Page 95 of A Debt Inherited

“Yes, sir,” Hill said. “She had her bonnet and gloves. She said she would only take the air.”

“She was not to visit tenants? Look in on the Perkins’s boy?”

“Not without you, sir.”

Bennet looked towards the stair.

“Only the air,” he repeated.

Mrs Hill looked towards the stair.

“Please do, Mrs Hill.”

She went at once.

Bennet looked at Hill. The man’s features had gone still.

Above them, doors opened and closed in quick succession. Mrs Hill’s steps hurried back along the passage before she appeared, one hand pressed to her cap, her eyes wide.

“Not above, sir.” Mrs Hill’s voice shook upon the last word.

“Thank you.” Bennet kept his tone even. “You did quite right.”

She drew breath as if to speak again.

“Mrs Hill,” he said, more gently, “look at me.”

Her eyes came to his.

“We shall find Miss Elizabeth. Until then, we must not spread alarm. If any servant saw Miss Elizabeth after noon, I am to know it at once.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No crying in the passages.”

Mrs Hill pressed her lips together and nodded.

Bennet turned to Hill. “You and I will take the grounds.”

Hill crossed to the stand by the door and brought Bennet’s cane.

Bennet took it without looking, gripping the carved horse’s head.

“The garden first,” he said. “Then the orchard, the shrubbery, and the lower path. No shouting unless we find cause.”

They went out.

The evening had begun to cool, but the heat still lay in the gravel and rose with each step. Bennet took the garden at once, his eyes lowered to the gravel, the grass, the borders, every place where a foot might have pressed and withdrawn. The clipped grass showed nothing. The beds had not been crossed.

The little gate beyond the shrubbery stood unlatched.

“She went this way, sir.”

“Yes.”

They followed the path to the orchard, then beyond it, where the grass grew longer beneath the hedge. Once Bennet stopped for a crushed stem. Once for the print of a half-boot in dust already softening at the edges.

The sun lowered. Shadows gathered under the trees.