CHAPTER FOUR: A HOUSE BUILT ON ORDERS

They returned to the orchard wall by separate paths.
Martha stayed with the mule while Ruth went to the kitchen to learn whether Ralston had left.
Elias waited beneath the window of the old schoolroom.
He could hear voices from the dining room through the open transom.
The master, Thomas Voss, sounded irritated rather than frightened.
“I will not have my household searched over a rumor,” Thomas said.
Ralston answered in a low voice that carried through the passage.
“You paid me to make troublesome questions disappear.”
“I paid you to keep the estate running.

”
“Those are not always different things.”
A chair scraped across the floor.
Thomas demanded to know why Ralston had come without an appointment.
Ralston said the physician had seen Adelaide’s condition and had concerns about the timing.
Elias heard a glass strike the table.
“You will not speak about my wife,” Thomas said.
“Then let me speak about the child she has hidden in the north cottage,” Ralston replied.
The silence that followed was long enough for Elias to hear the rain beginning on the roof.
A child in the north cottage made no sense.
The cottage had been empty since the roof collapsed.


Elias stepped backward into the darkness.
He had assumed the drawer contained a secret about Adelaide’s pregnancy.
Now he understood that Ralston was using the pregnancy to make an older secret dangerous again.
Ruth found him beside the schoolroom window.
“The physician never came,” she whispered.
“Ralston brought a man dressed like one, but the cook recognized him from the horse market.”
“What is in the north cottage?” Elias asked.
Ruth’s face went pale.
“The roof is gone,” she said.
“That is what everyone says.”
“I have not been allowed near it since spring.”
Elias thought of the false bottom in Adelaide’s drawer.


The bundle had been deliberately placed where he could find it if he understood the lock.
Perhaps Adelaide had wanted him to take it all along.
Perhaps she had been too afraid to say so plainly.
He was still angry with her.
That anger did not prevent him from seeing a chance to protect someone else.
“Wake the stable boys,” he told Ruth.
“Tell them not to approach the north cottage until I return.”
“Where are you going?”
“I am going to ask Adelaide one question she cannot answer with a threat.”