Yes, Eleanor said. It is. You have options, he said. I can help you formalize your claim to the 20 acres which are already within your current holding and simply require the paperwork to be properly registered in your name. That's straightforward.
If you wish to pursue the question of whether this information was withheld deliberately, that is a different conversation. Eleanor looked at the documents on his desk. She thought about Thomas, about his voice when he'd handed her the deed, about the way he'd said, "You have let yourself go." Eleanor, as though he were diagnosing something, rather than diminishing it. She thought about his expression when she'd taken the paper. The relief she'd seen there, which she'd understood perfectly at the time, and had chosen to understand only as inadequacy, not malice.
She wasn't certain, even now, which it had been. Formalize the claim," she said. "That's all I want right now." Martin Gould nodded once, precise and respectful. "I'll have the paperwork ready by the end of the week," he said. She walked out of his office into the October air and stood on the street for a moment.
Across the way at the feed store, she could see two men she recognized, neighbors, not hostile, not friendly, simply present in the general ecosystem of the town. One of them noticed her and nodded. She nodded back. She thought 20 acres are already mine. She thought they have always been mine.
She walked back to her wagon and drove home to her farm. The news about the documents traveled because in a town of this size everything traveled, and it reached Thomas before Eleanor chose to tell him herself, which she had known it would. He arrived on a Friday morning, unannounced, in his good coat, driving his own buggy, which meant he'd thought about how this looked. Thomas always thought about how things looked. Eleanor was in the kitchen garden pulling the last of the fall squash when she heard the buggy.
She stood up, brushed the dirt from her hands, and waited. Thomas climbed down. He looked at the farm, the barn, the repaired house, the garden, the evidence of four months of relentless work, and his face did something complicated that he didn't quite manage to resolve before he got close enough for her to see it. Elellanor, he said, "Thomas," she said. He looked at her hands, which were dirty.
He looked at her dress, which was a work dress, and not her second best. He looked at all of it with the expression of a man who has arrived to have a conversation. He rehearsed and and found the situation somewhat different from what he rehearsed it for. "I heard about the documents," he said. "I thought you might have," she said.
"I want you to understand," he started. "Did you know?" she asked. Her voice was level, the same levelness she had maintained in his dining room four months ago. About the bequest. Did you know it existed?
Thomas was quiet. That quiet told her. It was not a long quiet, and when he spoke, he filled it with the particular language of a man who has a great deal to say about intentions and circumstances, and the complexity of financial situations that Elellanor could not have been expected to understand. And all of it was, she recognized, true in the way that partial truths are true. There had been debts.
There had been a moment of decision. He had told himself she would be provided for through the marriage arrangements. And when those hadn't worked out, "You thought the farm would be enough," Eleanor said. "You thought you'd given me something, so whatever you hadn't told me about balanced out." Thomas stopped. "That's not," he began.