“Master Bryce.
Punctual.” Arthur Duncan opened his own front door rather than leaving it to a servant, a broad, unhurried man in good dark wool, his handshake dry and businesslike.
“I approve of punctuality in a young man.
Come in out of the wet.”
The slate roof Walter had clocked from the inn’s window his first week in Cranesmuir a detail filed and forgotten under a season’s worth of shop-work resolved itself overhead as he crossed the threshold into a hall warmer and better appointed than anywhere he’d set foot since Craigh na Dun.
Wax candles, not tallow.
A carpet underfoot that hadn’t been woven anywhere near this parish.
“Master Duncan.
I thank ye for the invitation.”
“Thank my wife for it.
She takes an interest in London men says the village hasn’t had a proper conversation in it since the last one passed through.” Arthur said it with the easy, unbothered fondness of a husband long accustomed to his wife’s particular enthusiasms, and led the way through to a dining room where Geillis sat already at the table’s head in dark blue silk, candlelight doing considerably more for the color than the green cloak’s silk trim had managed on a grey shop afternoon.
“Master Bryce.” Her public register, warm and unhurried, gave away nothing at all of the fifteen paces on the green.
“Sit, please.
Arthur, pour the claret.”
The mutton was good, better than anything the inn’s kitchen managed, and Arthur Duncan proved, over the first two courses, to be exactly the kind of pleasant, thorough conversationalist Walter had learned to answer without strain questions about his London training, his master’s name, the particulars of an apprenticeship Walter had built weeks ago and had, by now, told often enough that the invention had worn smooth as a much-handled coin.
“And your master kept to Galen’s humors, or the newer methods?” Arthur asked, working through his neeps with the unhurried appetite of the never-hungry, easy in the certainty the next meal would simply arrive.
“A mix, sir.
“Results before doctrine, he used to say.”
“A sensible man.” Arthur nodded, satisfied, and reached for his own glass and it was there, in the candlelit middle distance of an entirely ordinary gesture, that something in Walter’s perception caught and refused to resolve.
Not the doubled clarity of a proper diagnosis.
He hadn’t asked.
He hadn’t touched, hadn’t leaned in with intent the way Etiquette and every instinct he owned told him a patient’s consent required.
But five hours of proximity across a small table had apparently been enough to let something bleed through regardless a faint, formless wrongness sitting under Arthur’s ordinary color, in the specific unhealthy sheen of his skin at the temple, in a hand that trembled by a degree too small for its owner to have noticed and too specific for Walter’s trained eye to entirely ignore.
He set the observation down without chasing it.
There was nothing to be done with an incomplete signal at another man’s dinner table, no consent given, no diagnosis he had any right to.
He filed it the only way that mattered as a fact worth having, not a puzzle worth solving tonight and asked Arthur a question about the magistrate’s docket instead, because a good guest kept the conversation moving in whatever direction its host preferred.
The clerk arrived between the mutton and the pudding, apologetic and out of breath, a slight young man Arthur introduced without much ceremony as “MacRae, from the court,” and the paper he carried required, by his own account, Arthur’s signature before the morning session or the whole docket would sit unresolved another fortnight.
“Fifteen minutes, no more,” Arthur said, already rising, already reaching for his spectacles.
“Geillis, see our guest doesn’t starve in my absence.”
The door closed behind him, and the room’s whole temperature changed by a degree Walter felt rather than measured Geillis’s public register dropping away in the space between one breath and the next, the way a held note finally allows itself to end.
“Three questions,” she said, low, fast, the Glasgow underneath her voice surfacing whole and entire for the first time since he’d met her.
“I’ve been waiting six years to ask someone who could actually answer them, and I’ll not waste the fifteen minutes my husband’s just handed me being coy about it.”
“Ask.”
“What’s the best book ye read, before ye came.”
“Steinbeck.”
“Coffee.
Do ye miss it.”
“Every day.
Worse in winter.” A ghost of the dry humor surfaced despite the setting.
“I’d have traded a gemstone for a bad gas-station cup, some mornings.”
“Have ye flown,” she said, and something in the question carried more weight than the first two combined, “in an aeroplane.”
“Twice.
Boise to Portland, once each way.” He watched her face while he said it watched something in her eyes go, for just a moment, entirely unguarded, hungry in a way six years of careful performance hadn’t managed to starve out of her.
“Small enough plane you could hear the propeller change pitch on descent.”
“Finito,” she said, so quietly he nearly missed it, and reached for her claret with a hand that wasn’t, he noted, entirely steady either the same specific tremor his own hands had carried the day she’d first walked into the shop, two operators discovering, in the space of fifteen stolen minutes, exactly how much the not-being-alone was going to cost them both to keep carrying quietly.
The hall door opened.
Arthur’s unhurried footsteps returned, spectacles still in hand, already talking about the docket before he’d fully cleared the threshold, and Geillis’s public register slid back into place so completely that Walter, watching it happen, understood for the first time exactly how much practice that particular transformation had taken to perfect.
“Pudding,” Arthur announced, settling back into his chair with the satisfaction of a man whose evening had proceeded exactly as expected, entirely unaware of the fifteen minutes that had just passed six inches from his elbow.
“Mrs MacNeil does a fine steamed pudding, Master Bryce.
You’ll want the full portion.”
Walter took the full portion, and ate it with every appearance of a guest enjoying an unremarkable evening, and across the candlelight Geillis Duncan met his eyes for exactly as long as courtesy allowed and not one beat longer the whole of what either of them could say tonight already said, and everything else deliberately, carefully, left for whatever room came next that Arthur wasn’t in.