Page 7

Ten minutes later, he reappeared, and it took a moment for her brain to recognise him. He had shaved. The jaw that had been hidden behind weeks of neglect was sharper than she'd expected, and the absence of the beard changed his face entirely. He looked younger. Harder. Handsome, if she were inclined to notice, which she was not.

She followed him. He was crossing the yard towards the stable, unhurried, his stride long enough that she knew she could not catch him.

“Where do you think you are going?” she called after him.

He did not turn. “Working. I’ll return late. Don’t wait up.”

She looked at his back. He had changed his shirt. The one he wore now was cleaner, darker, fitted closer at the shoulders. His hair was combed back, and even from ten paces she could see that his boots had been wiped, which for Kit was the equivalent of a full court dress. No man cleaned his boots to mend a fence.

"Working," she repeated. "In a fresh shirt."

He kept walking.

"You have shaved. The house is falling apart, and you are walking away from it. In a clean shirt. And to think you thought yourself worth two hundred pounds. The front path is a wilderness. I could have fallen through the hole and died. The chimney pot is missing. And you are going somewhere that requires grooming?"

He disappeared into the stable. She stood in the yard, her cane sinking into the mud, her voice still raised for an audience that had left.

"I have seen better-kept ruins!"

The stable doors banged open and he came out at a canter on the bay mare, the horse's hooves throwing mud. He rode past her close enough for the draught to move her skirt and did not slow. He did not look at her. He sat the horse as though he'd been born in the saddle, his back straight, his hands low and sure on the reins, and at the gate he kicked the mare into a gallop and was gone, the hoofbeats fading down the lane until there was nothing left but the rooks and the mud and the silence.

She stood in the yard with her mouth still open and a fury so bright it almost felt like something else entirely.

She was tempted to call the locksmith and change the locks on him, cast out this infuriating knave. But she knew what happened to widows with property and no protector. Some cousin or solicitor would come eventually, smiling, offering to manage things on her behalf, and the managing would never end. She had no intention of allowing it.

Kit was rude, surly, and answered to no one. But he had not laid a hand on her without being provoked, and in her experience, that was more than most men could claim. Better a scoundrel who ignored her than a gentleman who smiled while he took everything she had.

She turned and went back to the house. She took the pot of marmalade from her pocket and set it on the kitchen table. The simplest task first: locating a pencil.

* * *

She found a pencil in the study and a notebook and started walking. Room by room. She opened every door, looked at every ceiling, tested every floorboard. She made a list. The list grew. Ceiling plaster down in the drawing room. Dining room carpet black with mould. Window frame rotted through.

The ivy had taken another window since her arrival. She could hear it at night, the tap of it against the glass, patient as fingers.

But as she walked, she noticed something else. Alongside the rot and the ruin, someone had been working. A floorboard replaced in the passage, the new wood darker than the old. A window frame patched with what looked like timber from a fence post. Whoever had done this had good hands.

The real surprise came when she entered the cold room. She had expected cobwebs and mice. She found flour, a full sack, dry, weevil-free, stored in a tin. Oats. Salt. A crock of butter, fresh. Eggs in a basket. Pots of preserved fruit on the upper shelf, labelled in a flowing, round hand. Feminine hand. Young and tidy.

Turnips and carrots in a box of sand. A ham hanging from a hook in the ceiling, partly cut. Dried herbs in bundles tied with string.

She turned back to the kitchen. The fire was dead. She had watched fires being lit a thousand times. She crouched lopsided, her hip protesting, and packed kindling into the grate and took up the tinderbox. Steel and flint. She struck. A spark flew sideways and died.

She sat back on her heels. Her hip was a bright wire of pain from spine to knee. She had soot on her hands, soot on her blue muslin, and the hearth was as cold and dead as when she had started.

She unpacked the kindling. Looser this time. She struck again. Twenty times. Thirty. Her thumb was bleeding, the skin split at the nail, and the blood mixed with the soot and turned her fingers black and red. She struck again. A spark caught, and she cupped her hands around it and blew, gently, carefully, barely breathing, coaxing it to live.

The flame held. She fed it one stick at a time, and it grew, and she added a log and it caught with a crack, and heat pushed into the room. The shadows pulled back from the range, retreating to the corners, and the peeling wallpaper moved in the updraft like something breathing. She sat on the stone floor with blood on her thumb and soot on her face and the fire warm against her shins. She felt as though she had lit a lantern inside her own chest.

Then she tried to cook.

The oats were in the pantry. The pot was on the range with a full bucket of water beside it. She poured the water into the pot and added oats. She stirred. The porridge stayed liquid for twenty minutes and then, in the space of one, turned to stone. She scraped the pot. Grey, lumpy, scorched at the bottom.

She served it into a bowl and ate it standing at the range, her back to the room, because sitting down would mean thinking and thinking would mean admitting that she could not cook porridge. Porridge. It was not even on the list. She ate it in the grey kitchen with the fire popping behind her and the smell of burnt oats.

The side door opened. ‘Just’ Kit. He walked into the kitchen, and she froze with the spoon halfway to her mouth and a glob of grey porridge hanging from it.

He glanced at her. He glanced at the pot on the range. The burnt smell was unmistakable.