Harriet snagged a slice of toast and cheese from the hearth, where Mrs. Crangle always kept something warm in case someone wandered by in need of feeding. “How would you feel about keeping chickens?” Harriet asked.
Crangle lifted a brow. “For eggs or for meat?”
“Eggs first, meat later, I should think.”
The cook considered this as she reached onto the shelf behind her and snagged a jar of honey, with which she anointed Harriet’s toast and cheese. “There’s a small run off the kitchen garden. I believe Lady Eccleston had all the birds sold off before she took ship—but the coop’s there. Be more convenient if we had eggs of our own, that’s certain.” That grin flashed again, the bright one that Harriet was seeing more and more often since they’d moved into the Hall. “Don’t tell me you’re getting tired of bringing back wild birds already.”
“Hardly.” Harriet took another bite of toast, and closed her eyes to luxuriate in the mingled sweetness and savor. She swallowed with a sigh. “Turns out our wild birds perhaps aren’t so wild after all—and someone has offered to help us catch and keep the lot of them.”
“Someone has, eh?” Lizzie Crangle’s eyes widened with curiosity. “Who might that be?”
Wraxhall, Harriet thought, but didn’t say. She wanted to confirm her suspicions first. Memory was a flighty, disreputable thing where the war was concerned. “One of the neighbors I met near the ruins. Her rooster had wandered in there, lured by our wild hens.”
“It’s a desperate woman who has to come all the way here in search of a cock.”
Harriet choked on a mouthful of sticky, cheesy crumbs.
Mary called out for the kitchen maids to help her roll out dough for meat pies. Still snickering, Crangle rose to supervise the pie-making, and Harriet swallowed the last of her food and hurried upstairs to the library.
Calling it a library was giving it more credit than it deserved. The room was more properly a study, with only two sets of bookshelves built into the high walls on either side of the window. Arun Dixit had already filled all those to bursting, however, and had ordered more shelves from a local carpenter to be installed along the remaining walls.
At present the journalist was sitting at his desk, the side of which had been set flush against the window-frame so Mr. Dixit could have as wide a view as possible of the land and wood and hills that Thornycroft faced. His dark hair had grown long on the voyage home, and the thick curls bounced insistently as he worked.
As Harriet entered, he signed with a flourish the letter he was writing, and set it on top of a similar stack. A new piece of paper was immediately placed on the blotter, pale and stark where his brown hand pressed sensitive fingertips against it.
Harriet planted herself by the warmth of the fireplace and coughed gently. “Mr. Dixit, I wondered if I could ask you to look up something from your notes?”
His pen stopped, and he blinked up at her.
Harriet repeated her request, to make sure he’d heard all of it.
The journalist nodded and reached for the notebook he always carried in his breast pocket. “What is it you need, Mrs. Boyne?”
“I was trying to recall the surname of Lady Eccleston’s soldier. The one who—”
“Yes,” Mr. Dixit murmured. “The one who.” His long fingers fluttered the pages until they found the one they sought. “Wraxhall,” he said. “Peter Wraxhall—later Sergeant Wraxhall. Battlefield promotion after Inkerman.”
“Thank you,” Harriet said. “That was all.”
Mr. Dixit nodded and returned to his letters. He sent them daily to various papers: to the Times, the Midlands County Herald, the Birmingham Daily Post. Not to mention all the individual correspondence to wives, widows, clergy, regimental commanders, local magistrates, and philanthropists. He may not have been sending reportage to a newspaper any longer, but he still spent nearly every waking hour writing something—and still about the war, even as it was winding down.
All in all, it was good that Lady Eccleston had left them her fortune as well as her house. There was no question of Mr. Dixit being able to afford paper, postage, and ink.
Harriet took her time walking back down the long staircase. So—the name Wraxhall had been familiar for a reason. Mr. Dixit’s notes had brought his face back up out of the depths of oblivion: a broad smile and crinkles at the corner of his eyes, sturdy hands, skin weathered by long years on campaign. And more than that, the sense of sunlight, of a heart so warm he made you feel like summer even in the middle of the coldest winter you’d ever known.
And then later: the flush of fever, the restlessness, the exhaustion and final fatigue.
Harriet shook off that last part of the memory. It wasn’t how the man would have wanted to be remembered. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing that would comfort anyone grieving his loss.
At least the woman in the ruins was his sister, not his wife or mother. It’s Miss, she’d said—even as she’d stated her intention to stay out, all day, in the cold, with a coat barely worth the name and only a bit of bread and cheese to eat the whole while.
At this point Harriet realized she’d been pacing the entrance hall, walking restlessly back and forth over the stones between the sitting-room door and the lowest stair. She made her feet stop.
They stopped.
Her hands had only just gotten properly warm again after the ride. The parlor fire was lit and merry, crackling in the hearth. Mr. Dixit had bedecked the mantel with evergreen boughs only yesterday, and set twists of silver paper in the branches to catch the firelight and gleam like caught stars. One of Mrs. Goodfellow’s quilts was draped invitingly across the back of the sofa—one of the floral ones, not one of her unsettling ones with fires or battlefields made out of the tattered scraps of dead men’s clothes—and Harriet knew it would feel marvelous wrapped around her shoulders. Mrs. Crangle would be happy to send up more bread and cheese, or some cake from the pantry, and a pot of good tea.
But no matter how warm Harriet got or how much coziness she tried to surround herself with, that ball of ice in her breast wasn’t going anywhere. It was her own little souvenir of the Crimea; a stubborn, frozen chunk of the war that not even the hottest fire seemed to touch. The relentless chill of it was a spur, sending her outdoors to walk or ride or run until exhaustion forced her to turn back.
