like a man bracing for impact. The ease she’d watched settle over him a moment ago snapped back into place, his posture becoming a kind of barricade. His fingers tightened around his cup with unnecessary precision, as if he could control the temperature by force of will.
Dara watched him register the trap he could claim she’d set and the one he couldn’t: that she’d noticed. That she’d named it.
“I don’t. His gaze moved, carefully, to a point just past her shoulder, then back, as though eye contact were an additional risk.
She held still, giving him space in the only way she knew: by not apologising for the question.
The reflex comes up in him like a shutter: a remark about Londoners and their obsession with signals, or a neat little question lobbed back at her, And do you ever stop performing competence? He can hear the cadence of it, dry and faintly cutting, a safe exit that would leave her laughing or, better, irritated enough to drop it. His tongue almost shapes the first syllable.
He doesn’t let it.
Seth’s jaw works once, as if he’s grinding the impulse to powder. He fixes his attention on the cup in his hand. Cream china, a hairline crack near the handle he’d noticed years ago and never mentioned. The edge of it gives him something harmless to focus on, a border he can keep his thoughts behind. For a beat too long he watches the surface of the tea settle, the tiny tremor of his fingers betraying more than he’d like.
When he looks up, it’s with a kind of deliberate surrender, as though he’s choosing the bruise over the armour. The expression on his face isn’t soft. It’s worse than that: plain, almost resigned, the look of a man stepping into cold water because there’s nowhere else to go.
“It isn’t a performance,” he says, and the instinctive frost in it makes him wince. He adjusts, the next words stripped back. “Not entirely. It’s… maintenance.”
He speaks as if reciting a timetable he could do in his sleep: up before six when the stone’s still holding the night, the boiler coaxed into something resembling warmth, radiators bled one by one because they sulk if ignored. Doors along the south corridor that swell with damp and have to be tested, gently, before a guest shoulders them and snaps a hinge. Windows opened to an exact fraction. Too little and the glass sweats, too much and the curtains drink the cold. It is, he finishes, a constant watching, as if the house is always considering how to fall apart.
The inventory goes on, brisk as a ledger. Old pipes that need cajoling, tap the cistern, listen, wait, before they’ll consent to fill. Roof slates shuffled after every hard wind, patched where they must be and left where they can be, because there is never enough money or time to do it properly. And every lapse, every drip or stuck latch, lands on him as moral failure: neglect, carelessness, decline. He offers it without flourish, no appeal for sympathy. Just the hard, spare geometry of it.
When he stops, the quiet snaps back into place like a rug smoothed over a stain. Seth holds his cup too steady, as if he’s bracing for the sound of his own words breaking. The ache isn’t the early mornings or the damp or the endless coaxing; it’s the admission that “effortless” is something he manufactures, daily, and that the polish is less pride than a lid clamped down.
Dara lets the quiet sit between them, neither of them reaching to fill it with apology or bravado. The library has its own weather: the faint prickle of heat from the fire, the dark smell of leather and old dust, rain ticking gently at the windows as if trying to be let in. Seth looks as though he’s said too much and is waiting for the penalty to arrive.
She doesn’t give him one.
Instead, she tips her mug slightly towards the room, a private sort of salute. “All right,” she says, keeping her voice low as if the spines might take offence, “tell me which rules are load-bearing and which are… decorative guilt.”
His gaze flicks to her, quick and sharp, as if checking for mockery. Finding none, he gives a sound that’s almost an exhale of relief. “Decorative guilt,” he repeats, and the corner of his mouth twitches as if he hates that it’s funny.
Dara shifts in the chair, tucking one foot under the other without thinking, then remembers herself and stills. As if the furniture might report her. “Seriously,” she adds, softer. “I don’t want to break anything. I just, I keep stepping on invisible tripwires.”
Seth’s fingers tighten once around his cup. “Most of them are there so someone doesn’t have to say, ‘Please don’t ruin my home,’ out loud,” he says, clipped, then pauses as if recognising the ugliness of it. His eyes drop to the hearthrug. “And some are simply… inherited habits. Theatre.”
Dara nods, practical, absorbing. “Okay. Give me the shortlist. If I’m going to be judged, I’d like to at least be judged for something I chose.”
Another beat. Then Seth’s expression shifts. Still guarded, but rearranged into something like instruction, like competence offered rather than displayed. Seth’s mouth tightens, then gives. One short exhale that could be a laugh if you didn’t know him. He lifts a hand, counting off with the edge of his thumb: “Floors first. If people treat the house like a pub, you spend the next decade chasing damage you can’t properly mend.”
Seth’s mouth tightens as if the admission has a taste. Then it relents: one short breath that might pass for a laugh if you weren’t paying attention to how carefully he rationed them. He raises his hand between them, palm angled towards the firelight, and uses the blunt edge of his thumb to mark out an invisible list on his forefinger, the way a man does when he’d rather be precise than kind.
“Floors,” he says. Not the floors. “They’re old. They move. They don’t forgive.”
Dara’s eyes drop, instinctively, to the boards nearest the hearthrug: the soft sheen, the hairline gaps where seasons had breathed through. Seth watches her see it, and his voice steadies with the relief of being understood on first attempt.
“If people treat the house like a pub, boots, spilled wine, chairs dragged about, then you spend the next decade chasing damage you can’t properly mend.” He pauses, jaw working once. “Not without pulling half the place up. And we don’t.
He shifts to the second count, and something in him settles: once he is speaking in categories, he can pretend it’s merely management. “Staff,” he says, the word flattened into practicality. “Some rules exist so no one gets cornered in a corridor, or made to laugh at a joke they didn’t choose, or blamed for a guest’s carelessness.” His thumb marks the next point with a small, decisive tap. “You don’t summon them like props. You don’t call them by diminutives. You don’t ask for favours that aren’t their job and then act as if you’ve been generous for letting them do it.”
He glances at Dara, expecting bristle. Finding only attention, he adds, quieter, “If you break those, it isn’t charming. It’s cruel.”
Dara nods once, sharp and approving, as if filing it under non-negotiable. “And the rest?” she asks: not teasing, not challenging. An invitation to finish the thought.
Seth’s gaze slips to the window where rain writes in slow, straight lines. His mouth tightens. “The rest,” he says at last, “is to stop people asking what things cost.” A beat, then, more bitterly: “Or why they can’t.”
Dara’s expression didn’t do the thing he’d come to dread: no pity, no careful rounding of edges. It sharpened into interest. “So pageantry is…” She tipped her head, considering the panelling as if it were a spreadsheet. “Crowd control.”
Seth held her gaze. A thin, unwilling relief moved through him, swiftly banked; she’d read the terms, and (miracle of miracles) wasn’t trying to rewrite them aloud.
The log settled in the grate with a sharp, sudden pop: an impatient little gunshot in the quiet. Seth was on his feet before the sound had properly finished, poker in hand, the movement so automatic it bordered on rude. Not hurried, exactly. Efficient. As if the world might splinter if the fire went the least bit wrong.
Dara watched him for a half-second, coffee cooling between her palms, and understood something she hadn’t when she’d first arrived: the house wasn’t simply his home. It was a machine he kept running by touch, by habit, by reflex. The flicker of flame across his knuckles made him look almost softer. Until he set the poker into the coals with surgical precision.
He nudged the log, angled it, coaxed a steadier burn. He didn’t swear. Didn’t mutter. He didn’t even glance back to see if she’d noticed. That, more than the action itself, felt like a tell: he assumed he’d be seen. Judged. Found wanting.
“Apologies,” he said, and the word was clipped enough to be a blade. Not for standing: more for having a body that reacted.
“It’s fine.” Dara set her mug down on the table without using a coaster and then, with a quick, self-correcting thought, slid it onto the nearest one anyway. The sort of tiny theatre he’d just explained, and she could practically feel him clock it. His shoulders tightened a fraction, then released, as if he’d decided not to make it a lesson.
The fire shifted again, a low, soft crackle now, and Seth stilled with the poker half-lifted, listening like a man waiting for a second fault.
“You do that a lot,” Dara said, lightly, aiming it at his hands rather than his face.
His eyes flicked to hers at last, grey, guarded, giving nothing away. “Do what.”
“Fix things before anyone has to mention they’re broken.” She kept her voice low, like they were negotiating with the room itself. “It’s… impressive,” she added, because it was, and because she refused to let admiration sound like accusation.
Seth’s jaw worked once. “It’s,” he began, and stopped. The poker hovered, suspended between correction and surrender.
Dara rose and came to stand beside him, close enough that he could feel the heat she carried in from the corridor, not so close it read as a claim. She stopped at the edge of his orbit, the place people with sense paused, waiting to be invited, or, more often, not.
The library smelt of old leather and damp wool. Rain fretted at the panes, turning the world outside into a watercolour. Seth kept his attention on the grate, on the geometry of flame and timber, as if precision could keep everything else at bay.
“You don’t have to make it effortless for me,” Dara said.
Not brightly. Not with the lilt of a joke. Her voice had dropped to the same register as the fire: low, steady, private. She didn’t look at his face; she watched his hands and the iron poker, offering him the small mercy of not being examined.
Seth’s shoulders tightened, then held. He could feel the pull of old reflexes, host, smooth, deflect. She wasn’t asking for a performance, though. She was, infuriatingly, making space for the man underneath it.
Dara’s fingers hovered near his sleeve, not touching. An asking without words.
Seth’s grip eased as though some invisible screw had finally been turned loose. The poker, halfway between command and correction, hung there, ridiculous, domestic, suddenly too intimate a prop for what she’d said. He drew a breath that caught, fractionally, on the way in, and for once he didn’t sand it down into a brisk remark.
“I don’t know how to do it any other way,” he said.
The words came out clipped by habit, but they weren’t armoured. No joke, no lecture about tradition, no neat little rule to hide behind. Just fact, plain as ash on a hearthstone. His throat worked once, betraying the effort it cost him not to turn the admission into irritation, not to lift his chin and make it sound like a choice. He kept his eyes on the fire, as if it were safer to confess to flame than to her.
Dara lifted her hand slowly, deliberately, as though offering him the dignity of retreat. For a heartbeat her fingers hovered, then brushed the cuff of his sleeve: barely there, a question written in skin rather than speech. Seth did not flinch. He turned towards her, not abruptly, but with the same measured care he gave the house, and leaned in as if deciding to fall.
Their mouths met: one careful press, controlled to the point of austerity, and somehow more intimate for it. No flourish, no lingering for the sake of proving anything. When they separated, the quiet held. Dara didn’t step away or laugh it off; she simply breathed, steady, close. Seth stayed where he was, hands still, letting the logs settle and the fire speak for him.
Dara eased back first. Not an apology, not a scramble for a joke. She studied him with an expression that didn’t pry at meanings or ask for an explanation. It was worse, in a way, and better: she looked as though she’d filed the moment somewhere safe, marked it kept, and expected him to do the same.
Seth remained where he was, shoulders squared out of long practice, as if bracing against an invisible draught. Yet something in him unlatched. The tight hinge in his jaw loosened by a degree, then another, and with it the familiar anticipation of consequence, the postscript interrogation, the careful debrief, the demand that he translate himself into something manageable, failed to arrive. He realised, absurdly, that she wasn’t about to make him pay for it.
He forced his fingers to unclench from the poker, set it back with more care than the action deserved. The iron clink was small, domestic; it made the room feel occupied, not merely inhabited. Heat from the fire sat against his shins, steady and unremarkable, the kind of comfort he’d always considered background noise until it was suddenly not.
Dara’s mouth quirked, not quite a smile. Her eyes stayed on his, level and unperforming.
“You look,” she said, choosing the words as if they mattered, “like you’re waiting for someone to tell you off.”
His first instinct was to deflect: to raise a brow, to convert the observation into a witticism and be done. It rose in him like a reflex and died, unused.
“I’m not,” he said, then corrected, softer because it was truer, “I’m trying not to.”
She nodded as if that answer was sufficient. As if he were allowed to be unfinished. The silence that followed didn’t tighten; it widened, a space neither of them rushed to fill, and Seth found himself standing in it without flinching.
Dara crossed to the side table as if she’d decided something and didn’t intend to announce it. Her phone was still in her hand, thumb hovering in the habit of refresh, of checking, of proving to herself that the world hadn’t moved on without her. The orangery’s patchy signal had made her irritable; the library’s steady hush had made her wary. Now she placed the device down with an odd, careful precision. Screen turned to polished wood, not face-up like an invitation, not slid aside like a guilty secret. Just put away.
It was, Seth realised, the kind of gesture that in other people came with commentary: I’m being present, look how well I can behave. Dara offered no such performance. She didn’t glance at him to see if he’d noticed, and that, perversely, was what made him notice.
His mind reached automatically for something managerial (no phones at meals, no devices by the folios, the table’s finish) then stalled. There was no need. No threat. Only a small relinquishing, voluntary, almost tender in its practicality.
He didn’t correct her. He didn’t fill the space with a rule. He simply let it stand.
Seth went to the hearth and shifted one log a fraction, coaxing it into better alignment with the sort of unobtrusive care the house demanded. It wasn’t theatre. If anything, it was the opposite: a private habit of tending a room so it didn’t ask questions. When the flames caught properly, he stepped back and found he had nothing left to do with his hands. No clipboard task, no excuse. Only the quiet, and the faint, clean crackle of resin.
Dara chose the nearest chair and sat as though she belonged to it, not lounging, not perching. She didn’t look up to see whether he minded. The lack of permission-seeking was a small, shocking revision of the usual guest-and-host ballet, and Seth didn’t move to correct the steps.
