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The boy wiped his nose with the back of his hand. "I can learn."

Kit looked at Audrey. She was leaning on her cane, her face streaked and filthy, watching them. She nodded.

Kit turned back to the boy. "Get up," he said. "Wait for me at the stable. There's work to do."

He offered his hand. The boy took it, stood. Then bowing hesitantly to Audrey, he left. The front door closed.

Audrey set her cane against the table. Kit crossed the room to her, and she walked into him and his arms closed around her and he held her. Tight. His face in her hair. Her fists in his shirt. She was trembling and so was he and neither of them pretended otherwise.

"You were magnificent with your cane," he said into her hair.

"He was being rude."

He laughed. It cracked in his chest. He held her tighter and she pressed her face into his neck, and they stood in the drawing room with the morning light striping the floor through the boarded windows and he thought: this. Whatever comes after this.

Chapter twenty-one

Light

Audrey

Quicklime dust floated in the light. The coffin sat on its platform behind them, the sacking crumpled where she'd climbed out.

Kit held her. She held him. Neither of them spoke, and for a while that was enough.

Then she pulled back, wiped her face with her hand, and looked at the boarded windows.

"I want the light back," she said.

He nodded and went to the passage for the claw hammer.

The boy was in the kitchen. She had given him ham and bread and a cup of tea and he had eaten without speaking. He was now sitting by the range with his hands around the cup, staring at the floor. She left him to it. Some silences needed company. Others needed to be alone.

They started with the drawing room. He worked the flat end behind the first plank and levered it free, the nails screeching as they pulled from the frame. The board came away trailing splinters, and the window behind it was filthy, cobwebbed, cracked in one corner, but the October sun poured through it and hit the floor in a wide bright rectangle and the room changed.

Audrey picked up the plank and carried it to the passage and leaned it against the wall. When she came back, he'd already freed the second board, and the light doubled, and the quicklime dust turned gold in the air.

They found the rhythm without discussing it. He pried, she carried. Board by board the drawing room opened. The broken step was ugly, the wood split clean through where the Māori's weight had taken it. But the room was a room again, not a box, and the air moved through the broken windowpane and the curtains shifted and the dust motes turned.

She did not speak about what had happened. Neither did he. The work was the conversation. Each board removed was a sentence neither of them needed to say: it's over, we're still here, the house is standing.

The kitchen next. He pulled the planks from the door, and she stacked them in the yard, and when the door stood open the draught blew through for the first time in days and the range fire fluttered and the smell of the house changed. Stale air moved out. Cold, clean October moved in. She stood in the doorway with her eyes closed and breathed and the air tasted of wet grass and woodsmoke and freedom, if freedom had a taste, which until this morning she hadn't been sure it did.

The side entrance. The scullery window. The passage window that looked out over the stable yard. Board by board the house emerged from behind its armour, blinking, battered, letting the world back in.

On the first floor they worked side by side. He levered the board from the landing window and the glass behind it was intact, uncracked, and the light that came through was wide and clean and fell across both of them. She stood in it and felt the warmth on her face and closed her eyes.

When she opened them, he was watching her. Not the guarded, sideways watching of the first weeks, stolen when he thought she wouldn't notice. Open. Steady. His hands were still on the claw hammer, but his eyes were on her face, and his expression held nothing she needed to decode.

She looked at him. He looked at her. The light fell between them on the dusty floorboards and the house breathed around them, open-windowed, open-doored, the boards stacked in neat piles in every passage, the nails collected in a tin on the kitchen table. The coffin was still in the drawing room. They'd deal with it later. Everything that needed dealing with could wait, because the light was back and the air was moving and the house was hers and he was in it.

"The tunnel," he said. "I need to lock the orchard entrance."

"Alright."

He set the hammer on the windowsill. Touched her jaw, briefly, with his knuckle. Went downstairs.

She listened to his boots on the stairs, then silence. She picked up the hammer and pulled the last board from the bedroom window herself, and when the light came through, she sat on the edge of his bed and held the hammer in her lap and looked at the room where they'd slept and the window where the sun was pouring in and the nail holes in the frame where the boards had been, and she thought: I built this. Not alone. With him. But I built it.