Between Michaelmas

The steward's office at Hartlow smelled of damp wool and lamp-oil and the sharp green of sized paper left too long in a drawer. Michaelmas rain had already darkened the yard beyond the small window, and the church clock, when it struck the quarter, did so as if it meant to be obeyed. Mara stood with her left hand on the latch and let the room settle around her: one desk, two drawers, a cracked cup on a saucer, and a chair whose leather had taken the shape of a heavier man. A nail by the door held a ring of keys. Dust lay on the nail's head as if no one had wanted to be the first to take them down.

Mrs. Keel had shown her the door and then gone back to the kitchen without offering more than a nod. She had said the old steward's keys were on the peg. She had not said what the keys opened, and she had not lingered to invent kindness. Outside, a cart axle complained on the home-farm track, and somewhere past the timber store a dog barked twice and went quiet. Hartlow was not grand. It was a working house with wet stone and a west wood that leaned against the weather, and the office was the place where weather became numbers that could feed people or frighten them.

Mara set her bag down beside the desk and looked at the two drawers. The upper one had a clean brass pull. The lower one's pull was darker, as if a thumb had worried it for years. On the blotter lay a stub of sealing-wax and a penknife with a bone handle worn smooth. The inks sat in two wells: one black enough for ordinary accounts, one a browner mix that looked cheaper and more private. Rain ticked the glass. A map of the home farm, inked on linen and cracked at the folds, hung crooked on the wall opposite the window. She was hired as of Michaelmas, and the house expected a steward who could walk mud and keep a ledger without making a sermon of either.

The old steward had died in the harvest week. That much Mrs. Keel had allowed. She had not said how the books stood, and she had not named the cause beyond a shrug that meant age and weather and work. Mrs. Hart had written from the morning room in a hand that did not waste ink: the estate needed continuity until the heir in Madras answered, and Madras answered slowly. Mara had come up the lane with that letter folded in her coat and the taste of coach dust still in her mouth. Now the desk waited, and so did the yard, and the west wood showed as a dark line beyond the home paddock, wet and close, a wall of timber the house had lived against for longer than any living tenant could swear to.

Mara could walk first. She could take the keys and step out into the Michaelmas mud and learn the edge of the wood before she touched paper. Or she could stay, open the dead man's desk, and meet the house in ink before she met it in weather. The church clock struck again. The cracked cup held a ring of old tea. Two drawers. Two inks. A year beginning in rain, and a steward who had not yet chosen which fact to learn first.