“So,” Dara murmured, tipping her chin towards the corridor beyond the door, “what’s actually necessary?” It wasn’t a sneer, or a dare. More like she’d handed him a small, solvable crisis. Seth surprised himself by answering without edge: which rituals kept the staff untroubled, which kept guests from trampling boundaries, and which were simply there to make the house look effortless. With each clean division, his voice steadied.
Rain worried at the panes in a steady insistence, turning the gardens into a smeared wash of grey and leaf. Inside, the library held its warmth like a secret. Seth had always treated rooms as territory to be managed; now it felt, disconcertingly, like a refuge they were both electing to occupy. Dara inclined towards him when he spoke, close enough that he caught the citrus of her shampoo, and he didn’t recoil. The silence that followed didn’t sharpen into threat. It softened, almost, into invitation.
Lila announced, with the sort of brightness that made Seth’s teeth itch, that the weather had “turned theatrical.” Her voice went up half a note, a performer’s choice, and she clapped her hands twice as if there were a stage manager somewhere off to the side waiting for her cue.
Outside the long windows the sky had indeed arranged itself for effect: a band of late sun breaking under bruised cloud, lighting the far fields in a colour too gold to be trusted. The rain had stopped in that indecisive way it had, fine needles in the air one moment, nothing the next, leaving the gravel dark and the hedges slick.
“Honestly,” Lila went on, already moving, “if we don’t go now it’ll be gone. It’s doing that moody Turner thing.”
Toby made an appreciative noise. “You’d know.”
Dara’s laugh came quickly, then faltered as her gaze snagged on Seth’s face, as if she’d realised he was not, in fact, part of the entertainment. Seth kept his expression arranged, neutral, faintly bored, because anything more would invite commentary. He could feel the house around them holding its breath, all corridors and portraits and the dumb insistence of legacy.
“Folly?” Dara asked, as though she were trying the word on for size.
“Little hilltop ridiculousness,” Toby supplied. “A monument to people with time.”
“A viewpoint,” Seth corrected, because the correction mattered more than it should have. Because time, in this place, was not an indulgence but a ledger, and he did not want Dara looking at it through Toby’s lens.
Lila had already lifted a wool scarf from the back of a chair and pressed it into Dara’s hands with brisk competence. “Here. Unless you want to look like you’ve been exiled from your own comfort.”
“I have my own comfort,” Dara said, but she looped it on anyway, fingers deft and unbothered.
Seth watched her do it and felt, absurdly, a small loosening in his chest. Not relief. Something adjacent. Lila’s eyes flicked to him, a silent warning: behave. He gave the slightest nod, which was all the compliance he could afford, and followed as she began to herd them out of the room like an artist rearranging difficult subjects before the light changed.
Lila made it sound less like a suggestion than a law of physics. If they paused to find gloves, to finish tea, to debate whether the air still held rain, the light would simply vanish out from under them and they would all have to stand there, indoors, pretending that was what they’d intended.
“Right,” she said, briskly cheerful, already walking. “Coats on, shoes that can cope, and no, ” her gaze landed on Toby with fond menace “, no one is allowed to have an existential crisis in the hall. We can do that at altitude.”
It was a small trick, Seth recognised: she bundled the decision into the group and wrapped it in humour, so refusal would register as sulking. People fell into motion almost in self-defence, reaching for collars and pockets. Even Dara, who looked as though she might ordinarily have asked for the rules in writing, slid into step with a quick, wry lift of her brows, scarf ends bouncing.
Seth followed because not following would be noted, and because Lila had already made staying behind feel like a kind of rudeness. Behind them the house shut its mouth, and ahead the drive gleamed like poured slate.
With the easy choreography of someone long practised at managing other people’s frayed edges, Lila altered the formation before anyone could remark on it. A half-step here, a shoulder angled there, and she was neatly between Toby and Seth as they funnelled into the corridor, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that she should be the soft barrier.
“Oh. “Actually, no, I remember. By the low wall: otherwise you get everyone’s hair doing that Brontë thing.” She smiled at Toby as if inviting him to be agreeable, and kept walking.
At the cloak stand Lila didn’t so much offer as equip. She fished out a spare wool scarf, soft, faintly smelling of cedar, and pressed it into Dara’s palms with practised efficiency, looping it once as if fastening a seatbelt. No fuss, no questions, no apology for the imposition; warmth, apparently, was a problem with a single sensible answer and a small, decisive smile.
Dara took the scarf as though it were an object with rules she hadn’t been briefed on: chin dipping in thanks, fingers tightening once at the fringe. Outside, the air had that wet-stone bite that made conversation feel louder than it ought. Lila set off at a purposeful amble, shepherding them into a loose, moving constellation: near enough for camaraderie, far enough that Toby’s wit couldn’t find a single throat to press against.
Dara appeared at Seth’s shoulder the way a sensible person might appear beside a lamppost on a dark street: not demanding, not quite asking, simply placing herself where the light was. At first it could have passed for coincidence (Lila’s herding, the width of the path, the brief bottleneck at the back steps) but whenever the formation loosened again Dara adjusted with small, efficient choices and ended up there once more.
Seth felt it in the arithmetic of footsteps. He slowed to avoid a muddy patch; she slowed too, not stumbling into his space, not darting ahead to make a point of independence. When the others drifted into a loose knot (Toby a half-turn sideways so he could be heard without having to look at anyone properly) Dara didn’t angle toward the easier laughter. She kept her hands in her coat pockets and her gaze forward, as if she’d decided the scenery was more trustworthy than the social temperature.
“You’re not obliged to babysit,” Seth said, low enough that it couldn’t become a performance.
Her head turned a fraction. “Is that what this is?”
“It’s what it looks like.”
Dara’s mouth twitched, humour held back like a coin she chose not to spend. “No. I’m choosing my company. There’s a difference.”
That, irritably, landed. Choice. Not being managed. Not being traded between people like a conversational prop. Seth let his eyes travel ahead, to Lila’s steady back and the dark line of trees beyond, and tried not to examine why the neatness of Dara’s refusal made his chest feel slightly less tight.
Behind them Toby’s voice carried, bright, amused, designed for an audience even on a footpath. “. The kind of pause Seth had learned to fill with a polite smile.
Dara didn’t fill it. She kept walking. The silence she left behind wasn’t rude; it was simply unhelpful.
Seth found himself speaking instead, because quiet between them was suddenly possible without it being a punishment. “If you want the view, the folly’s worth it. There’s an older track round the left. Less steep, but longer.”
“Less steep sounds like it was designed by someone who hated guests,” Dara said.
“Designed by someone who had to drag a horse up it,” Seth replied, and to his own surprise the dryness came out almost like ease.
The track pinched itself into a single-file ribbon, a slick seam of grass bordered by bracken that slapped at their coats when the wind worried it. The easy constellation collapsed into a line. Lila went ahead without looking back, as if the path itself were her authority. Toby’s voice, still attempting to perform, snagged and dulled. There was no space for it to bloom.
Seth watched Dara’s boots for half a second and hated that he knew, from the way she placed her weight, she was used to pavements and stairs, not hidden mud that behaved like a trap. The left edge of the track held water in a shallow, shining trough; the right rose slightly, a strip of firmer ground where the grass was shorter and pale at the tips.
He moved without ceremony, half a step outward and forward, taking the wetter line as though it had always been his. It was nothing: purely practical, the kind of adjustment one made for a guest and never mentioned.
Dara slid into the offered drier edge with the same unshowy efficiency. No startled gratitude. No joke to soften it. Just an accepting shift of her shoulder, as if this, too, were part of walking: noticing, choosing, not making a spectacle of small kindnesses.
With the line tightened into single file, conversation became optional: and therefore charged. They could speak, or they could let the only sounds be their own breathing and the wet hush of grass being pressed down. Seth was vaguely aware of Toby ahead, of Lila’s steady pace, but the narrowness made Dara’s presence beside him feel unavoidably chosen.
She waited long enough that it didn’t seem like a bid for attention. Then, without turning it into a joke, she said, “This ground. Why does it change here? It’s firmer, and the slope shifts. Is it drainage, or…?”
A practical question. Useful. As if understanding the land might be a way of understanding the house without having to ask anything personal at all.
“It’s drainage,” Seth said, brisk. “The rise is Stanner Brow: old spoil from when they cut the track in the 1880s. That firmer strip’s chalk; it runs like a spine up to the ha-ha. You’re feeling the boundary, as well. Estate land gives way to the parish right-of-way once you pass the ash copse. Different maintenance, different ground.”
Dara didn’t take the bait of scenery or scandal. “If the right-of-way cuts through,” she asked, “where does it run exactly? River side or the higher line? And who maintains it, parish, council, you?” It wasn’t flirtation; it was orientation. Seth heard his own voice change: less hostly varnish, more exact. “Parish, technically. But we keep it passable. The stile’s Victorian. Replaced in ’72.”
Toby drifted ahead and then (inevitably) turned, walking backward with the careless balance of someone who had built his life on being watched. The path might as well have been a catwalk. He kept his arms loose, palms occasionally out as if inviting applause from the hedgerows, and spoke over his shoulder in that bright, confidential tone that suggested you’d been chosen as the audience.
“It’s the bit I always love,” he said, pausing just long enough to let the others close the distance. “The grand houses doing the humble act. A sort of… curated frugality. Threadbare, but in an heirloom way.”
Lila made a small, noncommittal sound that could have been agreement or a warning. Seth heard it and didn’t look at her.
Toby’s gaze flicked, searching for the cleanest line to Dara. “And don’t you think,” he went on, “there’s something delicious about old money cosplaying austerity? Like, oh no, the poor dears, they simply must make do with their priceless panelling and their tragic, tragic acreage.”
There was a damp breath of laughter from somewhere up the line: more reflex than amusement. Toby took it as oxygen. He quickened, still walking backward, never once glancing at his own footing. Seth watched the soles of Toby’s boots skim over roots and stones and felt a tired irritation that was oddly personal, as if Toby were mocking not the estate but Seth’s right to occupy his own ground without commentary.
“You can see the performance, though,” Toby added, softer now, as if he were confiding rather than declaiming. “The whole thing. The effort of making effort look effortless.”
Seth kept his eyes on the narrow strip of path. He could, with very little imagination, picture Toby going down hard, mud, ego, an indignant oath, and for a moment the fantasy was almost restful. Instead, Toby continued, immaculate, angled perfectly to catch Dara’s face.
“And of course,” Toby said lightly, “none of it is ever quite as stable as it wants you to think.”
Dara’s laugh arrived on time, as if her body had a calendar reminder for charming men. It was light, neat, over almost before it had properly begun: then she let it fall away, not cruelly, simply unoffered. No second laugh, no encouraging tilt of the head. The silence that followed was not a rebuke, just a closed door.
She watched her own boots for a few steps, registering the way the gravel thinned where the track had been patched, the slight cant of the path as it began to climb, the deliberate interruption of the tree line as though someone had edited the view with a ruler. Everything here was arranged to look as if it had never been arranged at all. She’d built companies on making choices invisible; she recognised the trick.
Toby’s voice kept reaching for her, bright and angled, but her attention slid sideways to the land itself. The seam where pasture met rougher verge, the way the hedge was thicker on one side, the ground changing underfoot. She wasn’t sulking. She simply stopped giving him what he wanted, and the air around them altered: less theatre, more walk.
Toby, sensing the slip, lifted his voice into something sunnier. “This reminds me of a place in Sussex: same sort of noble melancholy, except their ‘rustic’ tea came with a sponsored gin. Very authentic.” He laughed first, to cue the others, and added, more pointed, “Though at least here you don’t pretend you’re not doing it.”
No one quite took the bait. The path was steeper now, the wind brisk enough to steal easy laughter. Lila offered him a glance, gentle, warning, an invitation to soften, but even she didn’t throw herself into patching the moment. She adjusted her scarf and let the quiet stand.
Their footsteps began to set the tempo instead: gravel crunch, a gate latch, the soft complaint of leather. Toby’s words, for once, had nowhere to land.
Dara drifted closer to Seth: no hush of intimacy, just the instinct to stand beside the person who actually knew the ground under them. “That bend in the river,” she said, nodding toward the darker line of trees, “does it flood the lower fields, or does it behave?” Then, sharp as a pin, she pointed at the grassy dip. “And the ha-ha. How far does it run? What’s it hiding, and from who?”
She kept looking outward, not in reverence but with the brisk concentration of someone reading a map: the intentional gap in the trees, the half-hidden track worn hard enough to be used and soft enough to be overlooked, the way the slope seemed to shepherd walkers towards the hill as if by design. It made Seth adjust his answers: less anecdote, more fact. “Planted after the ’47 gale,” he said. “And that path’s maintained because it’s a right-of-way.”
At the fork, the main path swung left. Seth angled right instead, towards the rougher track that cut along the upper hedge. He didn’t look back; he didn’t need to. Lila’s voice carried even when she tried to make it sound casual, bright as a bell she could pretend she wasn’t ringing.
“I ought to check the top gate,” he said, as if announcing an errand to the housekeeper. It came out clipped, procedural.
Dara fell in beside him without asking permission. “Is the gate likely to stage a revolt in the next ten minutes?”
“It’s a possibility,” Seth said. “They have ambitions.”
Her laugh was quick, then softened into something that wasn’t quite amusement. She glanced back once, where Toby’s silhouette was too animated against the sky. “Convenient timing.”
“It’s maintenance,” Seth replied automatically. The word tasted of habit. Logistics as a shield.
“Mhm.” She didn’t press, which was an offence and a relief in equal measure.
