They filed at the end of January.
Evans brought the completed application in person, which Ella had not expected and which she found, when she thought about it later, entirely consistent with the kind of man he was. He arrived at nine in the morning, sat across from Samuel in the study while she stood at the window and went through the document section by section, answering questions, and then at half past ten he took it away again, and by four in the afternoon a messenger arrived from the city to confirm that the central committee's clerk had received and logged the submission.
The status: pending. The timeline: forty-five days for initial determination.
She did the arithmetic. The northern estate's deadline had expired three weeks prior. The arbitration filing had, per standard procedure, triggered an automatic suspension of asset transfer pending determination. Lawrence Blackwood could not take possession while the committee was reviewing.
They had forty-five days. Given what they had submitted, she thought they needed less.
She told Samuel in the study, the messenger's confirmation in her hand, and he sat very still for a moment before he spoke.
"Six years," he said. Not to her, not to anyone—to some interior audience, some account he was settling. "The document was placed six years ago. My father's been dead thirty-three."
She waited.
"He would have hated this," Samuel said. "Not the situation—the fact that it was allowed to sit. He was a man who dealt with things immediately. He didn't—leave things." A pause. "I've been leaving this."
"You were building toward it," she said. "There's a difference."
"Is there."
"Yes," she said. "A wall built over years holds better than a wall built in a week."
He looked at her for a moment. Then: "You didn't know him."
"No," she said. "But I know you. And I know what you've done with what he left you—the estate, the tenants, the records." She met his eyes. "He would have been proud of those things. Whatever else is true."
He said nothing for a long moment. Then he stood, walked to the window, stood with his back to her looking out at the frozen garden, and she let him have that.
After a while he turned back. His face had done something—she couldn't have said precisely what. Opened slightly. Like a door that has been closed for a long time and has just been opened a crack, not enough to see through but enough to feel that the air on the other side is different.
"Ella," he said. "I want—" He stopped. "I don't know how to say this precisely."
"You don't have to be precise," she said.
He looked at her. "I want you to know that what you've done here—what you've been doing since November—it isn't something I could have asked for. It isn't something I thought to ask for." A pause. "I don't have a word for what it is, except—necessary. In a way that goes past the practical."
She held this carefully, the way you held something that was warmer than you expected. "I know," she said quietly. "I think I understand."
"Do you," he said.
"Yes," she said. "I think we understand each other rather well."
He looked at her for a long time. Outside, the sky was shifting—the low grey of January beginning to break, the earliest intimation of something that might, eventually, become February.
"Dinner tonight," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"I'll tell Margaret something worth celebrating," he said.
She smiled—properly, fully, without the careful management she had been applying to her expressions since approximately the fourth week of November.
"Tell her that," she said. "She'll be pleased."