The road to Cambon was considerably busier than the one to Blissbury.
People finishing breakfast and heading out to the fields, traders carrying goods toward town, travelers from Cambon passing through Feltham on their way to the southern villages—the road hummed with the steady traffic of a working morning. Greetings were exchanged every few minutes at least, and Eloise, as the daughter of Mr. Severton—who could fairly be called one of Feltham's foundations—was expected to stop for rather more of them than most.
"Miss Eloise! It's been too long!"
A middle-aged man in a freight cart, catching sight of her, swept his hat from his head with visible pleasure.
"Mr. Hanson! How are you keeping?"
"Couldn't be better. And my wife is well too—thanks to your father's kindness."
He climbed down from the cart, rummaged in the back, and lifted out a cloth bag, which he set in Eloise's cart without ceremony.
"First potatoes of the year, just pulled up this morning. Still on the small side, but the flavor is already something. Give them to Emily—she'll know what to do. And perhaps a bit of cheese as well?"
"Now, don't you start. If you keep on like this, I'll think twice before reading out another recipe to your wife."
Mr. Hanson laughed, unrepentant, and swapped the cheese for a basket of eggs instead.
"If I run into Miss Eloise and send her off empty-handed, I won't hear the end of it at home." He glanced past her, acknowledging Ryan's presence for the first time. "And this gentleman...?"
"Forgive me—I should have introduced you straight away. This is Sergeant Ryan Thornton, the new manager of Blissbury. Sergeant, meet Mr. Tom Hanson—he farms for Pastor Harrison's parish."
"Ah." Mr. Hanson turned to Ryan and gave a short, correct bow. "I hope you find your stay agreeable, Sergeant. If you ever need anything, don't hesitate to call on me."
He settled his hat back on his head, climbed up to his seat, and clicked his tongue at the horse.
"Safe travels to you both."
The cart rattled off and was soon lost around a bend in the road.
Ryan picked up the reins again, watching the dust settle.
"He doesn't much care for me."
He'd noted it clearly enough—*I hope you find your stay agreeable.* A perfectly civil phrase, and yet the subtext was not difficult to read: *and when your stay is over, you may find your way back to wherever you came from.*
Eloise didn't contradict him. She'd seen it too—the way Mr. Hanson's gaze had moved over Sergeant Thornton with something that wasn't quite warmth.
"Please don't take it personally," she said, with a small, rueful smile. "Mr. Hanson feels a great debt to my father. With you here as the new manager, I imagine he sees you as someone come to take his place. He doesn't mean to be unkind—he simply doesn't know yet what to make of you."
"Does your father have many people like that?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary... Mr. Hanson's wife was very ill for some time. She needed proper treatment in New, but the cost was beyond what they could manage on their own. My father happened to cross paths with them at the right moment. He helped. We're all from Feltham—it seemed only natural to him."
"That isn't natural."
He said it before she'd finished, and she looked at him in mild surprise.
"How many people do you know who would go to such lengths for someone outside their own household?"
"But they're from Feltham. We're all neighbors."
"Neighbors, not family. Not old friends."
"And yet we're from the same village." She considered him for a moment. "Sergeant—if someone from your home town were in serious trouble, would you not help them?"
He was quiet for longer than she expected.
"I don't know," he said at last. "Where I grew up, I didn't know who lived next door."
The answer settled the question she hadn't quite known she was asking.
A person raised in the capital. A person raised on a farm. A person raised in an industrial city in the north. They could not have had the same childhood—and it had been careless of her to assume otherwise.
"Where are you from, Sergeant?" she asked, carefully.
It occurred to her, as she said it, that this was the first question she had ever asked him that had nothing to do with Blissbury or Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave.
He paused—brief, but noticeable.
"Chester."
Chester.
Eloise kept her expression still.
She had never been there, but she knew it well enough from the newspapers, which wrote about Chester with a kind of exhausted frequency. A port city in the north of Albion, one of the largest industrial centers in the country—and one of the most miserable. The factory smoke was so constant and so thick that neither sky nor sun was properly visible from the streets. After the wars, refugees had flooded in seeking work, faster than the city could absorb them. For most of its factory workers, a home was an impossible aspiration; they spent their daily wages on a place to sleep and began again the next morning.
She remembered reading an article once about children who slept in different places every night—no fixed bed, no table, not even a toy they could reliably carry with them. That evening, saying her prayers, she had been very conscious of her own pillow, her own room, the familiar creak of the house around her. She had prayed for those children by name, though she hadn't known their names.
It turned out one of them had grown up to be the man riding beside her.
The image of Chester was not a kind one in the public imagination: a city of poverty, of crime, of perpetual grey. The newspapers had printed, without apparent irony, that Chester was the closest thing to hell that could be found on English soil. When someone mentioned they were from there, faces arranged themselves into expressions of careful sympathy—and then, once that person had moved on, voices dropped, and warnings were exchanged. *Best to be cautious with that one.*
People from Chester learned quickly to say nothing about where they'd come from.
But Sergeant Thornton had said it plainly, without apology.
"Were you born there? Did you grow up there?"
"I don't know where I was born. I lived there from when I was three until I was ten."
"And after that?"
"I was just... wandering. Different places."
*Wandering.*
The word was light, almost careless, and she understood immediately that it was neither. He had told her as much as he intended to tell her—had named Chester without flinching and closed the door on everything that came after.
She didn't press him further.
But the question settled quietly in the corner of her heart, and stayed there.