The track narrowed, bordered by hawthorn and the kind of grass that looked harmless until it soaked your trouser hems. Seth lengthened his stride on instinct, the small, petty satisfaction of leaving the others to the easier way. He could tell himself it was sensible: less chance of someone wandering where they shouldn’t, less chance of Toby turning the estate into a stage. Yet his pulse sat a fraction too high for a man on a simple inspection.
Behind them, conversation thinned to a murmur, then to nothing at all, as if a door had shut in another wing of the house.
Dara kept pace: urban fitness, purposeful. “So what happens if the top gate’s open?” she asked, sounding genuinely interested.
“Sheep in the gardens,” Seth said. “Or walkers where they have no business being. Or both.”
“And you,” she said, very dry, “having a stroke.”
He huffed something that might have been a laugh if he’d been less practised at withholding it. “More paperwork than stroke.”
Dara’s gaze moved over the land with an appraising steadiness, not reverent, not dismissive. “Right. Show me what you’re checking.”
The track crested and the estate fell away in a soft, controlled slump of pasture and tree line. Seth found himself indicating things with two fingers, as if he were briefing a man from the council. “That darker strip. Clay. It holds water for days after rain. You think it’s firm, and then you’re ankle-deep and furious.” He caught himself and added, more neutrally, “We keep the mower off it.”
Dara’s eyes didn’t go glassy the way most guests’ did. She followed the line of his hand as though he’d sketched it on paper. “So you route people around it,” she said. Not a question. A solution.
Along the hedge, the hawthorn bent in a deliberate pattern. “Laid last winter,” he said. “Stops it getting gappy.” He pointed lower, where the grass was chewed shorter. “Sheep try there, always. But the wire’s new. So they don’t bother.”
“Because boundaries only work if you keep proving they’re real,” Dara murmured, half to herself.
Seth’s jaw tightened; he wasn’t sure whether she meant livestock or people. “Something like that,” he said, and kept walking before he had to decide.
The river announced itself in a cooler breath before it appeared, a thread of dark water moving with quiet insistence beneath the trees. Then the footbridge came into view: narrow, sensible, built to endure rather than impress, its boards stained almost black by years of wet boots and careless soles. Seth stepped onto it first without thinking, muscle memory, an old domestic reflex, listening for the familiar complaint of timber under weight. It held, of course it did.
Halfway across he slowed, then stopped at the far end and turned, waiting. One hand settled on the rail, fingers splayed as if he could steady the whole contraption by sheer will. He watched Dara approach, alert to her footing, and found himself absurdly attentive to how she chose to cross.
He took her on beside the treeline, where the parkland’s prettiness gave up and the edge of things showed: a leaning stile, a scuffed post with a faded waymarker, the path worn flat by strangers’ feet. The public right-of-way cut along the boundary with the blunt confidence of law. Seth stopped. “That,” he said, curt. “Isn’t ours to close.” The irritation wasn’t at the rule: only at being reminded.
Without looking at her, he outlined it as if delivering an inventory: hedges cut back to break sightlines, gates kept latched, the housekeeper instructed what to challenge and what to pretend not to notice. His voice stayed level, phrases trimmed to usefulness. Then, lower, almost grudging: it’s never absolute. You can do everything properly and still be watched. Still be appraised. Still have strangers tramping through as if the place were theirs by right.
Dara kept her gaze pinned to the valley, to the patchwork of fields laid out with indifferent precision, as though it were easier to address distance than a man who spoke about boundaries with the flat competence of someone who’d had them stitched into him. The wind worried at her hair and she let it, grateful for the small, physical insistence of it. Her hands were shoved deep into her coat pockets, knuckles pressed hard against the lining to keep them from doing something betraying. Gesturing too much, reaching for her phone out of habit, performing.
Behind them, the path carried on with its own quiet certainty, and with it the others: Lila’s warm voice floating in and out, the soft crunch of boots in damp earth, Toby’s laughter too bright to be spontaneous. Toby was talking again, of course he was. He did it the way some people lit cigarettes. An automatic hand-to-mouth comfort, a claim staked without looking.
“Honestly,” Toby was saying, “you have to admire it. The whole (what is it) threadbare grandeur. Old money cosplaying austerity.”
Lila made a sound that might have been a warning or a yawn.
Dara felt the phrase try to hook her, to pull a laugh out of her on cue. It would be easy to give him one. An easy allyship, a signal that she got it, that she wasn’t taken in by stone and crests and inherited weight. But Seth’s earlier irritation had sharpened something in her, a little flint-spark of stubbornness. He wasn’t showing off; he was explaining a fact he couldn’t sand down.
She turned her head, not quite fully, and aimed her voice at Seth’s shoulder rather than his face. “So the footpath,” she said, practical, as if they were in a meeting. “It runs the whole way along the boundary? How far does it go: into the woods, or does it hook back toward the town?”
Seth paused, just enough to register surprise as a change in the air. His eyes followed the line she indicated, not at her but over her, mapping. For a second his expression eased into something almost unguarded: focus, a kind of relief at being asked about land instead of self.
“It skirts the far boundary,” he said. “Through the spinney, then along the river bend. It brings walkers out near Helmsford if they keep going. Most turn back at the stile, unless they’re determined.” A beat. “Or lost.”
“I hate being assessed,” Dara said, brisk enough to make it sound like a harmless gripe, filed under Weather, Trains, and Other British Pastimes. She kept her eyes on the valley, as though the fields might offer a neutral audience. “You know: when people have decided what I am before I’ve even opened my mouth.”
The words came out with a quick, practiced lift at the end, the shape of a joke she’d told often enough to make it pass. But the effort sat wrong against the tight set of her mouth. She dug her hands deeper into her pockets, thumbs worrying the seam as if there were something there to unpick.
“It’s not even that they dislike you,” she went on, voice still light, too light. “It’s worse. It’s the: polite version. The smile that says, right, we’ve got you. Entrepreneur. New money. Bit loud. Needs translating.” She gave a short laugh that didn’t reach anywhere useful. “And then you spend the whole time proving you’re not whatever they’ve written in their heads. Or, ” a pause, clipped, as if pausing was safer than finishing, “, you let them keep it.”
The humour doesn’t so much land as skim, an elegant, practised stone over water, then vanish without the satisfying plunk. Dara feels it go, feels the air turn fractionally sharper. Her shoulders pull in almost imperceptibly, as if making herself smaller might make her less legible, less available for other people’s conclusions. She tips her chin up anyway, the reflex of someone who refuses to be managed, even as something in her chest tightens with the old anticipation. Here it comes, she thinks: the gentle correction dressed as kindness. You’ll get used to it. Don’t take it personally. It’s tradition. Be flattered they’ve noticed you at all. The worst part is how reasonable those phrases can sound: how easily they’re offered, and how hard they are to refuse without seeming ungrateful.
She risked a sideways glance (quick, disciplined, the kind you could plausibly deny) taking an inventory of his expression. Waiting for the small tightening at the mouth, the courteous chill that meant her category had been decided and neatly shelved. His profile gave nothing away at first: only that tense jaw, eyes fixed on the line of the land as if it were safer than meeting hers.
Seth didn’t reach for levity. No dry remark to make it manageable, no polite reassurance to tuck her discomfort back into its box. He simply went very still, the sort of stillness that in a drawing room could pass for composure and out here read as a barricade. The pause lengthened, deliberate as a locked gate, and Dara found herself holding it with him, exposed, waiting.
Seth let the breath out through his nose, slow and measured, as though it had been caught somewhere between his ribs and his pride. For a moment Dara thought he would do what men like him did best: turn away into competence. Name a tree. Recite a date. Offer her a safe fact with sharp edges filed off.
His eyes stayed on the ground ahead, on the faintly worn strip of turf between heather and bracken where generations of boots had decided the easiest line. The path dipped towards the ribbon of river, a glint of pewter in the lowering light. Somewhere behind them, Toby was talking again (something about “heritage” and “curated deprivation”) but the words blurred, as if the air itself had decided to muffle him.
Seth’s posture didn’t change. That was the disturbing part. No dramatic shift. No softening that could be interpreted as flirtation or charity. Just that infinitesimal loosening at the base of his throat, the fraction of a second in which his control looked less like hauteur and more like effort.
“So do I.”
It landed with a bluntness Dara wasn’t prepared for, not because it was elaborate but because it wasn’t. Three words, offered without the usual scaffolding: no self-deprecating joke, no polite explanation that would allow her to wave it away. The confession wasn’t in the sentiment so much as in the refusal to decorate it.
Dara felt the instinctive urge to make it lighter, to reward him for stepping out of his armour with a laugh, a quip, something that would keep them safely in the realm of banter. She didn’t. She swallowed it back, the way you might lower your voice in a church without being told.
“Right,” she said instead, quiet. “It’s exhausting, isn’t it?”
A beat. The hill opened out in front of them, the last of the sun turning the grass copper. Seth didn’t answer at once, but he didn’t retreat either, and the not-retreating was, in its way, its own kind of courage.
He kept his gaze pinned to the slope ahead, to the dry-stone wall that stitched the hill together in patient grey. Looking at land was easier; land didn’t look back. His jaw worked once, a small, involuntary grind, as if the words had been a coin he’d had to prise out with his teeth and now resented the empty space it left. He could feel Dara beside him without turning. Her pace matching his, her presence held with an unfamiliar care.
The wind came up, nosing under the edge of his coat and worrying at his cuff, tugging at the fabric like a child testing a seam. He didn’t correct it. His hands stayed where they were, straight at his sides, fingers loose but controlled, the posture of someone who’d been taught that fidgeting was a kind of failure.
Down in the fold of the valley the river flashed again, indifferent pewter; the footpath beyond the boundary was only a pale suggestion in the grass, but he knew precisely where it ran. Behind them, Toby’s voice rose and fell, syrup over grit, yet Seth felt the shift: the dangerous quiet of having said something true and not being able to unsay it.
Dara held the silence as though it were something with weight, something that could be dropped if she fussed at it. She didn’t offer him an easy out, didn’t pat the admission into a joke. Instead her face altered in a way Seth felt more than saw: the quick, defensive brightness gone, her mouth settling into a line that wasn’t displeasure so much as thought. Her eyes stayed on him tracking the set of his shoulders, the restraint in his stride, as if mapping the effort it took to remain intact.
It was unnerving. Not appraisal, exactly. Recognition. As though she’d found the seam in his composure and, rather than picking at it, simply noted it was there.
A pace behind them, Toby let his gaze skate over their backs with practised nonchalance: and then slow, attentive as a hand finding a bruise. Seth’s shoulders had dropped a fraction; Dara’s head had tipped, listening in a way she hadn’t for Toby’s performance. Toby’s mouth arranged itself into a genial curve, harmless as a postcard. His eyes stayed cold, filing the quiet away like a receipt.
The track pinched between bracken and a shoulder of stone, and the others’ talk thinned to a far-off blur. Toby eased nearer, close enough to belong, not so close as to break whatever had formed. He watched the space between them like an investment: small now, but accruing. Wrenford always paid out.
Toby edged into the semicircle of glasses as if he were merely filling an empty space, then somehow became the hinge everyone turned toward. He did it with the soft competence of a man who’d made a career of being watched: shoulders open, smile easy, his tumbler held at that casual height that suggested permission had already been granted.
Seth had clocked the move the moment it began. Not the stepping closer, anyone could drift nearer the fire, but the way Toby’s attention scattered generously, a touch to Lila’s elbow, a glance that gathered Dara in without quite asking. Seth felt his jaw tighten, a familiar inconvenience, like a collar a half size too small.
“Do you know,” Toby said, voice pitched to carry without shouting, “I’ve always thought old houses are like… very polite beasts. You arrive, and they pretend they haven’t been waiting all day.”
There was a ripple of laughter; a few heads inclined as if to catch the rest.
Dara’s eyes flicked to Seth, quick as a check of the exits, then back to Toby. She looked amused in a way that held its own teeth. Seth disliked that he could read the curiosity under it, as though she were deciding whether he was an exhibit or a person.
Toby took a sip, performing thought. “And Wrenford, God. It’s astonishing. You come through the drive and it’s all calm, isn’t it? Like the place exhales for you. The fires are simply on, the glasses simply appear, your coat simply vanishes.”
Another laugh, warmer. Someone murmured, “Quite,” like agreement was good manners.
Seth kept his expression arranged. He could feel the house behind him, the portraits, the stone, the faint smell of beeswax, holding itself upright. He also felt the fine, unspoken arithmetic: who belonged, who was being entertained, who was being assessed.
Toby’s smile widened, friendly as a knife kept sheathed. “It must be restful,” he said, and the word landed too neatly, “to arrive and feel the world arrange itself around you.”
Toby lifted his glass a fraction, not quite a toast. More an invitation for everyone else to follow his lead. “To old houses,” he said lightly, and then, with a sidelong look that gathered Seth and Dara in the same net, “and old friends who tolerate them.”
A few obliging laughs. The fire snapped; the decanters on the sideboard threw small, hard highlights.
“It’s just, ” Toby let the pause do work, as if the right words were too modest to arrive on time. “You step over the threshold and something in you unclenches. You can feel it. Like the place is… trained. It knows what to do with you. The tea is where it should be, the chair appears at your back, the draft you didn’t know you were avoiding is somehow gone.”
He shrugged, all faux humility. “I mean, it’s beautiful. It’s also faintly supernatural. Restful, wouldn’t you say?” His smile stayed pleasant while his gaze held on Seth. “To arrive and have life run: almost of its own accord. To have the world arrange itself around you, without you ever needing to ask.”
“Legacy,” Toby said at last, and the syllables came out with a shine on them, as if he’d taken them from a case. Not history, not even sentiment: something closer to insulation. He spoke of stability the way one spoke of central heating in a house like this: a system put in place before you ever arrived, humming on regardless, so you can walk in from the cold and pretend the warmth is simply how the world is.
