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The forest behind the Fernsby estate had a name the family used exclusively amongst themselves, which was Atonement, because Great-Great-Grandmother Alice had named it that after something happened there in 1887 that nobody ever could quite explain and which had been absorbed into the general ambient mythology of the house. The groundskeepers kept the path in, and that was the extent of human intervention. Everything else was managed by the forest itself, which did as it liked.
Ambrose had been going there since he was small enough to lose himself in the ferns. He knew where the ground softened, and where the old Cornish elms clustered so tightly that from the outside you couldn't see through them, and from the inside, you couldn't see out. It was just incidental knowledge he collected and possessed, which he knew in the back of his mind would matter someday.
He hadn't expected it to matter quite so soon.
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Piers Cavendish-Mott was seventeen and a half and had been given by some alignment of prep school social physics the power of being feared without needing to have striking hands raised. He was in three of Ambrose's advanced courses. And he had, two weeks ago, seen something in the Fernsby estate's guest wing that he had no business seeing, which was Ambrose, seventeen, in a room he'd thought was private, not alone.
The other boy had left the country, said he needed to follow to his father's diplomatic post. No trace.
Piers had stayed, and talked. But not loudly, no. Not in the stupid raucous manner of downtown folks either. He'd whispered to exactly four people about what he saw, and then stepped back to watch it travel. By the time it reached Ambrose it had been through eleven people, and had been finally relayed to him by a classmate with a pitying face that was worse than anything Piers had said.
People are saying things, Ambrose. You might want to know.
And he knew.
For this, Ambrose had spent two days doing what he'd been trained to do, which was consider which options closed doors and which ones left them open.
The problem with Piers Cavendish-Mott was not that he was cruel. Cruelty, Ambrose could work with. The problem was that Piers was careful. The rumor he started was deniable, and its spread pattern looked organic. Piers could and had said, when asked directly, I haven't the faintest idea what you're was talking about, Ambrose dear, who on earth is saying these things, I hope you're alright.
When Piers actually said that with a smile that reminded him too much of Adelaide's, Ambrose had stood in the school corridor and smiled back, while he felt something go very quiet inside him.
Adelaide described that quiet to him, once. She called it the clearance, the moment when everything extraneous stopped being relevant and only the problem remained. Ambrose didn't have Adelaide's comfort with the clearance, and he didn't think he ever would, but he recognized it.
And he waited, and he thought.
At the end of two days, his conclusion was unchanged. There was no negotiation to be done, no lever. Piers had nothing he wanted and nothing Ambrose could take from him. The rumor was already loose in the world, growing into a cancer that followed you out of school and into whatever your life was supposed to be after.
Unless... it didn't have anyone to keep confirming it. Unless the source became unverifiable.
Ambrose was seventeen. In these seventeen years of his life, he had read enough history of the Fernsby library and sat through enough of Adelaide's quiet explanations of things she'd read in books their tutors hadn't assigned, to understand that he was standing at the edge of a line. Crossing it changed what you were, permanently, irreversibly. He wasn't romantic about this. He'd never been romantic about anything so far, as there was no need. He simply took the information on board and let it sit with the rest of the calculation.
On the third day he asked Piers, very casually, if he wanted to see the estate's forest.
Piers, who was careless, who had never had to stretch his mind about what invitations actually meant, said yes.
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The hatchet lived in the groundskeeper's shed at the edge of Atonement. It was used for clearing branches that fell across the path after autumn storms. Ambrose stood in the shed for three minutes before he picked it up.
He could feel the calmness of the clearance settling in. As he closed his fingers around the wood, he noted that his heart was still pumping away at a leisurely rate. That should mean he was calm.
In truth, he was also terrified. He was only seventeen. He was shaking. The tremors hadn't reached his hands yet but were present in his chest as a taut rubber band of his nerves. The Fernsby method, such as it was, was not the absence of feeling but the management of it. The Fernsby method was holding fear like a lantern and continuing on.
He tucked the hatchet along his outer thigh where the treeline shadow would eat its shape. Then he walked back to where Piers was standing in the path, looking up at the elm canopy.
"It's strange in here," Piers said. "Darker than I expected."
"It does that," Ambrose agreed.
He led Piers deeper.
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Piers had just been about to steer their one-sided conversation towards what he saw that started the rumor in the first place, before the hatchet lodged in his back.
