A week to the day after Julian's departure, a carriage of unfamiliar design—lighter, sleeker, and spattered with the mud of hard travel—clattered up the drive of Hazeldene Hall. It did not have the weary air of a post-chaise, but the assertive purpose of a vessel arriving at its plotted destination. From her vantage in the morning room, Elara watched it with a cold, shrinking feeling in her chest. This was not Julian returning. This was something new.
The man who descended was, in every aspect, a discordant note in the muted symphony of the moorland. He was perhaps in his late forties, tall and lean with a rawboned vigour that spoke of open spaces and a younger nation. His clothes were impeccably cut but of a sharper, less yielding cloth than English broadcloth, his boots polished to a high, pragmatic gleam. His face was clean-shaven, tanned, and marked by intelligence of a cool, assessing kind. Most strikingly, he carried no hat, letting the damp Yorkshire air tousle hair the colour of weathered wheat. He surveyed the grey façade of the Hall not with awe, but with the keen scrutiny of a surveyor, his gaze lingering on the repaired roof-line as if costing the labour.
Blevins, his posture more rigid than Elara had ever seen, announced him moments later. "A Mr. Samuel Lockwood, of Boston, Massachusetts, to see you, Miss Vance. He… insists his business is urgent and concerns the master."
Lockwood. The name vibrated in the air, a too-close echo of the underlined Locke in Julian's diary. Boston. America. The geography of the threat expanded dizzyingly.
Elara rose, forcing a calm she did not feel. "Show him in, Blevins."
Samuel Lockwood entered the room with an air of contained energy, his eyes taking in its details—the worn rug, the good but not fashionable furniture, her own simple dress—with a swift, comprehensive glance. His bow was correct, but not deep.
"Miss Vance. Forgive my intrusion. My name is Samuel Lockwood. I am an attorney. I have recently been in correspondence with Mr. Thorne regarding a matter of legacy. As my business in York concluded sooner than anticipated, and understanding him to be resident here, I took the liberty of calling." His voice held the faint, flattened vowels of New England, a sound utterly alien within these walls. It was a voice of ledgers and courtrooms, not of poetry or rain-soaked moors.
"Mr. Thorne is not at home," Elara said, her voice steady. She did not offer a seat.
A flicker of something—annoyance, or perhaps satisfaction—crossed his sharp features. "I see. My letter must have preceded me. He has gone to York to meet with my associate, then. No matter. The essentials can be… contextualized… here, perhaps even more effectively." His gaze settled on her fully, and she saw in his light grey eyes a dispassionate curiosity. "You are the housekeeper?"
"I am the mistress of this household," she replied, the title feeling both fragile and fiercely necessary. "Any business you have with Mr. Thorne may be entrusted to me in his absence."
His eyebrow lifted a fraction. "Is that so?" He did not challenge it outright, but the doubt was a palpable force. He reached into an inner pocket of his coat and withdrew a leather portfolio. "The matter is complex, rooted in transactions from a decade ago. It concerns the settlement of interests in a… venture. A mining venture in the Colorado Territory. My client, Mr. Griffin Locke, was Mr. Thorne's partner."
Griffin Locke. The name, spoken aloud in this clipped American accent, seemed to crack the room like ice. The Dust in the corners seemed to quiver, listening.
"I am not familiar with Mr. Thorne's commercial history," Elara said, her hands clasped tightly behind her back.
"Few are," Lockwood said smoothly, extracting a single sheet. "It was a brief, and for my client, a catastrophic, entanglement. Mr. Thorne provided capital, then, citing moral reservations about the methods being employed, withdrew it abruptly. The collapse of financing led to… severe consequences. A cave-in. Lives lost. My client's reputation and fortune were destroyed. Mr. Thorne's subsequent written settlement, achieved through London lawyers, was, in my client's view, a paltry sum that did not approach the true debt incurred—the debt of ruin."
The debt is not of money, but of a more lasting kind. The fragment's words echoed horribly.
"Mr. Thorne considered the matter closed," Elara stated, clinging to the word from the diary: Settlement. Final.
"Closed by distance and legal technicality, perhaps," Lockwood countered, his tone hardening. "Not by consequence. Not by conscience. My client has passed, Miss Vance. But his heir—his daughter—remains. And she remembers the stories of her father's despair. She remembers the name Thorne." He paused, letting the implication hang. "The American courts have their limits regarding foreign obligations of such age. But the court of reputation… that has a wider jurisdiction. A respected Yorkshire landowner, a man rebuilding his standing… such a man might find the prospect of certain allegations becoming public to be a powerful incentive to revisit the terms of an old settlement."
It was blackmail. Elegantly phrased, legally veiled, but blackmail all the same. He was not here for Julian's money; he was here for his peace, his hard-won redemption. The American had crossed an ocean to lay a claim not on pounds sterling, but on Julian's very soul, threatening to stain the new life they were building with the old mud of a faraway tragedy.
Elara felt a cold fury rise within her, burning away the fear. She met Lockwood's assessing gaze. "You have delivered your… contextualization, Mr. Lockwood. I suggest you return to York. Your business is with Mr. Thorne, not with me, nor with this house."
He studied her for a long moment, a faint, unreadable smile touching his lips. He seemed to appreciate her mettle, even as he dismissed it. "As you say. But a house, Miss Vance, is only as sound as the foundation upon which it is built. And some foundations, it seems, were laid with compromised mortar." His eyes flickered almost imperceptibly towards the window, as if sensing the strange, waiting stillness of the land itself. "You have a singular atmosphere here. Quite haunting. I shall tell Mr. Thorne I found his… household… in attentive keeping."
With another brief, efficient bow, he took his leave. Elara stood motionless long after the sound of his carriage had faded, the taste of his threat like metal on her tongue. The past had not just sent a letter. It had sent an emissary—a cool, modern, transatlantic claimant who saw not a home, but leverage. And Julian was walking into a nest of such men in York, armed with nothing but his own tortured conscience. The walls of Hazeldene, for so long a bulwark against the moor's weather, felt terrifyingly thin against this new, calculating storm from the west.