His gaze drifted, leisurely, around the room and back again, suggesting the point without quite making it. The comfort here wasn’t luck, wasn’t labour, wasn’t choice. It was inheritance.
Still smiling, Toby began to count the place as if it were a set of ledgers kept out of sight: hands striking matches before anyone asked, hands topping up glasses, hands smoothing a frayed edge before it could be remarked upon. Money that never raised its voice; tradition that muffled the gears. The small humiliations of living, leaks, shortages, apologies, simply… handled, so the owner could remain clean of need.
The punchline came wrapped in velvet. How fascinating, Toby implied, to inherit a life so thoroughly arranged that want never had to show itself; that even inconvenience could be absorbed elsewhere, politely, before it reached the drawing room. The laughter that answered him was immediate, relieved, complicit. Each easy chuckle felt like a counted coin dropped into a box: yes, that’s him, that’s how it works.
Seth felt the laughter land in the room like the soft click of a latch. Not warmth; not shared amusement. A signal.
It travelled through people in small, disciplined motions: a glance exchanged over a rim of glass, a mouth pulled into the kind of smile that could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice. Someone (he didn’t catch who) tilted their head a fraction, sympathetic in advance. It was the preface to concern, the stage direction that said go on then, prove you’re not what he’s implying. Even the fire seemed to hesitate, the logs shifting with a subdued sigh.
He watched their bodies turn by degrees, chairs angling, knees crossing, shoulders squaring as though bracing for weather. Careful care. They were giving him space in the way people did for a dog they weren’t sure would bite: generous, watchful, pleased with themselves for the generosity. He could almost hear the thought beneath it, poor Seth, trapped by his own fortune, and the other one, sharper, or perhaps he deserves it.
Across the decanter, Dara’s expression was alert, unsmiling. She wasn’t laughing. That, maddeningly, didn’t help. Her attention had the same quality as the rest, measuring, waiting, but without the old varnish of politeness. She looked as if she’d like to reach into the mechanism of the evening and fix whatever was grinding, even if it meant breaking it open.
Toby lounged as though he’d merely offered a pretty observation, his smile easy, his hand loose around his drink. Seth had seen this move before. Done in committee meetings, in charity boards, in school common rooms: say something that sounded like admiration and then stand back while the target tried to correct the impression without seeming defensive. The correction became the confession.
Seth took a sip he didn’t want, mostly to occupy his mouth. The whisky burned cleanly down his throat. His jaw ached with the restraint of not saying the first thing that arrived, and the second.
He kept his face arranged. He kept his voice behind his teeth. And still he could feel the room leaning. Waiting for the crack.
Conversation didn’t pick itself back up; it held its breath. The room settled into a false ease, glasses lifted and set down again, a murmured mm here, a laugh that died too quickly there. Small noises made to prove no one had meant anything by it, while everyone waited to see what he would do with the blade now sitting neatly on the rug between them.
Seth felt, with a faint nausea, the old reduction: not a man in his own house but a question put on display. Would he bridle. Would he charm. Would he concede. Would he bite. The answer would be taken as evidence, filed away, repeated later as if it had been volunteered.
He could read the choreography without looking directly. A guest’s knee angled towards him; someone else’s chin lifted, sympathetic before the fact. The kind of attention that pretended to be invisible.
Toby’s silence was the worst of it: an invitation masquerading as courtesy.
And Dara, still and bright-eyed across the drinks tray, seemed poised to interrupt the ritual entirely, as though candour were a door she could simply push open. Seth, absurdly, wanted her not to.
He held his face as one might hold a tray: level, steady, giving nothing away, though his molars met with a pressure that made his temples throb. The neutrality cost him. He could feel it in the hinge of his jaw, in the tightness at the corners of his mouth where a real smile would have lived if he’d been a man who believed in easy things. Each second stretched and was weighed, not by him, but by the room’s appetite. Waiting to see whether he would repay Toby’s insinuation with charming gratitude, or whether the strain would show and grant them their little proof. It was never simply silence. It was a test posed in upholstered tones, and he was expected to answer without sounding as if he’d noticed the question.
Dara’s focus found him with unnerving precision, bright, unblinking, as if she could itemise the fault lines in him from across a decanter. It ought to have felt like an ally’s steadiness; instead it had the prickle of inspection, compassion set to interrogate. He could almost hear the question forming on her tongue, ready to be kind in a way that would cost him.
The hush that followed had the polish of good breeding: attentive faces, softened eyes, the faint tilt of heads as if he were about to offer something worthy of note. Seth felt the mechanism click into place. They weren’t listening for meaning; they were listening for tone, for a slip, for the shape of his reaction. Not Seth, exactly: an idea of him, waiting to be confirmed.
Dara watched Toby’s smile remain perfectly moored to his face while his words went on the softest possible rampage. He made inheritance sound like a parlour trick (how fascinating, how rare) and stability like an item on a household ledger, outsourced to hands that didn’t get names. He didn’t say servants; he didn’t need to. He let the room fill in the old nouns for him, pleased with himself for never once raising his voice.
It was the kind of cruelty she recognised from boardrooms and dinner parties alike: the congratulation that required you to blush, the praise that rearranged you into a caricature, so that if you objected you were the one making it ugly. Toby held his glass as if he were offering a toast, and with the same gesture he was tightening a noose.
Across from him Seth hadn’t moved, or perhaps he had. Only by fractions. Dara saw it anyway: the slight angle of his shoulders as if he’d made himself narrower, the strange stillness of a man trying to take up less space in his own house.
Lila’s gaze flicked, quick as a match-strike, between them. Someone laughed at the wrong moment, too bright, like a cough in a church. Dara felt the laugh land in her teeth.
She could have left it. She could have let the performance pass over them all like a draught and told herself she was merely a guest, merely observing the local weather. But she’d spent too many years watching people put knives inside velvet and then feign astonishment at the blood.
“Toby,” she said, cutting through the last of his sentence. Not loud. Just: placed. The way you set down a glass you mean to be heard.
His eyes slid to her, amused, indulgent.
“That’s a very pretty story,” Dara went on, and kept her voice level because she refused to give him the pleasure of heat. “But it’s not admiration. It’s a trap. You’re dressing up an accusation so he has to either defend himself or look guilty for not entertaining you.”
The room made its tiny, collective adjustment (backs straightening, fingers tightening around stems) polite interest sharpening into something watchful. Dara kept her gaze on Toby, and did not flinch.
Toby’s brows rose in a bloom of gracious surprise, the sort that implied she’d said something witty rather than true. He didn’t bristle; he made space, a half-step back and a small, theatrical spread of his hand, as though inviting her to take centre stage. It was generosity with barbs hidden in the ribbon: go on, then; let everyone see what you’re like.
“Darling,” he said, soft enough to sound affectionate, “I’d hate to think you’d misread me.”
He angled his body so the room could look at her cleanly. Seth noticed it with a dull, familiar irritation: Toby’s instinct for arranging an audience, for turning discomfort into a shared entertainment. In the orangery the chatter thinned to a single, suspended thread. Glasses hovered midway to mouths; the clink of ice stopped as if someone had pinched the air.
The attention didn’t slam round. It pivoted, smooth as a well-oiled door on old hinges. Polite faces, alert eyes, that cultivated curiosity which pretended it wasn’t hunger at all. Even the housekeeper, passing with a tray, seemed to slow.
Seth felt the estate shift with it: not a room now, but a courtroom dressed for Christmas.
Dara should have stopped. She could feel the room begging for it, begging, politely, for everyone to pretend the air hadn’t changed. But Seth stood there like an heirloom clock: valuable, silent, impossible to interrupt without offence. And she was so tired of watching meaning get smuggled out of sentences as if it were contraband.
Her gaze slid from Toby’s satisfied poise to Seth’s shut-down calm.
“Do you mind telling me something?” she asked, and hated how reasonable it sounded. “Why do you act as though people are trespassing?”
A beat. His expression didn’t shift, which somehow felt like an answer.
She swallowed, too far in to back out with grace. “Because I honestly can’t tell,” she added, quieter but no less sharp, “whether you dislike having guests: or whether you just can’t stand being looked at.”
Her question hit the room like crockery on stone. Conversation arrested itself in mid-breath; a few mouths shaped polite amusement and thought better of it. Seth didn’t need to lift his eyes to know he was being weighed, him, and her with him, Dara filed under pushy, unschooled, while Wrenford was assessed for cracks: what it meant for the week, the veneer of ease, the old pretence that nothing ever spilled.
Seth felt his composure cinch: no longer shelter, but a straitjacket. Any practiced line would land like a confession; any flicker of humour would read as softening. Dara’s bluntness grazed something oddly tender, a private bruise he kept beneath starch and surname. And there it was: pity, poised in her eyes and, worse, in the room’s polite stillness. His jaw tightened until it hurt. For a heartbeat he gave them nothing. Even the house seemed to pause.
Seth let the silence stretch. One second too long, long enough to feel the room begin to make its own story out of it. He could almost hear the verdicts being drafted behind teeth and gin: touchy; arrogant; thin-skinned; typical. Dara’s face held, stubborn and bright, as if she’d set her weight against a door and expected it to open.
He drew in a slow breath through his nose, as though selecting a tie. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and controlled; it carried without needing to climb.
“No,” he said, and then, because she’d asked for explanation, he gave it with the kind of economy that left no purchase for argument. “I don’t ‘mind’ having guests.”
A small, precise pause. His gaze met hers at last, not warm enough to be personal, not angry enough to be messy.
“What I mind,” he went on, “is being addressed as though we’re in the habit of conducting interrogations over pre-dinner drinks.”
Something moved at the edge of his vision: someone shifting a glass, someone’s laugh aborting itself. He didn’t look away. Looking away would be weakness; looking too hard would be threat. The line between them was as narrow as the rim of crystal.
“This house runs,” he said, “on a set of courtesies. You may find them ridiculous. You may find them oppressive. That is your privilege.” The last word was smooth, almost kind, which made it worse. “But there is a difference between speaking plainly and speaking publicly.”
His fingers tightened on his tumbler until the cold bit. He kept his hands still.
“If you wish to ask me something personal,” he added, “you may do so when we are not providing entertainment for an audience.”
It wasn’t a raised voice. It didn’t need to be. It was an usher’s hand, firm at her shoulder, turning her from a doorway she’d assumed was open. And beneath it all, tucked neatly behind the manners, was the unmistakable message: You don’t know where you are; stop acting as though you do.
He let his expression settle into something politely blank, as if she’d chosen (deliberately) the one wrong fork to make a point. The effect was almost worse than anger. Seth’s gaze flicked, briefly, to the circle of glasses and half-smiles around them, then returned to Dara with a quiet finality.
“This isn’t a meeting,” he said, mild as milk, every consonant placed with care. “No one here is waiting for your conclusion.”
A faint tightening at the corner of his mouth suggested he considered that a mercy. He shifted his tumbler a fraction on the tray table, aligning it with the edge; order, reinstated in miniature.
“There are subjects,” he continued, “that are not for the room. Not because anyone is frightened of truth, but because truth (when you haul it out in company) stops belonging to the people it concerns.” His voice didn’t rise; it thinned, sharpened. “It becomes a performance. A thing to be discussed, improved upon.”
He held her eyes, and for a moment there was something like weariness behind the frost.
“So if you want to call it bravery, by all means,” he said. “But don’t mistake trampling a boundary for honesty. Carelessness often looks very bold from the outside.”
He didn’t have to lift his voice to make it discipline. He simply arranged her question inside the category of impropriety and watched it shrink. She was new, he suggested. New to the rhythms of a house that ran on more than charm and money, new to a week stitched together by habit and obligation, new to the particular way a comment could travel from drawing room to village shop and back again with interest. There were costs to “speaking plainly”: staff who heard it, friends who repeated it, family who carried it like a stone for years. And Dara was behaving as if other people’s lives were a useful case study, something to poke until it yielded a satisfying answer. He met her gaze, cool and exacting, as though warning her off a fragile display.
His manners stayed lacquered, faultless; only the blade beneath caught the light. He built each line with the care of a man drafting minutes. Phrases that could, later, be quoted as reasonable, as merely explanatory. In the moment they arrived as sentence and judgement alike. Presumptuous. Untrained. Worse: a liability. Someone who might tip, with one careless question, the precarious arrangement they all relied upon.
The room seized on it like a handrail. A small laugh (too quick, too bright) broke the tension, and others followed with murmurs that weren’t quite agreement, merely relief. Gazes skated off Dara as if she’d spilled something difficult on the carpet. The air rearranged itself into something legible: of course he’s like that. Across the circle, Toby’s smile twitched, pleased with the clean incision.
Seth didn’t move from the hearthrug. He held his drink at waist height, fingers precise around the cut glass as if it were something practical, an anchor, a paperweight, rather than a concession to conviviality. Around him the drawing room re-formed itself with the efficiency of a well-trained staff: chairs angled back into safe alignments, shoulders loosening, conversation finding its old grooves. Relief was contagious. It carried, faintly, the acid tang of people glad the awkwardness had chosen someone else.
Toby’s laugh arrived again, not loud enough to be crude, just present enough to be permission. A few guests followed it, obediently. Even Lila, merciful, watchful Lila, hesitated, as though deciding which fire to smother first.
Dara had gone. He could still see the exact moment her face shut: the flash of offence, then something worse: hurt that tried to disguise itself as contempt. She’d asked like she’d ask a supplier why a delivery was late: brisk, solvable, intolerably human. And he’d answered like the house was a court and she’d spoken out of turn.
