Mrs. Crangle snorted and strode around the pair of them to pull the front door shut. Snowflakes settled gently to the stone, and the hush from the lack of wind was deafening. “If you’ve got all that sorted out,” she said, making Harriet grin and Lydia blush, “I’ll be going up.” Then the older woman did just that, climbing the broad stairs with one last indulgent shake of her head.
Lydia and Harriet stayed in the hall a little longer. The biting cold from the wind still lingered in Lydia’s hair, and she could feel an echo of it on Harriet’s skin when she nuzzled into Harriet’s throat. She pressed her mouth there to heat it away. “You love me,” she said, wonderingly.
“You sound surprised.”
“Pleased, more like.”
Harriet’s voice went low and honey-sweet. “How pleased?”
Lydia grinned and scraped her teeth across the tender skin of her beloved’s throat. Harriet laughed—a breathy sound, like the wind in branches—and pulled her up the stairs to bed.
Much later, Lydia asked: “Why is Mrs. Crangle staying up with Mr. Dixit?”
“He has trouble with storms,” Harriet said. They were sprawled over one another across the bed, coverlet askew, limbs flung every which way. “He was on a ship in Balaklava harbor last winter when a hurricane came through. The destruction was… unimaginable. He was lucky to have survived—and ever since, he cannot abide storms or confined spaces.”
Lydia held her tighter. “He’s lucky to have friends who understand what he’s gone through.”
“It’s not only him,” Harriet said. Her hands were moving, restless over Lydia’s skin. “We’re all carrying the war around with us, still, in different ways. I’m not sure the breaks will ever heal completely.”
“You aren’t broken,” Lydia insisted, and then again when Harriet shook her head. “You aren’t. You’re—changed, that’s all. The world changes you, changes all of us.” She wrapped her arms around Harriet’s waist, head resting on the hollow of her collarbone, perfectly sculpted for Lydia’s cheek. “When we lost Peter, I knew things would never be the same. Not for my parents or myself. It’s always going to be a part of us now, that grief. That hurt.”
“Grief can be the sharpest weapon of all,” Harriet murmured.
“Grief is not something that exists outside of people,” Lydia countered. “That’s what I’m trying to say—the grief is not a thing that happens to you. It is a part of you. Us.”
Harriet huffed, amusement and chagrin mingled in her voice. “You’re saying we do this to ourselves.”
“I’m saying: you can’t grieve where you haven’t loved.” She raised her head. “You’re worried the war is part of you.”
Harriet’s head jerked once, affirming. She looked away, chin high.
Lydia smiled fondly. “You don’t have to love the war. But you can—you must—love the part of you that carries it.”
Harriet’s eyes were wide.
Lydia lowered her head again, listening to the wind howl against the windowpanes. “I’ve never seen a battlefield,” she said. “But I’ve sat at plenty of deathbeds. There are ghosts I carry around with me—people nobody else remembers, but who I see whenever I turn a corner in the road, or walk past a house in the village. You could fill Bickerton twice over with just the people whose last words I was the only one there to listen to.” Harriet’s hand tightened on Lydia’s shoulder, offering comfort. “If I tried to shut those memories away, I’d lose half of myself. I expect it’s the same for you, and for the others in this house.” She scooted up, resting one elbow beneath her, and fixing Harriet with a gaze that left no room for doubt or fear. “You carry the war with you,” Lydia said, “because you were strong enough to survive it.”
Harriet breathed out. “Lucky. Not strong.”
Lydia shrugged. “Lucky and strong, then.”
“Lucky,” Harriet repeated, and her hands threaded in Lydia’s hair, and her eyes shone, and her smile was a bonfire and a seduction and a sun. “Lucky enough to find you.”
5
The storm lasted through the night and most of the morning, then pulled away like a curtain to let the winter sunlight flood the snow-muffled hills. Lydia had been up since dawn, so Harriet fed her lunch and wrapped her in her thickest cloak and followed her out into the wide, white world.
Half a foot of snow had changed the contours of the hills; they were taller but somehow softer, velvet heaps to either side of the road. Harriet was exhausted by the time they reached Bickerton green, where they found a fretting, fluttering crowd of poultry enthusiasts picking through the ruins of the tent.
Harriet’s heart stuttered; Lydia gave a cry and ran forward.
Mr. Finglass was where she’d left him, at the front where the tent had collapsed like a wave breaking on the shore, arguing with the head workman—Harriet had an improbable, unshakeable vision the two of them had been fixed there all night, arguing, as the storm raged and roared around them. “I told you,” the weary workman was saying, “we needed more towers of strength—”
Lydia went to where Mr. Brome was standing beside a mass of tumbled tables and wrecked cages, the willow-work bent and twisted. A handful of small feathered bodies had been carefully laid to one side, but not nearly as many as Harriet thought there ought to have been. “How bad is it?” Lydia was asking as Harriet caught up.
“I can’t figure it,” Mr. Brome said, mustache trembling beneath a lugubrious eye. “They seem to have vanished.”
“What,” Lydia said, “all of them?”
