One evening, she ordered the kitchen emptied before the tea tray arrived. Daniel entered to find her standing beside the fireplace, fully dressed.
carefully.
“What do you want?”
“All forty-seven people released. Daniel included.”
Samuel laughed once.
John reached for the ledger.
“Then I’ll take it to the printer.”
The laughter stopped.
***
The magistrate arrived at ten.
So did Samuel, accompanied by a solicitor and two witnesses.
Eleanor received them in mourning silk, her face pale but composed.
When Samuel placed the ledger on her desk, she stopped pretending to be weak.
“You stole from me.”
John stood beside the doorway.
“Yes.”
She turned toward the magistrate.
“Arrest him.”
But Samuel was already unfolding her letter to the trustees.
What followed lasted three hours.
The magistrate cared little about the twelve men. The solicitor asked more questions about the inheritance than about Eleanor’s bedroom. Daniel, brought upstairs under guard, understood that his suffering had become important only where it touched another man’s property.
Still, something had changed.
Eleanor was being made to
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