He told himself it was necessary. He told himself she’d been careless.
The room had chosen its story with an ease that made his molars ache. Not Toby’s, exactly (Toby only set the hook) but the older one, the comforting one: Harrington is chilly, Harrington is proud, Harrington doesn’t bleed. How quickly it let everyone off the hook. How neatly it excused them from having to notice anything complicated, anything that might demand effort or, God forbid, kindness.
He felt their eyes on him in glancing, respectable portions. Not curiosity. Their curiosity was for Dara, for the novelty of someone who didn’t know when to soften her edges. What he received was approval, and it sat in his chest like a weight. He heard himself being filed away as predictable.
When he finally lifted his glass, it was only to take a sip he didn’t taste. The whisky burned, and the burn was preferable to the alternative: the sense, thin as paper under his skin, that one direct question had come too close to the seams he spent his life pretending weren’t there.
Under the irritation, fear came up sharp and bright, like the first sting of cold water. Not fear of being disliked (he had long since made his peace with that) but of being looked at properly. Of having the Hall inspected the way Dara would inspect a balance sheet: with brisk competence and no reverence for what ought to be left uncounted.
He could almost hear the arithmetic start. The slight thinning of the carpet in the corridor where everyone always walked. The draught that never quite went away no matter how the shutters were coaxed and patched. The way the roses on the terrace looked abundant from a distance and, up close, revealed the same two gardeners rotating their miracles through sheer stubbornness. The caterer “on call” who was, in truth, a favour. The housekeeper’s schedule engineered like a military campaign to disguise how few hands kept the place upright.
And then, inevitably, the tally would move from things to people. From maintenance to motives. From Wrenford’s compromises to his own. He imagined them turning the estate into a case study and him into its sour, defensive caretaker: an heir guarding not grandeur, but the illusion of it.
He heard, too, what Dara’s question might prise loose if he let it. Not merely the accounts, the draughts, the careful misdirection of a house run on stubbornness and inheritance, but the simpler, more mortifying lack behind it all: the quiet space where other people seemed to keep certainty. He’d built his manners like a high wall, polite brickwork, impeccable lines, precisely so no one would lean over and remark on what wasn’t there.
In his mind, pity formed before it ever reached him: a softening of eyes, a lowering of voices, a hand offered as if he were a skittish animal. The thought made something in his jaw clamp, heat flaring under his collar. Contempt he understood. Contempt had edges. Gentle concern was worse. Gentle concern assumed ownership.
The familiar mechanism engaged with a quiet, vicious certainty: if he couldn’t direct the story, he would end it. He could always find a line sharp enough to cauterise. Let them call him austere, even cruel; it kept them at a safe, tidy distance. Disapproval was manageable. Sympathy was a hand on the throat, a claim made with soft eyes.
Only after it lands (after the room gives that minute, hungry hush) does Seth feel the choice register in his body. He’d let Dara take the impact meant for everyone watching, had used her bluntness as a convenient enemy because it was safer than admitting she’d hit something true. Shield and target in the same breath: defensible on paper, unforgivable in the gut.
Dara held herself still, the way you did when you were trying not to spill something you couldn’t mop up again. The tumbler hovered just below her chin; condensation slicked her fingers. Heat climbed her throat and into her cheeks with a vengeance that felt adolescent, as if she’d been caught out in front of a classroom rather than in a drawing room full of grown adults pretending not to relish other people’s discomfort.
She had the line ready. She could feel it, sharp, competent, a neat little blade she could slide between Toby’s ribs without ever raising her voice. Something about theatre, about men who mistook cruelty for candour. Something that would land and make two people laugh too loudly, and one person choke on their drink, and everyone else decide she was either fearless or vulgar. She’d done that sort of thing before. It worked, mostly.
Only she could see it now, with the peculiar clarity of a bad angle in a mirror: the arrangement of bodies, the tilt of heads, the polite half-turn of shoulders that created a small arena in the middle of the room. Toby was leaning in just enough to look engaged rather than triumphant, his smile aimed like a spotlight. The others had gone still in that social way. Glasses paused midair, expressions softened to neutrality that wasn’t neutral at all.
And Seth. His face had settled into that immaculate blankness that wasn’t blank; it was a decision. Whatever she said next would not be heard as itself. It would be filed. It would be used.
If she fired back, she’d give Toby exactly what he wanted: a clean, quotable exchange with her cast as the interesting outsider and Seth as the chilly heir. If she apologised, she’d confirm the other story, the one where she’d overreached and been corrected. Either way, she became a prop. Either way, they got to keep talking about her.
Her tongue pressed against her teeth. She swallowed, tasting gin and something metallic.
She didn’t look at Toby again. She didn’t look at Seth, either. Not because she couldn’t, but because she wouldn’t lend him the intimacy of it in front of an audience. Instead she let the silence do what it did. Let it show the shape of the trap. Let it sit, heavy and unmistakable, between them.
Her fingers slacken around the tumbler as though someone has quietly uncurled them one by one. She leans forward and places the glass on the nearest side table with the exaggerated care of a person setting down something breakable: and not just the drink. The base meets the wood without a clink. She waits a beat, fingertips still resting on the rim, as if steadiness might transfer by contact.
Then she straightens.
It isn’t a storming exit. There’s no theatrical inhale, no “well” designed to make heads swivel, no brittle laugh to soften the blow for anyone who would rather call this banter than what it is. She doesn’t give Toby the satisfaction of a retort he can admire, repeat, or twist. She doesn’t give Seth the mercy of a public reconciliation, either. She simply withdraws her attention as if it’s a privilege being revoked.
Her mouth is set; her throat tightens on the swallow she refuses to turn into a confession. She steps back carefully, skirts the edge of the little arena they’ve all constructed, and walks out as if she has remembered, at last, exactly where the door is.
As she turned, her gaze caught on Seth and stuck there, unhelpfully. He stood as if he’d been measured and adjusted by some invisible hand: shoulders squared, chin level, expression locked into that maddening, courteous nothing. The sort of composure people mistook for virtue.
Her anger sharpened until it had edges. It wasn’t that he’d defended himself, God, fine. It was the way he’d done it. He’d taken her bluntness, the one thing she had that was meant to be honest, and folded it into his own protection like a handkerchief into a pocket. Let her be the breach in etiquette, the rude outsider, while he delivered his cut with clean gloves on.
And he hadn’t even looked sorry. He’d looked… relieved.
She went without ceremony, letting her absence be the only punctuation. Behind her, talk faltered and she didn’t turn back to reward Toby with a chase. The corridor met her with colder air and the smell of polish. Fury kept her upright; shame followed, sour and intimate: not that she’d lost, but that she’d wanted Seth to prove her hope wasn’t foolish.
Upstairs, she shuts her door on the hall’s muffled murmur and the house’s soft, inherited quiet. The latch clicks like a verdict. Dara leans back against the panel, presses her palm to her forehead, and tries to breathe past the gallop in her chest. The sting isn’t Toby’s smug little theatre. It’s Seth’s. How easily he’d made her feel impertinent for asking. Worse: that she cares enough to be hurt, enough to pace, replaying syllables, hating herself for granting him that power.
Seth woke before the pipes had finished their tentative knocking and before the draughts withdrew from the corridors like guilty guests. Grey light seeped round the curtains, cold enough to make the stone feel resentful. His throat was raw with all the things he hadn’t said, worse, with what he had, and his jaw ached from last night’s self-control turning, at some point, into a weapon.
For a moment he lay still and listened to the house performing its morning: a distant door, the soft clink of something set down in the kitchen, the faint tick of a clock that had outlasted wars and marriages and was clearly not impressed by his current predicament.
Muscle-memory offered him the familiar solution. Dress quickly. Descend with impeccable neutrality. Mention the groundskeeper. A boundary stone. A leak in the east guttering. Vanish with purpose, so no one could accuse him of sulking. Let time do what it always did: sand the edges, make yesterday look less like a decision and more like weather.
He sat up, swung his feet to the floor, and immediately regretted the movement. His head throbbed in the precise place where Toby Bramley’s laughter had lived. Not laughter, exactly. Performance. A net thrown over the table and tightened until someone (Seth, always Seth) had to thrash.
He washed, shaved, buttoned himself into something passable. The mirror returned a man who looked as if he’d slept eight hours and hadn’t lain awake rehearsing various versions of, I didn’t mean it. None of them sounded like him. All of them sounded like surrender.
On the landing he paused, fingers resting on the banister’s polished curve. If he went down now, into breakfast, into witnesses, he would be forced into either charm or silence. Both were dishonest. Both were safe.
The thought of Dara in that room hit him with an ugly clarity. He could almost hear her voice: I get it. You’re like that.
He swallowed. The old strategy rose again, smooth as a well-practised lie. But it wasn’t neutrality he wanted. It was control. And last night had proved how quickly control curdled into cruelty when she didn’t play by the house’s unspoken rules.
He pictured the breakfast table with a steadiness that felt like punishment. Dara opposite him, posture impeccable in the way people got when they were deciding not to be hurt again. Bright smile deployed, eyes doing the brisk assessment of exits and allies. She would make conversation with Lila, accept coffee, laugh in the correct places, and keep her tone light enough to give everyone else permission to pretend nothing had happened.
And when Seth arrived, if he arrived, she would lift her gaze with that particular, clean politeness strangers used when they’d learned your habits. No invitation. No warmth. A neat, final line drawn in her mind: aristocratic man is rude; aristocratic house is worse; lesson absorbed.
The absurdity was that he could hear his own defence already, clipped and reasonable. She misunderstood. He’d been tired. Toby had been baiting him. None of it mattered. What mattered was the shape of it: he’d made her feel small in a room that was already designed to do that.
If he vanished into “errands” now, it wouldn’t read as restraint. It would read as confirmation. Worse. Permission.
He stopped at the tall sash window, one hand braced on the cold timber, and watched Wrenford perform its morning competence. Mist lay over the lawns like gauze; the clipped yews held their geometry; chimneys exhaled in slow, civilised puffs as if even smoke had been trained. From here the place looked untroubled. No invoices, no damp creeping behind panelling, no strained smiles at dinner.
It was the same view he’d used for years as proof that keeping everything in order was synonymous with keeping everything safe. The thought of taking refuge in it now (letting the estate’s tidiness stand in for an apology he hadn’t earned) made his stomach turn, sharp with a resentment that had nowhere to go except back into his ribs.
Order, he realised, could be a hiding place as surely as any locked door.
He made the decision the way he dealt with burst pipes and missing keys: swiftly, precisely, with no room left for cowardice. Not a text: typing would let him edit himself into decency. He would be decently in the flesh, exposed to weather and consequence. Dara would have gone somewhere the house couldn’t supervise: down past the ha-ha, towards the river, where the signal died and so did spectators.
He dressed himself (shirt buttons slightly fumbled, boots tugged on without calling for Evans) then left his room as if speed could outpace second thoughts. In the corridor he paused, listening, jaw set, and chose the back stairs to avoid questions. Outside, the air bit cleanly at his cheeks. He took the path down towards the river with one uncharacteristic intention: to cross the distance first, before pride made last night unfixable.
The house had beaten him to wakefulness. Even at this hour Wrenford moved with its particular, self-effacing efficiency: the soft scuff of sensible shoes on runner carpets, the discreet clink of china being persuaded onto trays, the faint, medicinal sigh of polish on old wood. Someone murmured a good morning to someone else in the distance, as if the words were part of the building’s maintenance.
Seth kept his pace steady. He could not look hurried; hurried was an admission. He offered the sort of nod that passed for greeting without inviting response, eyes skimming cornices and portrait frames rather than faces. The corridor, usually his ally, felt narrowed by invisible seating. Every open door was a proscenium arch; every landing, a place where a guest might appear with coffee and curiosity and an opinion on his manners.
From the service passage came the muted rattle of cutlery. A maid crossed his path with folded linen held like an offering, paused with a flicker of alarm at finding him there, then dipped into a curtsey too quick to be graceful. He’d always hated that, the way his presence made other people rearrange their bodies. “Carry on,” he said, and heard how it landed: clipped, too formal, as if he were granting permission in his own home and resenting it.
At the turning toward the breakfast room he slowed, as though considering whether to go in, though the smell of coffee and grilled tomatoes made his stomach tighten rather than hunger. He had no appetite for an audience. There would be questions dressed as banter, slept well?, and the inevitable glance at his mouth, as if apologies left physical bruises.
A laugh rose, low and practiced; a chair scraped; someone said his name and stopped. He did not look in. He kept moving, letting the house’s rhythms swallow the interruption behind him.
His boots found the back stairs, the older wood complaining under his weight with a familiar honesty. By the time he reached the ground floor, he was breathing as if he’d run a mile, and he hadn’t even left the building.
As he passed the breakfast-room doors the sound snagged him: cutlery ticking against plates, the murmured hush that pretended not to be interested in anyone’s business. A scent of coffee and buttered toast drifted out, domestic as a trap. He kept his gaze fixed on the corridor’s far end, but the voices slipped through the crack like smoke.
Toby’s carried best, bright with morning confidence and sharpened at the tip. “: not saying he was wrong,” Toby was saying, which was always the preface to saying exactly that. A soft laugh answered him, obliging, and Seth could hear the shape of the room in it: heads inclined, shoulders loosening, people grateful for a story that would tidy last night into entertainment.
“And then,” Toby continued, drawing it out, “our host, ”
Seth’s name wasn’t spoken, but it hovered, invited. He felt, absurdly, the turn of attention like a hand on the back of his neck, steering. He imagined Dara reduced to a punchline, her directness repackaged as rudeness, his own temper filed down into aristocratic eccentricity. The hunger of an anecdote was a particular thing: it didn’t care who it chewed. He walked on, expression arranged, and refused to give it more.
