The letter arrived in the second week of January, formal and pleasant on the surface, with a quality underneath it like a floor that had been tested for weak boards. Warwick wished to call, to congratulate them properly on the marriage, at their convenience of course, any day that suited—
"He wants to see us in our natural environment," she said, setting the letter on the desk.
Samuel had already read it. "Yes."
"He needs to verify that the marriage is genuine enough to disqualify Lawrence's challenge. Or he's assessing how genuine it isn't, so he can find the angle." She looked at the letter. "Either way, he comes in, he watches, he leaves with an impression."
"What's the impression we need him to leave with."
"The truth," she said. "Or near enough to it that he can't find the seam." She paused. "He'll look for performance. For two people being a married couple at each other. What he won't be looking for is just—two people who know each other."
Samuel was quiet. "What does that look like, from the outside."
She thought about how to answer this. "Like what's already there," she said. "You don't need to perform warmth. You need to stop suppressing it." She let that sit for a second. "When I come back from a trip, you're different for a day. When I come into a room you're already in, something shifts. I'm not asking you to manufacture anything—I'm asking you to not work quite so hard to hide what's actually happening."
He looked at her for a long moment with an expression she couldn't entirely read. Then he said, "All right."
Warwick came on a Thursday, with a secretary and without a lawyer—she filed this: private reconnaissance, not legal manoeuvring. Not yet.
She kept to her ordinary schedule. The accounts in the morning. A conversation with Fischer about the coal stores. A brief exchange with Samuel in the upper corridor about a supplier dispute she'd resolved—he stopped, they spoke, he moved on. She moved on.
She could feel Warwick's eyes from the far end of the hall, and she gave him nothing to interpret except two people managing an estate, which was what they were.
At lunch, Samuel said, simply, "Will you join us?" directed at her, in the small dining room, in front of Warwick—and the way he said it, the particular naturalness of it, made Ella think that either he had been practising or that he had decided, at some point in the last twenty-four hours, that he was done hiding things.
She sat across from them. Warwick watched her. He was subtle—he had been a political man for long enough to have developed considerable subtlety—but she had been managing difficult guests for a decade, and she knew how to feel a room without looking as though she was reading it.
He watched Samuel's face when she spoke. He watched whether Samuel leaned toward or away from her. He watched for the precise, invisible markers of two people who had decided to be in the same place, rather than two people who simply happened to be there.
When she pushed the roasted carrots toward Samuel—he had been ignoring them, distracted by something Warwick had said, and she did it without thinking because she had done it three times in the last month and it had become habit—she felt Warwick's gaze pause on the gesture.
She didn't look at him.
After lunch, Warwick and Samuel went to the study. She went to the accounts room. She worked for an hour, and then she heard the front door, and then Fischer's knock at her door.
"He's gone," Fischer said.
She found Samuel in the entrance hall, looking at nothing in particular with the expression of a man running a private calculation.
"He asked how we met," Samuel said, when he heard her. "I said Fischer had recommended you before you formally applied. That you'd been in the house already."
"That's true," she said. "It's also elegantly unspecific."
"He seemed satisfied." A pause. "He asked me one other thing. Whether I was happy."
She went very still.
"I said yes," Samuel said. He looked at her—the direct look, unguarded. "It was the easiest answer I gave him all afternoon."
She didn't know what to do with that. She filed it in the place where she kept things she didn't know what to do with, which was becoming increasingly crowded.
"Good," she said. "That's good."