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Go upstairs. The stairs were twelve steps away. His room was at the top. The door had a latch. He could close it and lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and try not to think about her bare feet on the cold flagstones and fail, but at least he would fail in private and that was better than failing here where she could hear his breathing change.

He went to the drawing room.

The fire was dead. She was sitting in the chair with Marian's copy of Clarissa open in her lap, a book so long and so dull that even Marian had used it exclusively to press flowers. She was not reading it. She was holding it in front of her face the way a soldier holds a shield, and behind it her knuckles were white.

"The fire is dead," he said.

"I am aware."

"You'll freeze."

"Then I shall freeze. Goodnight."

He crossed the room and knelt at the grate. His hands knew this work. Kindling first, loose, the tinder at the centre. He struck the flint. The spark caught. The flame spread, and as the light climbed the walls, he felt her watching him. Not the book. Him. His hands building the fire, placing each stick, feeding the flame. He could feel the weight of her attention.

He fed the fire until it held. Stood. Brushed his knees. Turned to leave.

"Sit down," she said.

He stopped. Sat. On the floor, his back against the settee, because the chair across from her was close enough to reach her and the floor was not, and he needed something between his body and hers that was measured in feet rather than inches.

His legs stretched toward the hearth. The fire warmed his shins and threw his shadow across the floorboards. She pulled her feet beneath her in the chair and tucked the nightgown around her knees, and the book lay open in her lap and neither of them pretended she was reading.

"You bake well," she said.

He tilted his head back against the settee. The ceiling was dark above him. "Lady Linton taught me. But Marian was never happy with it. She'd critique the result until I wanted to throw the dough at her head."

Audrey smiled. He saw it in the edge of his vision. Small, private, directed at the fire rather than at him. The same smile scaled down. The one that had sent him out of the kitchen four days ago and refused to leave.

"You smiled like that this afternoon," he said. "In the kitchen. When the bread came out."

"I don't remember."

"I do."

Quiet. The fire popped. A log shifted and the light surged and fell back and her face was lit for a moment and then in shadow and in the moment of light he saw that her eyes were bright and her jaw was set and she was holding herself together, bu the discipline was slipping.

"It was just bread," she said.

He looked at the fire. Thought about the way her fingers had trembled as she tore the loaf. The way she'd held the two halves and stared at them as though she were holding proof that she could make a thing from nothing.

"It was not just bread," he said.

He heard her fingers tighten on the book. He did not look. If he saw her face he would stand and cross the distance. God only knew what would happen if he did.

He stood. The fire was warm on his back. She was in the chair below him, looking up, the book forgotten, her nightgown pooled around her bare feet, and the expression on her face was the one he'd seen when the bread came out of the oven—stripped, unguarded, something that had been locked away for a long time coming to the surface for air.

He wanted to kneel in front of the chair and take her hands and press his mouth to the split skin on her thumb and the blisters on her palm and the soft underside of her wrist where her pulse ran close to the surface. He wanted to tell her that her smile had taken the last steady thing in him and pulled it loose. And watch what it did to her.

Instead, he said, "Goodnight, Robin."

He crossed the room, took the stairs and went into his room. He stood with his back against it and his eyes shut and breathed until his hands unclenched.

Much later, he heard her footstep and cane on the stairs. Slow, careful, passing his door without pausing. Her door closed.

Chapter seven

What She Has Left