Chapter 4: Him

Him

The bathroom door opened and let the steam out into the bedroom.

Adrian came through it with his hair still wet and a white robe knotted loose at the waist, hanging open down the front. Water ran off his jaw and down his neck and kept going. He didn’t wipe it off. He crossed the room, opened the closet, took out a gray long-sleeved shirt and a pair of dark trousers, and laid them on the bed. He passed the mirror over the dresser and didn’t look into it. He dressed. He went down.

The stairs came down into the front hall. Dining room off to the left, kitchen behind a swing door past that, and behind the kitchen the narrow passage the staff used to carry dishes without crossing the front of the house. It was the quiet the house got after seven: cars in, gate shut, nothing left in the day that had to happen. Behind the swing door somebody set a lid down on a burner and moved a pot. That was all.

There was food on the table. Plated and covered to hold the heat, and laid out for company that wasn’t coming. Adrian stood at the end of the table and looked at it. Then he pulled the chair out, sat down, and didn’t touch any of it.

Walter was already there, back by the sideboard, hands folded.

“Walter.”

“Mr. Adrian.”

“Where is he?”

Walter didn’t answer straight away, and the pause had nothing to do with the words.

“Sir?”

“Has he eaten?”

There was only one person in this house it could be about, and Walter had been in service long enough to know better than to say so.

“Mr. Ellery,” he said. “You’re asking about Mr. Ellery.”

“Mm.”

One syllable. Flat. He said everything that way.

Something went up in Walter’s chest and took a second to come back down. A month he had watched this marriage from the outside, and in that month not one word about Mr. Ellery had crossed this table. Two questions now, in the same minute. For as long as it took to draw a breath, he let himself believe that whatever Adrian Hale had been carrying against that boy had finally been set down.

“Mr. Ellery went to New York a week ago,” he said. “He had some business to see to.” A beat. “I told you when he left, Mr. Adrian. Don’t you remember?”

Adrian heard it land. He had asked — out loud, in front of Walter — where a man he had never once asked about had gone, and the question was in the room now, and Walter was standing there with it.

“I must not have been listening,” he said. “When does he come back?”

“Tonight. He called this morning.” Walter glanced at the clock on the wall behind him. “By now he should be nearly here.”

A pause. Then, carefully, because he was an old man and had earned himself one question:

“Is there something you wanted him for?”

“No.” Evenly. “Nothing. Just asking.”

Walter’s head dipped half an inch, and he said nothing else.

Adrian looked down at the plate in front of him. He did not lift the cover off it.

He had come back a month into the marriage. That was where he was standing. The wedding was a month behind him, the papers were signed, the rooms on the second floor were assigned, and in all of it he had not said one word to Milo Ellery. Not the day the man moved in. Not at the table. Not in the hall. Not once. It had never been a decision he had to make fresh every morning. It had just been the arrangement.

He hadn’t wanted it. His grandfather had wanted it; his father had agreed to it; the lawyers had drawn the papers. Adrian had said yes to it himself, and he had never explained why, to anyone.

What stuck was the other side of it. Milo had said yes too. Nobody had made him.

He had come up the drive one morning with two suitcases and a gray coat, and he had taken the name Hale like something handed to him at the door. Adrian had understood the whole arrangement inside the first hour. The name, the house, the money — and in exchange, the man stayed out of his way.

And Milo had held up that end of it. Adrian had to give him that much. He was never in the room. He was never at the table when Adrian was at it. He was careful in a way that kept him out of sight, and Adrian had taken it for good manners and never once looked at it twice.

He had missed a week of it. A whole week — a plane, a city, a return — and he had sat in this house the entire time and never noticed the quiet.

He had missed it the last time, too. This month had already happened to him once, the same rooms and the same silence, and there was nothing in that version of it to tell him Milo had gone anywhere at all. He would have remembered.

Something turned over in his chest, once, and hurt.

He sat with it for a second. Then he put it down to guilt and left it there. He had married a man he hadn’t wanted and shut a door on him for a month. There was guilt in that, plainly.

He put his hand on the cover over the plate.

A car came up the drive.

He heard the gravel, then the engine cut, then the front door, then two voices in the hall, low and quick, neither of them carrying past the next room.

Walter was already moving. “That’ll be Mr. Ellery,” he said, looking straight at Adrian while he said it, and then he was gone through the dining room and into the hall, faster than he had moved for anyone in this house in twenty years.

Adrian stayed where he was and looked at the doorway Walter had gone through.

Walter had been with this family since before Adrian could remember. He had carried Douglas Hale’s suits and Arthur Hale’s coats, and for one month whatever it was Milo Ellery needed carried — and in all that time Adrian had never seen the man move for anybody like that. Not for his father, who paid him. Not for his grandfather, who paid him more.

When had that happened?

He was standing before he had decided to. The passage at the back of the dining room ran along the kitchen and came out at the far end of the front hall, and that was the way he went, and he stopped at the mouth of it.

“— I’ve got it, I’ve got it. Mr. Ellery, please. Give it here.”

“I’m not letting you carry it up the stairs.”

“It’s my job, sir.”

“You’ve been on your feet all day. I’ve been sitting down. Look—“

The suitcase stood on the floor between them and both of them still had a hand on it. Walter wasn’t standing like a butler. He had let his shoulders down and his face open up, and he was grinning at the man in the gray coat like a grandfather at a school gate.

“I’ll take it up. It’s nothing. You go and sit down.”

“Walter.” The man in the coat laughed a little, badly — the laugh of somebody who had been polite past the point of refusing — and got another grip on the handle. “It’s fine. And you don’t have to keep doing that. You can just call me Milo.”

Walter threw his head back and laughed, a real one, loose, and about thirty years younger than he was. “All right. All right, then.”

“Milo,” he said, trying it out.

There was half a second in which the man in the coat did nothing at all with his face. Then he smiled again and picked up his end of the suitcase.

Adrian came the rest of the way out of the passage.

“Mr. Adrian—“ Walter started.

“You’re back,” Adrian said.