Ambrose remembered tackling him to the ground while pulling the tool free with a wet shuck. Piers had the sense to roll over, to try and scream, but a haymaker across his jaw bought Ambrose enough time to bring the hatchet down again twice, this time at the front of Piers' overcoat. Blood bloomed, seeping through the cloth. He assumed by this time already that Piers was so overcome by pain that he couldn't make any loud noise, so he stepped back.
He was aware of his head spinning. He was pretty sure it was being caused by the sudden waft of iron from Piers mingling with the sharp loamy smell of the forest. Still, he didn't like to linger, especially not with something so unpleasant like this, so he went back in.
Piers started to cry out words slurred by his agony at the sight of Ambrose approaching. Perhaps he was trying to plead for his life, to say sorry, but that wasn't important anymore.
Ambrose began hauling Piers by the back of his overcoat, and dumped him against the nearest elm at an angle that would leave him sitting upright. He then took a deep breath, vaguely aware of the mess on his own clothing, then raised the hatchet in perfect swinging form.
Piers shook his head frantically, as much as the pain would allow him, and made a move to scramble.
Too late.
Ambrose felt the hatchet blade crunch through bone and soft tissue before it embedded in the elm trunk. It was an angular hit to Piers' face, cleaving his right eye, nicking the top of his right ear, exiting straight to the back of his skull. He stopped struggling.
Ambrose let go of the hatchet, still stuck to Piers' body and the tree, and took several steps back. The clearance was lifting, like a veil off an unwilling bride. It was a very nauseous feeling that he prevented from becoming a psychosomatic one via sheer willpower to not vomit.
He looked down at himself for the first time since he and Piers entered the forest.
"Ah..."
He was a fucked up Jackson Pollock painting of red and vintage spring print. The red got on his face too, he noted after trying to wipe at the uncomfortable wet spots on his cheekbone.
And then something wet spilled from his left eye. Then the right. It was accompanied by a sinking trepidation in his stomach, which was not something he'd predicted, because the clearance had made him think crying was somewhere else, and then it wasn't.
It was right there, with nothing to do with Piers' death and everything to do with what he'd done, what it meant that he'd done it and what he was now for it.
Ambrose Fernsby was on shaking legs in the earth of Atonement, and he was crying so hard he couldn't breathe.
He stayed there for a long time.
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Ambrose cleaned up at the edge of the creek the groundskeepers used as a property marker. It had water that this time of year was almost painfully cold, and he used it. His coat was unsalvageable with the time he had left, so he buried it properly. He also washed the hatchet in the creek and returned to the groundskeeper's shed, hung exactly where it had been, blade facing the same direction.
He walked back to the house. The estate was quiet. Adelaide was somewhere inside. He could hear the faint sound of her at the piano through one of the upper windows. He stood in the kitchen doorway and listened to it for a moment, before he went upstairs.
He showered. He changed. He came downstairs and he ate dinner with his family, which on that particular evening was Adelaide and their father, who asked nothing about the afternoon except whether any academic work had been completed. Ambrose said it had. Their father nodded and returned to his newspaper.
Adelaide looked at Ambrose across the table. Her face, as usual, was perfectly placid, though the corner of her mouth quirked up in a small smirk. Just a little quirk. Then it smoothed out.
She said nothing.
He said nothing.
They ate.
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Piers Cavendish-Mott was reported missing four days later. His body was found nine days after that, in the forest behind the Fernsby estate, which became the primary focus of the investigation for about three weeks before the investigation turned, as investigations do, toward other explanations. The Fernsby family cooperated fully.
Ambrose was ruled out early. He had been seen in the village that afternoon, at the post office, at the fishmonger's, at a timing that the investigation agreed made the forest an impossibility.
He had not been at the post office or the fishmonger's. He had been careful about who saw him and where, earlier in the week, in a way that felt, in retrospect, like a kind of foresight he hadn't known he possessed.
The ruling stood. Piers' case eventually went cold. These things happened, they said. It was a tragedy. The school held a memorial, which Ambrose attended. He stood in the chapel with his hands folded and listened to the eulogy.
The rumor, without its source and the confirming repetitions that kept these things alive, eventually lost its footing. It became unverifiable. Just a thing someone had said once, which isn't the same as a thing people wholeheartedly believe. Then It softened into nothing. By the following year it was gone in all meaningful aspects.
That was how it should be, and how it has remained, long after Ambrose graduated.
That was the Fernsby method.