One afternoon he saw Daniel struggling to hold a plane steady.
Josiah quietly took the tool from him and led him outside.
He did not ask for details.
He simply said that exhaustion was not a character flaw and that survival sometimes required silence until a safer moment arrived.
Daniel did not tell him about the summons.
The knowledge sat between them anyway.
By autumn, Catherine grew impatient when Daniel failed to perform gratitude.
She offered him a better coat and an extra blanket.
He accepted the blanket because the cabin was cold, then hated the feeling that even warmth had been turned into a transaction.
She promised to speak to the Colonel about reducing his field assignments.
Daniel asked instead that she stop sending for him.
Her expression hardened so suddenly that he stepped back.
She told him to remember what happened to men whose names appeared in her husband’s disciplinary ledger.
Daniel said nothing.
He had seen the ledger, and he knew that a single accusation could move a person hundreds of miles from everybody they loved.
During those months, Daniel’s closest friend was Thomas Reed, a groom who worked on the eastern side of the property.
Thomas had a quick laugh and a habit of hiding small pieces of news inside ordinary remarks about horses.
He noticed when Daniel stopped joining the workers at the kitchen steps after supper.
One evening Thomas brought him a heel of bread and asked whether somebody upstairs was making his life difficult.
Daniel stared at the bread until he could speak.
He answered that there were things a person could not say safely while the wrong people owned the walls.
Thomas sat beside him without demanding more.
He promised that if Daniel ever needed a witness, he would stand where he could be seen.
For the first time in weeks, Daniel felt that somebody had addressed him as a person rather than an instrument.
In January, Catherine summoned him just before midnight and found him standing near the door instead of the bed.
Her face looked pale in the candlelight.
She pressed her palm against her abdomen and said she was expecting a child.
Daniel did not move.
She watched his expression with the same anxious concentration she used when inspecting a delicate piece of porcelain.
She said Colonel Blackwood had no reason to suspect anything, because he had returned from military business often enough to provide an explanation.