He found himself mapping the house as he always did, instinctively: back corridors, the service stair, the door that opened by the boot room and spared him the theatre of the front hall. It was a small, mean comfort: control by inches. Yet each option ended in the same thing: a threshold with eyes beyond it. Indoors, even silence had an audience. A footman appeared as if conjured by linen. A guest’s laugh ricocheted off plaster. The whole place listened.
And it wasn’t only his dignity at stake. He could stomach being thought cold; he could not stomach Dara being made a scene while he attempted to amend last night. An apology performed was not an apology. It was entertainment. He kept moving, as if motion might shake the house off his shoulders.
Outside, the estate laid itself out between him and Dara like an examination he hadn’t revised for: gravel giving to wet flagstones, paths that split without signage, yew hedges high enough to swallow a person. His phone sulked into No Service the moment he cleared the house. There would be no brisk message, no timed repentance: only his own feet, and the choice to keep going.
The worst impediment wasn’t distance or the estate’s labyrinth, but the one lodged behind his ribs: the automatic tightening into manners, the instinct to make tenderness sound like minutes from a meeting. He could already hear himself and hated it. Dara, sensibly, might have decided that being alone was preferable to being handled. He would have to meet her unarmoured, or not at all.
Seth went before the house could gather itself into breakfast: before the clink of silver, before a cheerful inquiry lobbed across the table like a net. He did not leave instructions, did not summon anyone with the habitual crispness that pretended to be efficiency rather than escape. He simply took the side passage that led past the boot room and out into the thin, early light, as though he were only stepping outside to check a latch.
The air was cold enough to make his teeth ache. Somewhere behind him, the hall’s windows held a dull suggestion of movement, shadows, life, the beginning of another day in which he was meant to be a person among people. He shut the door with a care that bordered on superstition. No slamming. No announcement. Nothing for anyone to follow.
He chose the long route on purpose. The straight path felt like walking through a portrait gallery: every step framed, every angle designed to be seen. Instead he cut along the edge of the formal gardens where the box hedges rose like stiff collars, then slipped between them at a gap only someone who’d grown up here would think to use.
Gravel gave way to packed earth, then to the honest, sucking inconvenience of mud. The estate changed character by degrees: clipped order loosened into nettles and last year’s bracken, the air smelling of wet bark and river-rot rather than polish. The only sound was his own footing, too loud at first, then softened by leaves, and the occasional reprimand of a crow.
He’d dressed out of habit, not theatre: old boots, a jumper that had seen better decades, no coat that declared him master of anything. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets, as if he could keep them from doing what they always did in company. Already his jaw ached from holding his mouth in the shape of composure. He let it go. Let the chill sting him awake. Let the trees do what walls could not: swallow the idea of an audience, make conversation not merely unlikely but irrelevant. If anyone wanted him now, they’d have to come looking. He did not intend to be found. Not until he found her.
He tracked her by instinct rather than certainty, following not the formal routes but the ones that let a person be merely a person. He knew the estate’s choreography too well. The sweep of drive, the flattering vistas, the rooms that made even laughter feel arranged. A newcomer would feel it like heat. Dara, with her brisk competence and city-bright confidence, would have smiled through it until the smile began to pinch.
The river was the obvious refuge: open enough to breathe, tucked away enough that no one could accidentally turn it into a conversation. He took the turn by the kitchen garden, skirted the ha-ha where the grass dropped away like a trick, and let the path narrow into something more honest. Damp woodsmoke clung to the air; the ground underfoot went from maintained to merely endured.
He did not rehearse. Rehearsal was another performance, and he’d done enough of those to last him a lifetime. He kept his attention on small, factual things, water noise, birdcall, the cold biting at his knuckles, because the moment he let his mind run, it sprinted straight to cowardice.
Each time his throat tightened with the urge to turn back, he walked on anyway.
He found her where the path kinked and the river narrowed, the bank falling away in a small, treacherous slope to water turned almost black beneath a tangle of alder and thorn. Dara stood with her back to him, hands in her pockets, weight shifted as if she’d been there long enough to register the cold properly. A twig went under his boot with a dry, traitorous snap.
She didn’t turn.
Seth let the silence remain what it was, earned, rather than rushing to plaster it over with a genial morning. He stopped a few yards short, close enough that she could hear him breathe if she cared to, far enough that he wasn’t crowding her into politeness. His hands stayed visible, empty, uselessly honest. Even his posture felt like an apology: careful, measured, a man approaching something skittish and fully aware he’d been the thing that made it so.
When she turned at last, he didn’t reach for ownership of the moment with a courteous, practiced “may I have a word,” as though her time were another estate privilege. He held himself still instead, the request sitting awkwardly on his tongue like something untrained. His voice was level, but it frayed at the edges with effort. “If you’ll let me, just, finish what I should have said yesterday.”
He waited. No step closer, no coaxing smile to buy himself forgiveness, no pre-emptive little speech to rearrange her feelings into something manageable. He simply stood where he’d stopped and let the cold bite through his coat, letting the decision be hers. When she gave him only a look he took it as permission and fixed his attention on her, steady as he could make it.
“I was rude to you,” Seth said, because if he allowed himself any prettier phrasing he would dodge the point entirely. “Not brusque. Not… misunderstood. I chose to be sharp.”
Dara’s expression didn’t soften in the way most people’s did when they scented an apology. It stayed alert, as if she were deciding whether to believe the shape of it. She didn’t give him the relief of immediate rebuttal, either. The river did the talking for them, pulling on stones with a steady, indifferent patience.
He kept his voice even. He could do even. “Last night ” His jaw tightened, the old reflex rising like a hand reaching for a weapon. He forced it down with the next breath. “I felt cornered.”
Her chin tipped a fraction, not sympathy, not contempt; an invitation to continue if he dared.
“When attention turns personal,” he said, “I don’t. “I don’t manage it well. I’ve learnt to host a dinner. I’ve learnt to make conversation. I have not learnt to be… examined.”
Dara’s mouth twitched. “Most people don’t enjoy that.”
“It isn’t merely unpleasant.” The words came out dryer than he intended; he let them sit anyway. “It feels like a trap. And my reflex, my very charming reflex, is to strike first so I’m not the one bleeding in public.”
He watched her take that in, the unvarnished admission, no polite varnish of intent. He didn’t dress it up with jokes. He didn’t add, and you must understand, because understanding would be a kind of absolution he hadn’t earned.
“I took your directness,” he went on, “and I treated it as an attack, as if you were part of it. You weren’t. You were simply… there. Asking a question like an adult. And I answered you like a child with a pin.”
Seth’s gaze slid past her, not in dismissal this time but in self-preservation, fixing on the river where the current worried at the bank and carried on regardless of who was making a mess of what. He drew a breath that tasted of damp earth and cold stone.
“Wrenford isn’t… scenery,” he said at last. The pause sat between them like an admission in itself. “For most people it’s a weekend: something to admire and then leave. For me it’s a perimeter.”
His fingers flexed once at his side, as if he could feel the shape of the house through the air. “I keep track of everything. Which rooms people drift into. Which doors are propped open. Who speaks to whom and how loudly. What gets laughed at. What looks, ” he let out a short, humourless exhale, “, effortless.”
He glanced back, briefly, as though to check she was still there and not already walking away. “It’s ridiculous, but it’s the only kind of safety I seem to understand. If I can keep the routes and the tone and the appearances in line, nothing can get in.”
His voice went tighter. “And when you were honest I treated it like an intruder.”
“I saw you being straightforward,” he said, and the confession scraped on the air between them, “and I decided it was a contest I had to win.”
A small, bitter shake of his head. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t even do anything, ” he searched for the word with visible distaste, “, improper. You simply refused to pretend you were perfectly comfortable. And I punished you for it.”
He kept his hands still, as if movement might turn into theatre. “I was polite. Formally. That’s the part people like me learn early: how to keep the sentence clean while the tone does the damage.” His gaze held hers, unblinking now. “There was contempt in it. In me.”
The next words came out quieter, worse. “Because some part of me assumed you needed managing, not meeting.”
When he looked back at her, the neatness in him gave way, fraying into something steadier and far more exposing. “It isn’t fine,” he said. “It looks fine. That’s different.” The house ran on postponed repairs and borrowed time: favours called in, invoices edged to the bottom of the pile, gutters left until the next storm made a point. One bad month, one unexpected failure, and there was no cushion.
He didn’t fish for pity or any neat absolution. He gave her the motive like a ledger entry, unadorned and unforgiving: he was tired, properly tired, of staging “effortless” for people who circled a flaw like hounds, eager for sport or advantage. If he’d been unbearable, it was because he’d been living as though one visible crack would invite the whole room to bend closer and feed.
Dara let the quiet stretch until it stopped feeling like a pause and became a choice. The river kept moving, unbothered by old stone and old names; somewhere behind them the hall sat with its shutters half-drawn, as if listening. Seth’s admission hung between them with an almost physical weight, not dramatic, not tidy: simply there.
She watched him the way she watched a man in a meeting when the pitch ran out of polish and finally showed its numbers. Not with softness, and not with cruelty either. With attention. With a kind of respect that didn’t require her to pretend he hadn’t just told her he’d tried to win something she hadn’t known was being played.
“I do understand it,” she said at last. Her voice was calm enough to make space, not calm enough to be comforting. “The instinct. If you’ve spent years holding a room together by force of… competence, you don’t suddenly stop because one person turns up and doesn’t know where to put her hands at tea.”
A beat; her gaze stayed on his face, not the line of his shoulders, not the estate beyond.
“But understanding isn’t a pardon.” She drew the words carefully, as if she didn’t want them to bruise. “You didn’t just tighten your grip on the situation. You aimed it at me.”
She shifted her weight, boots pressing into damp grass, and folded her arms. Not defensive, simply contained. “I’m not fragile, Seth. I’m not an experiment in whether you can be kind today. And I’m not, ” she glanced briefly towards the house, where judgement was a habit more than an event, “, a prop you use to prove you’ve got everything under control.”
The air cooled; his expression shuttered and then, with effort, stayed open.
She took a breath, and when she spoke again it was practical in the way he’d been, specific enough to be usable. “If you want me anywhere near you this week, or after it, then you don’t get to manage me. You talk to me. Straight. If you’re braced for a fight, say so. If you’re frightened, say that too. But don’t turn it into a contest and call it manners.”
She let the silence do its work, then stepped into it with a steadiness that made the words land like placed stones.
“I’m not signing up to be cast,” Dara said. Not loud: firm. “Not by Toby, with his little performances and his needling. Not by this place, with its… silent examinations. And not by you.”
She watched the flicker in Seth’s face, pride, annoyance, something rawer, and didn’t retreat from it.
“If you freeze me out because it’s easier than being seen, that’s your habit. I’m not obliged to make it comfortable.” She uncrossed her arms, palms open for a moment as if offering the point for inspection. “I didn’t come here to be the novelty guest everyone assesses over breakfast, or the useful outsider you wheel out when it suits. And I’m not going to be managed like a temperamental supplier.”
A small exhale, sharp with humour that didn’t soften the line. “If I’m in your orbit, it’s because you want me there. Not because you can position me, or tolerate me, or use me as proof you’ve still got the whole thing under control.”
Seth’s jaw flexed, the muscle jumping as though his body meant to start the argument on his behalf. For a second she saw the familiar reflex. Polite frost, a neat dismissal, the pivot to logistics so he wouldn’t have to touch the point. Then he swallowed it down. His gaze flicked to the river, to the mud at their boots, anywhere but her face, and came back with the faintest abrasion of effort.
He gave a single nod. Not agreement. Recognition. Something he had to pay for.
“Fine,” he said, voice clipped, as if the word were a tool. “Equal.”
He paused, then added with the same brutal plainness he’d used for the rest of it, “What does that look like to you?”
Not a plea. Not even an apology in disguise. A question asked like a clause that needed drafting: because guessing, and being wrong, had always been dangerous.
“Transparent,” she said. “Not grand. Not… scenes.” Her gaze held his. “You don’t get to decide things like weather and then act surprised when everyone’s drenched. We talk: before you pronounce. And when it goes wrong, you don’t vanish into ‘errands’ and expect me to make up the difference.”
She nodded towards the hall. “Start with what you can do. Let me work beside you. We sort what’s urgent, what’s solvable, and who’s safe. Feelings can queue.”
Dara held out her hand. Not a forgiveness offered for free, but an agreement: she would think with him, shoulder what could be shouldered, and not be quietly diminished for her trouble. Seth stared at her fingers as if they were a dare. Then he took them, his grip measured, almost wary. “I can do that,” he said. “Equal. If you can stand me… learning it as I go.”
They found the path without naming it, as if the river had simply tugged them into place. The grass at the verge was slick, the mud dark and patient, and the water moved with a quiet confidence that made the house’s anxieties seem briefly theatrical. Seth walked half a pace beside her: close enough that she could feel the heat of him through his coat when the wind shifted, not so close it might be mistaken for a claim. For once he wasn’t cutting a line through the landscape like a man late for his own life.
Dara adjusted to the tempo without commenting on it. She had made a career of dragging reluctant men to decisions; this one, she decided, would be handled differently. No shoving. No applause. Just… showing up. She let the crunch of gravel underfoot and the distant bleat of sheep do the talking a while.
Seth’s hand hovered near the seam of his pocket, the old habit of containment. He looked at things when looking at her would have cost him too much: water slipping over stones, reeds bending with an obedient grace, the footbridge ahead with its damp boards. The estate presented itself in every direction: boundaries, maintenance, the careful choreography of “natural” beauty. He could recite where every path led. He couldn’t, apparently, recite what he needed.
