ACT I

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which Arthur found offensive. Letters, in his experience, did not arrive on ordinary days. They came on Tuesdays only when the world was already breaking and wanted to do it in stages.

The letter was from a solicitor in Leeds. It did not mention his father. That was the first thing Arthur noticed, and the first thing that terrified him. If his father had wanted him to know something, he would have written it himself. The solicitor's handwriting was a substitute for silence, and silence was worse than any news.

Arthur sat at the window of his bedroom at Pendelton House and read the letter twice more. Eighty percent of the estate. The words sat in his stomach like a stone. He was twenty years old, educated at Eton and Oxford, and he could not prevent the slow dismantling of five hundred years of his family's name.

The second thing that terrified him was how calmly he felt about it. Not calm—there was a humming in his chest that would not stop—but not the panic he expected. Perhaps he had always known this day would come. Perhaps the house, the servants, the careful performance of being a Pendelton had all been a dress rehearsal for something he could not yet name.

His father had been ill for six months. A wasting sickness, the doctors said. Arthur visited him every Sunday at the sanatorium in Harrogate, where the air was clean and the nurses were efficient and his father pretended that the world was not slipping through his fingers. They talked about cricket and the horses and nothing at all about the letter that would eventually arrive.

Arthur needed to leave the house. He needed to be somewhere that was not this house, where every corridor led to a room that reminded him of what he was losing. He went downstairs to the library and found Tommy Harrow sitting by the fire, reading a book he had borrowed and not yet returned.

Tommy was nineteen, from a mining town thirty miles south of the estate. They had met at Eton, where Tommy was a scholarship boy—bright, stubborn, and surrounded by boys whose families had known the Pendeltons long before Tommy's grandfather had picked coal out of the ground. Tommy never made a performance of being poor, which made Arthur equal parts attracted to him and ashamed of himself.

"You look like someone died," Tommy said. He did not look up from his book.

"That's a cheerful way to greet someone," Arthur said.

"I've known you for six years. I can read your face like a newspaper." Tommy finally looked up. "Did someone die?"

"No. Well. Not yet." Arthur sat in the chair opposite him and told him everything. The letter, the estate, his father's illness, the way the house seemed to be getting smaller every time he walked through it.

Tommy listened without saying anything for a long time. When Arthur finished, Tommy closed his book. "You could leave," he said. "You could come with me down south. The quarries are hiring—

"