Page 75 of Ties of Legacy

They followed a bend in the main drive, and the manor house appeared before them. If the earlier nostalgia had seemed strong, it was nothing to the wave that hit Elliot as he reached his childhood home.

He walked forward in a daze, only to be brought up short by a grizzled older man who stepped into the path in front of them.

“Master Elliot!” he cried with delight. “I mean…Your Lordship.” He chuckled at his own forgetfulness, offering Elliot a hand which Elliot shook more speedily than he had Corbett’s.

“You’re still here!” he exclaimed, remembering the gardener who had always let him take a turn with the pruning shears.

“Aye, My Lord,” he said with a grin. “I’m not gravebound yet.”

Elliot flushed. “I merely meant that you might have retired by now.”

“But who else remembers how you like the garden kept?” the man asked with a wink. “O’ course none of us were going to leave before the young master returned.”

“None of us?” Elliot repeated, looking toward Corbett who shrugged and nodded.

“Master Elliot! Master Elliot!” Several people came running down the path from the house, puffing with the exertion.

When they reached him, the matronly lady in front threw her arms around him and burst into tears.

“We’re saved! We’re saved!” she cried.

The others stood back a little, but they looked no less relieved.

“It’s Your Lordship now, Cook,” the gardener said, and the woman finally released Elliot and stood back, mopping at her eyes.

“Why, so it is, and foolish me,” she said, beaming at Elliot. “I’m just that pleased to see you again, young master.”

Elliot smiled uneasily back at her. He remembered her fondly—largely because of all the spiced buns she used to sneak him. But he didn’t want to take credit that belonged to Avery.

“Actually it’s Avery, the roving merchant, who brought the lamp to save you,” he said.

Cook stared at him blankly for a moment before glancing at Corbett.

“Oh, that creature in the cave, you mean? Yes, we’ll be well pleased to see him gone. No one’s been able to set foot outside at night without fear ever since it took old Hubbard. And thechildren can’t play in the forest at all. Supplies are hard to come by too, since that merchant train got attacked. No merchants will come near this region at the moment, so you’ll find we have a meager table, I’m afraid. We’re scraping by on what we grow and make ourselves, but some of the younger ones are talking about getting up a supply chain of our own, it’s getting that desperate—” She broke off when Corbett cleared his throat meaningfully, although he was hiding a smile as he did it.

“Well, never mind all that,” she said. “I hope I can still put a decent meal together, whatever the restrictions. But I wasn’t meaning that creature—as glad as we’ll be to see it gone. I meant us here at the manor are saved.”

“He didn’t get any of our letters,” Corbett said. “He doesn’t know about Clarence.”

“Not a single one?” the gardener cried. “But my son went after Her Ladyship himself when we didn’t hear back after the first two letters. He tracked her down and swore he put it into her hand himself. She promised to pass it on.”

Elliot ground his teeth together. What must they have been thinking of him all this time? And who was Clarence to have them so concerned?

He turned to Corbett with a look of inquiry. The steward had said there was more to relate, and Elliot was growing more and more impatient to hear the full tale.

“I think I need to hear what’s been going on here in my absence,” he said.

Corbett quickly nodded. “Why don’t we go inside and use your father’s old study? It’s untouched.”

“Except for the cleaning, of course,” one of the women behind Cook chimed in. “You won’t find any dust.” She sounded proud.

“Thank you,” Elliot said, unsure what else to say to this collection of loyal people from his past. They had been thebackground of every memory of his childhood, many of them kinder to him than his own mother. He had pictured them scattered and gone since his father’s death, but they were all still here, just as they had been then. He should have returned much sooner.

The original staff’s presence made it seem almost impossible that his father wasn’t waiting for him in that study, working behind his large desk or consulting a book on one of the shelves. But his father would never sit in that room again. Elliot waited for the pain of that truth to cripple him. But the grief that came was manageable. It hurt, but it didn’t strike him down. He had been convinced that the old, familiar environments would make the pain infinitely worse, but somehow it was the opposite.

The familiarity of his old home didn’t just remind him of his father’s absence, it also reminded him of all the years they had shared. His mother had robbed him of nearly five years with his father, but he and his father had shared thirteen years before that. Stepping into his father’s study—untouched by the passing time—made those first years feel far more real than the shadowy years that had followed them.

Elliot sank into an armchair near the window as he realized something both wonderful and horrifying. He had longed to find a proper home and put down roots, but his roots had still been there in Bolivere all along. He had thought he lost his home when his father died, but it had always been waiting for him. Why had he wasted three years longing for something that was already his?

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