“You’re not. “Not what?” Dara asked, not turning her head, giving him the mercy of side-by-side rather than face-to-face.
“Making a thing of it,” he said at last, the words delivered with the same wary precision he used on silverware inventories and seating plans.
“I’m making a plan,” she corrected lightly. “Different sport.”
His breath fogged once, then steadied. Something in him unclenched, incremental as thaw. The silence after that didn’t feel like punishment; it felt like agreed working space, a bench cleared. Dara found herself listening not for the next barb but for the smaller sounds. His boots matching hers, the occasional swallow, the river’s insistence.
When a gust lifted her hair into her eyes, Seth reached up as if to help, then thought better of it and dropped his hand. The restraint wasn’t rejection; it was learning, in real time, where not to bruise.
Wrenford Hall reappeared by degrees: first the pale shoulder of stone above the trees, then the neat geometry of the south front, then the line of windows that always looked, at this distance, as though they were watching back. Seth’s pace faltered. He didn’t stop, exactly; he merely revised the rhythm, as if his body were taking a quiet inventory of risks.
His gaze travelled with the instinct of a man checking for draughts. Curtains. Reflections. The gravel sweep where guests could be mid-conversation, a footman could be crossing with a tray, a harmless question could turn, with the right audience, into a small trial. He made a slight adjustment towards the drive, then, old habit, his shoulders began to angle as if for the cover of the kitchen garden wall, the convenient lie of “I should speak to. Dara watched the movement start and then, to her surprise, watched it fail.
Seth inhaled through his nose, the line of his jaw tightening once, and chose the open approach. No detour. No manufactured urgency. The change was minute but unmistakable: his hands still, his spine uncoiling, his attention no longer on escape routes but on what waited ahead.
They didn’t reach for each other, but the space between them had altered: less a gap to be defended, more a shared corridor. The path pinched where nettles leaned in, and Dara edged instinctively to the rougher side. Seth shifted without comment, taking the muddier strip as if it were his by right, his shoulder a quiet shield against the brambles. It wasn’t gallantry; it was logistics, offered with the same restrained competence he’d used on the estate all week.
Her phone flickered: one bar, then none. The screen searched, failed, went blankly optimistic again. Dara let out a short, irritated breath and slid it into her pocket.
Seth’s eyes dipped to the movement. He gave the smallest nod, almost approval. As if, here, beyond reception and ears, they could both stop performing.
At the steps, where damp stone met the faint civility of polish and last night’s smoke, Seth slowed. Not to stage a gesture (he despised staging) but to give her the smallest, most private courtesy: choice. His fingers flexed once at his cuff, then stilled. Dara drew in a quiet breath and didn’t summon her city-bright armour. She held on to the steadiness of the river, and crossed the threshold as if it had always been hers to cross.
Inside, the Hall resumed its gentle surveillance: crockery chiming somewhere ahead, the low murmur of morning voices, the faint, reproving tick of a longcase clock. The old urge rose in Seth, smooth the face, find an errand, but he let it pass. Dara’s posture stayed easy, not brittle with charm. They moved together, not touching, yet aligned; and the air, inexplicably, felt warmer.
Seth arrived at the drawing room doors with his watch already back in his pocket, as if the minute-hand had been consulted purely out of professional interest. Not late enough to require apology, not early enough to be absorbed into someone else’s momentum. A fraction late on purpose: an unspoken reminder that the house still had a spine, and that he could choose when to show it.
Inside, candlelight skimmed the old silver and made the threadbare parts of the room look like deliberate restraint. The table conversation had that pre-dinner pitch: bright in places, sharpened in others. Toby was mid-anecdote, naturally, his laugh a little too cultivated for the punchline. Lila’s mouth quirked as if she were watching for the moment it turned.
Dara was at the far side, shoulders relaxed but eyes alert, as though she’d decided she wouldn’t be cowed by linen and lineage, but she also wouldn’t offer herself up for sport. When she saw him, she didn’t brighten on command. She simply met his gaze and gave him a tiny, solid nod that said, Get on with it, then.
He crossed to his place at the head with the easy competence of someone who had been trained to make other people comfortable even while he remained, personally, unmoved. Yet the calm in his movements was not the old rigidity. The clenched jaw, the careful angles. It was a chosen steadiness, like setting down a heavy object without flinching.
He took in the room because he always did: who was leaning in, who was leaning away; which glass had been refilled too quickly; the small impatience in Toby’s foot, the warning softness in Lila’s smile. He noted the staff, too (the housekeeper’s measured passes, the new waiter’s too-quiet breath) as if everyone’s pulse belonged to the same organism.
And then, without the familiar instinct to brace, he made a decision.
Not to win. Not to retreat.
To set the pace, and keep it.
Before anyone else can marshal a flourish, Seth lifts his glass. Not high: just enough to be seen, a small, competent claim on the room. The cutlery quiets. Even Toby, for once, pauses mid-breath.
Seth keeps his eyes on the middle distance, as though addressing the house itself rather than any one person. “Thank you for coming all this way,” he says, voice level, almost bored with ceremony. “For the effort. For tolerating the weather. And” (a fractional hesitation, the closest thing to mischief Dara has ever heard from him) “for managing, at least intermittently, to behave like people rather than positions.”
A beat. Then laughter breaks, not the brittle kind that begs to be counted as success, but something warmer and surprised. Lila’s shoulders drop as if she’s been holding them up on everyone’s behalf. The housekeeper’s expression softens; the new waiter’s tray steadies, his exhale audible only because the room has, momentarily, stopped performing.
Seth takes a sip as if the matter is settled. No grand declaration, no invitation to clap. Just a tone set.
Dara felt it, the minute of air after his words, as distinctly as a window unlatched. Instinct suggested she should do something with it: laugh louder, offer a clever tag, prove she understood the joke. Instead she did nothing. She let the pause belong to him, to the room, to the house that always seemed to be listening. When her gaze found Seth’s, it wasn’t a challenge or a plea; it was a brief, steady recognition. Then she looked down at her napkin as if to make it plain: she hadn’t come to take his measure.
The table obeyed. Lila’s smile arrived unguarded, as though permission had been granted to be human. Someone shifted their chair with a scrape that wasn’t met with a flinch. Conversation restarted in smaller, truer voices: less audition, more exchange.
Toby, unable to help himself, tossed in a bright little “Of course, Seth would call it intermittent. We’ve all seen his idea of warmth,” like a bauble meant to catch candlelight and attention. Seth didn’t stiffen. He didn’t smile, either. “Quite,” he said, bland as porridge, and turned his head. “Lila: did you ever find that view above the folly you were raving about?”
Course by course, Seth made his choice visible in the smallest ways. He asked Dara what she thought of the trout, not as a test but as though her opinion might actually alter his. When someone tried to turn her into a talking-point, “You must find all this terribly…”, he redirected, gently, and returned to her answer. No preamble. No defence. Just room.
Dara kept her eyes on her wine as though she were merely listening, but she watched him anyway. Because you did, when someone’s politeness started to look like strain. The conversation had tilted, almost imperceptibly, from anecdotes to assessment. Toby’s voice grew brighter, the way it did when he’d found a seam worth worrying at, and one of Seth’s old friends, Freddie, was it?, leaned forward with that eager, polite interest that never quite reached the eyes.
“So,” Freddie said, “you’re keeping the place going single-handedly now? It’s a great deal of work. Must be… rather relentless.”
The sympathy was a hook. Dara felt it catch the air between them.
Seth’s shoulders went a fraction squarer, as if he’d heard a distant command. His jaw tightened; the muscle ticked once, as precise as a metronome. He didn’t look at Dara, which was telling in itself. He looked past the candlesticks, to some point on the far wall, and arranged his expression into something immovable.
“It’s not single-handed,” he said, smooth enough to pass. “There are competent people who actually run the place. I mostly sign cheques and make noises at the correct moments.”
Toby gave a soft laugh. “Modesty from a Harrington. We truly are in unprecedented times.”
A couple of people chuckled: the right amount, the safe amount. Dara could feel the room doing its little arithmetic: the house, the man, the money, the story.
She resisted the urge to rescue him with a quip, to drag the attention away with brute charm. That would make it a spectacle. Seth hated spectacles; she’d clocked that on day one, when he’d vanished behind an “errand” the moment anyone tried to prise him open.
Instead, she lifted her gaze to Freddie and said, plainly, “Relentless is running a company with investors who text at midnight. This is a different kind of pressure.” She let it be neither accusation nor compliment. Just true.
Then, because the pause threatened to harden into something pointed, she added, mild as cream, “Also, your trout is excellent. If this is what ‘making noises at the correct moments’ produces, keep making them.”
Dara kept her posture easy, shoulders loose as if she weren’t aware of the room’s attention sliding, inch by inch, towards the head of the table. She didn’t jump in front of Seth’s discomfort like a human shield. He wasn’t a man who thanked people for rescuing him; he’d only resent the implication he’d needed it.
Freddie’s gaze flicked to her, as though inviting her to confirm whatever story they’d all decided was appropriate. “And you. Do you find it… an adjustment?” he asked, polite to the point of antiseptic.
“A change of scenery,” Dara said. Simple. No apology, no bravado. She met his eyes long enough to be taken seriously, then let the look fall away as though it didn’t matter whether he approved. “I like the walking. And the fact no one can get hold of me in half the grounds.”
A few people laughed, relieved. The laughter wasn’t at her; it was with her, and that mattered. She took a sip of wine, unhurried, giving Seth space to decide whether to re-enter or retreat.
When the silence threatened to congeal, she added, almost idly, “Though I do miss decent coffee on demand. Your kitchen’s spoiling me.”
Beneath the fall of linen and the polite theatre of cutlery, Dara’s hand moved as if to smooth an invisible crease. Her fingertips grazed the sleeve of Seth’s dinner jacket at the wrist. Nothing that would earn a glance from anyone else, not even from Toby, who was always hunting for leverage. The contact was fleeting, unclaimed, and yet it landed with the quiet certainty of a door being shut against draught.
She didn’t look at him when she did it. That, oddly, was the point. No public alignment, no rescuing performance. Just the wordless message: I’m beside you. I’m not collecting evidence. You don’t have to manage me as well.
Seth’s pulse answered before his expression did.
Seth felt the brush of her fingertips like a valve turning somewhere inside him, pressure venting without noise. When Toby’s next joke came dressed as concern, aimed neatly at Seth’s competence, his solitude, Seth didn’t brace. He lifted his glass, took an unhurried sip, and let the barb die of its own lack of purchase. Then he addressed Lila instead, calm as a closing door.
At last, Seth inclined towards Dara by the smallest margin, as if he were merely adjusting for the candles. “If Toby offers to curate the cheese course,” he murmured, voice pitched for her alone, “do stop him. He’ll demand an encore and a grant.” It should have been armour but it wasn’t. It was a private gift, and the old, sour sense of being appraised eased under her steady presence.
The dinner began as it always did at Wrenford: names on cream card, chairs eased back at precisely the right moment, conversation pitched to the safe middle ground of weather and travel and Helmsford’s newest café. Silver appeared as if summoned rather than carried, each course arriving on an invisible cue. Seth sat at the head of his own table like a man wearing a coat in his own house. He had spent the entire week pre-empting those lapses. A glass set down too hard in the drawing room. A laugh that travelled too far up the stairs. Lila’s boots, always faintly accusing with their mud, parked where they shouldn’t be. The house was a creature of habit; it loved rules because rules were easier than feelings.
Someone, certainly not Mrs Greaves, left a pair of damp boots by the hall door.
Seth saw them the moment the dining-room doors opened and the draught carried in a trace of wet leather and winter grass. Blackened soles. A small puddle darkening the stone. His jaw tightened on instinct, the old reflex of management rising like a hand toward a bell.
And then, because Dara was two steps behind him and had been all week quietly refusing to flinch, he paused. Not long enough for anyone to notice; not long enough to become a scene. Long enough to feel the choice in his own body.
He let the boots remain, absurd and ordinary. The Hall didn’t crumble. No portrait tilted in outrage. The ceiling didn’t lower itself in disapproval.
Toby noticed, of course, Toby noticed everything he could turn into theatre. His gaze flicked to the boots, then to Seth, sharpening as if tasting blood.
Seth met it without hurry. He gave Toby nothing: no reprimand to twist into snobbery, no brittle joke to read as a crack. Merely a look that said, with exhausting clarity, I see you trying.
Lila’s mouth softened, approval smuggled behind a sip of wine. Dara’s face stayed composed, but Seth caught the smallest lift at one corner of her mouth, as if she’d seen him choose ease over performance and filed it away.
The room, deprived of its usual tension-point, had to find another rhythm. Conversation loosened by half a degree. Plates clinked. Someone laughed without checking the ceiling first. Seth felt, with faint surprise, the relief of not correcting anyone.
Dara didn’t wait for the bread to be ceremonially offered down the line. When the basket paused (caught between Lady-this and Sir-that, fingers hesitant as if generosity required a licence) she simply reached across with an unshowy economy and took a roll. No glance for permission, no performative apology. She tore it open, steam ghosting up, and set a portion on her plate as though eating were not a referendum.
The serving dish wobbled as it changed hands, silver skimming perilously close to a wineglass. Someone inhaled. Dara’s hand came up, steadying the rim with two fingers. The moment didn’t become a moment. The dish continued on, saved from a clatter that would have made Mrs Greaves appear like summoned thunder.
Seth watched her, aware of the minute recalibration rippling outward. Shoulders eased. A hand reached for butter without theatrics. Conversation found its footing again, not because anyone had been instructed, but because Dara had treated the table like a practical thing: meant to be used.
A laugh broke loose from somewhere near the far end of the table, bright, uncontained, half a note louder than the room generally permitted itself. It rang against panelling and inherited silence, and for a heartbeat Seth’s body answered as it always did: a tightening behind the eyes, the instinctive inventory of consequences. Who had done it. Who would look. How quickly he could smooth the moment back into something correct.
His gaze lifted, already prepared to offer a dry, muffling line.
Dara’s shoulders were still, her mouth curved as if she hadn’t even thought to be embarrassed. Lila’s eyes gleamed with quiet delight. No one clapped a hand over their own mirth; no one performed contrition. The sound simply existed, then softened, settling into the air like warmth rather than offence.
Seth breathed out through his nose and did nothing at all. Wrenford held. The week, improbably, held with it.
‘Could I have a bit more of that?’ Dara asked, voice level, as though wanting seconds were neither confession nor challenge. The table’s attention slid, brief, appraising, the old current of Is that done? Seth felt the reflex to soften her edges, to supply an excuse on her behalf. Instead he merely angled the dish towards her, wrist steady, and continued, ‘As I was saying about Helmsford.
The looseness moved by inches, as if the house were learning a new language: jackets slung over chair-backs, sleeves pushed up, someone, astonishingly, speaking to be understood rather than admired by dead relatives in gilt frames. Silence arrived and stayed, companionable, not an emergency. Seth heard himself make room instead of rules, and watched Dara move through Wrenford with a kind of respect that wasn’t reverence. Nothing cracked; it simply… widened.
Toby cleared his throat with the particular solemnity of a man about to be charming on purpose. He lifted his glass, barely, not enough to trigger a toast, just enough to gather eyes, and began an anecdote about a gallery opening in London, all white walls and earnest funding pitches. His delivery was polished, paced for laughs. He sketched himself as the unwilling hero, the only one brave enough to puncture the pretension.
Seth listened with the mild detachment he usually reserved for weather reports. The structure was familiar: a little set-up, a sideways compliment to the house for contrast, then the turn.
‘And then,’ Toby said, smiling as if sharing a confidence, ‘this man leans in and asks whether I’d ever considered doing something… useful. Not art, obviously. Something that might keep a roof on one’s head.’
The dagger was neat. It didn’t name Seth, didn’t need to. It hovered at the table’s centre, implying an entire class of people who had never had to decide between rent and pride. Toby’s eyes slid, fractionally, to Dara. Checking whether she’d laugh, whether she’d join him in the easy camaraderie of the supposedly self-made.
There was the smallest pause, calibrated. A space for the room to do what it had always done: tip toward Toby, offer him the warm rush of reaction, invite Seth to stiffen or bristle or prove him right.
Seth felt the old mechanism in his chest begin to whirr, then stall. Sleep deprivation, the week’s accumulated strain, the awareness of portraits and panelling: none of it mattered as much as it used to. He had hosted dinners like this as if they were examinations. Tonight, it was only a table.
Toby’s smile held, expectant.
Dara didn’t rescue him with a laugh. She didn’t wince, either. She watched him with a calm that suggested she understood the game and was bored by it.
Seth reached for his wine, not in defence, merely because his glass was there. Somewhere down the table, cutlery tapped softly against china. The story waited, suspended, for applause that didn’t arrive.
It doesn’t. Seth sets his glass down with a soft, deliberate click and looks at Toby as though he’s assessing a timetable rather than a provocation.
‘Useful is a matter of context,’ he says. ‘And roofs are, regrettably, rather expensive to keep on.’
A small breath of laughter escapes from someone and then it’s over, because Seth doesn’t sharpen the point. He turns, without fuss, to the guest beside him. ‘Dara, you mentioned Helmsford had a decent butcher. Is it still the one by the cross?’
Dara meets Toby’s gaze for a beat longer than politeness requires. Her expression doesn’t plead, doesn’t flare; it simply refuses the offered roles. No wounded pride to console, no conspiratorial grin to invite him nearer. Just a quiet acknowledgement of what he’s done, and a decision not to carry it.
Toby’s mouth stays half-shaped around his next line, stranded. Across the table, the conversation sidesteps neatly into safer terrain, shops, routes, the river path being muddy after rain, as if the barb were only a crumb brushed away. The room’s attention drifts, bored by the absence of blood.
Toby didn’t leave it there. He tilted his head, offered a rueful little shrug that asked to be read as courage rather than calculation. ‘Mind you, I can’t pretend I’m any better. I’ve done “useful”. I lasted three weeks in an office once. Nearly perished. The fluorescent lighting alone was an existential threat.’
In another room, on another night, that would have earned him the warm, scandalised laughter he lived on. The chorus assuring him he was too bright, too special, too alive for spreadsheets and small talk. Here it arrived in polite fragments, smiles that didn’t quite lift, a soft exhale from someone who’d already moved on.
With no spotlight to catch, his grin slipped. He drew a longer breath, shoulders easing as if he’d been holding himself up by charm. ‘Anyway,’ he said, quieter, and for once it wasn’t a cue. It was simply the next sentence.
Lila noticed it first: the subtle slackening, as if a cord had been cut somewhere under the table. She let her shoulders drop. She stopped listening for the next fracture and started listening for pleasure: the cadence of a story, the small ridiculousness of it. Once, she laughed too loudly and didn’t apologise. When someone asked about her work, she answered plainly, proud, without cushioning it in a joke.
As the meal ebbed, something settled over the table like a tablecloth smoothed flat: not silence, but a steadier kind of noise. Toby’s little performances arrived and went unanswered, landing with the dullness of cutlery set down wrongly. Lila leaned back as if she’d been released from duty. And in the middle of it all, Seth and Dara kept finding each other, brief looks, shared pauses, easy, unclaimed, quietly undeniable.
When the last plates were cleared, the dining room exhaled. Linen smoothed, glasses thinned to a few stubborn inches of wine, and talk fractured into friendly, manageable clusters: weather with an edge of rivalry, Helmsford gossip, someone’s ill-advised attempt at pheasant facts. Seth felt the old instinct rise, neat and practised: Now. One more circuit with the housekeeper. A fictitious note about tomorrow’s breakfast. The library’s blessed hush.
He stood, half a movement already committed, and found Dara watching him as if she’d learned the shape of his exits. Not accusingly. Simply… accurately.
Her expression was composed, but there was the tiniest lift at one corner of her mouth, like she was waiting to see whether he would choose the obvious defence or something else.
Seth’s jaw tensed on reflex. He loosened it, deliberately. He didn’t look towards the sideboard. He didn’t glance at the staff. Instead, he held Dara’s gaze, long enough that it wasn’t an accident, not long enough to invite comment, and tipped his head towards the doors.
‘Would you come for a walk?’ he asked.
The words landed between them with surprising weight, not because they were grand, but because they weren’t. No qualifier. No joke. No disguise of obligation.
For a heartbeat Dara seemed almost thrown, as if she’d prepared for a spar and been offered a hand instead. Then she rose, smoothing her napkin with the air of someone who refused to be flustered by kindness.
‘Now?’ she said softly, and there was a brightness in it, interest, not challenge.
‘If you’re not otherwise engaged,’ Seth replied, clipped out of habit, then added, as if he couldn’t bear to let it sound like he was granting permission, ‘It’s calmer outside.’
Dara’s gaze flicked past him, Toby holding court to two half-smiles, Lila laughing with her shoulders loose, and back. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’
Seth inclined his head, a minimal gesture that still felt like stepping into open air, and offered his arm as if it were merely correct. Dara took it without hesitation.
They left the dining room as if the idea had occurred to them both at once. No flurry of goodnights, no conspicuous excuses. Only Seth’s faint inclination of the head to the nearest cluster and Dara’s quick, neat smile that gave nobody anything to hook a comment onto. The door clicked behind them with a tactful softness, and the corridor received them like a held breath.
Wrenford Hall was in its after-dinner phase: voices thinning as guests drifted towards staircases, a distant laugh muffled by panelling, the discreet whisper of staff clearing what could be cleared without being seen to do it. The air smelt of beeswax and cooling stone. Seth’s pace was the one he used when he was alone (efficient, unhesitating) until he felt, rather than saw, Dara matching him step for step.
He eased back, half a stride, as if the house had reminded him she was not luggage to be transported. His arm remained offered, formal enough to be armour, but his hand relaxed where it rested against his coat. Dara didn’t fill the quiet; she simply walked in it with him, and it made the corridor feel less like an exit route and more like a choice.
The terrace met them with a cool, unvarnished sort of air, as if the house’s warmth had been a performance and this was the truth of the place: cut grass, damp stone, a faint metallic tang from the river somewhere below. Behind them, the tall windows threw warm rectangles onto the flagstones, catching the edges of their coats; ahead, the valley was a single dark sweep, open enough to make even Seth feel briefly unarmoured.
He went to the low wall and set his hands on it, fingers splayed, as though he could anchor himself to the estate’s old certainty. For a moment he simply looked out, jaw working once, then he turned to her. No smile summoned; no joke raised as a shield.
‘Dara,’ he said, carefully, and the care was the point. ‘I’d like to ask you something. ’
He didn’t dress it up. No flourishes, no repentant theatrics. Just a steady look and the plain proposition, as if it were the most practical thing in the world. Would she come back, properly, when there weren’t guests to charm or survive? Not as a curiosity, not a tolerated interruption, but included. Here, on the dull days too, when the house demanded work rather than applause.
Dara didn’t laugh it off. She didn’t ask for a definition, or a timetable, or the correct phrasing for a house like this. She came in close enough that he could feel her warmth in the night air and looked straight at him, as if he were just a man and not a role. ‘Yes,’ she said, simply: yes to the quiet weekdays, the awkward bits, the necessary planning, and whatever came after.
Seth let out a breath that seemed to have been portioned out in sensible measures all week, as though air were another resource he was meant to manage. It left him in one long exhale, and with it went a fraction of the rigidity he’d been wearing like a well-cut coat. He didn’t turn it into a moment; didn’t look at her to see what she’d make of it. He simply shifted, because standing apart suddenly felt less like propriety and more like cowardice.
He moved closer until the line of his shoulder sat a thought away from hers. No clasping, no declaration. Just the unshowy decision to stop arranging distance between them. The terrace wall was damp under his palms, cold enough to sting a little through his skin. He set his right hand on the coping, fingers spread, and felt the grit of centuries and weather, the steadiness of stone that had outlasted every mood he’d ever had.
For a beat there was only the valley and the dark. Then Dara’s hand came to rest beside his, as if she’d been considering where to put herself and chosen this without apology. Her fingers were warmer than the stone, warmer than he expected; the contrast was immediate and oddly intimate, like a light switched on behind a curtain. She didn’t cover his hand. She didn’t edge away from it, either. Just adjacent, present, making a small, quiet claim that wasn’t about possession so much as permission.
Seth’s throat tightened with something he refused to name. He stared out at the darkness and tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, to summon the familiar irritation that usually rose to rescue him from feeling too much. It didn’t come. What came instead was the awareness of her steady breathing and the faint brush of her sleeve when the night wind shifted their coats.
He spoke without looking at her, because looking might have made it dramatic. ‘I’m not very good at this,’ he said, as if confessing an administrative weakness. Then, after a pause that held more than it should have, he added, quieter, ‘But I’d like to be.’
Behind them the Hall continued its low, competent settling, as if it had never done anything else. Somewhere a latch caught with a careful, practiced pressure; footsteps crossed a flagged passage and receded; a clock worried at the seconds with the quiet insistence of a small metronome. There was a brief, polite clink (china being stacked, perhaps, or cutlery laid down) and then the sound stopped, swallowed by thick walls.
Seth registered it all without turning his head. Normally the house’s noises came with instructions: reminders dressed up as atmosphere. Close up, lock up, check the silver, remember the guests, remember yourself. Tonight they were only evidence of other lives moving through the same space, getting on with it. He was not the hinge everything swung on.
A draught found the terrace and slid under his collar. Instead of bracing against it, he simply shifted his weight and let the cold be what it was. The estate loomed behind his back (portraited, panelled, demanding by habit) and for once it didn’t feel as though it had him by the throat. It was just a building, doing its nightly tidying, while the valley lay open and black ahead like unclaimed ground.
Dara didn’t rush in to patch the quiet, didn’t perform ease for the benefit of the house behind them. She stayed with the dark as if it were simply weather, then tipped her chin towards the east, where the line of the hills was only just distinguishable. ‘What time do you think the drive to Helmsford actually takes in the morning?’ she asked. Not as a test. ‘If I’m on the (what is it) ten fourteen, I’ll need to leave here by nine? Nine-thirty if we’re feeling reckless.’
It was so ordinary it almost hurt. Trains. Timetables. The mild, shared nuisance of not dawdling. No sweeping promises, no careful disclaimers: just the quiet assumption of a morning that existed, waiting to be managed. And somehow that was the tender part: a future measured in calendars, not fantasies.
Seth gave a single nod, the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth suggesting he’d heard the joke beneath her logistics. ‘I’ll have the car brought round,’ he said, crisp as an instruction to staff, then softened by the next breath. ‘I’ll send you the address, and we can leave at. He didn’t retrieve it. Something in his shoulders eased, as if his body had decided before his mind could object.
They remained at the terrace wall, not speaking, not needing to. Seth could feel the warmth of her coat through the thin air between them; close enough now that it didn’t read as defence, merely a shared stillness. Below, the valley held its darkness without judgement. Wrenford, too, seemed to exhale. No assessment, no audience. Just earth and stone, steady underfoot, as if it might be possible to build something here on purpose.