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“The oats were...” she started.

He crossed to the shelf, took a length of rope, and walked back out. The door closed behind him.

The impudence of that man. She stood at the range with the spoon in her hand and her face burning. He had not said a word. But the silence had contained a verdict on her cooking and she did not care for it.

She ate every bite. It tasted of ash and defeat but she did not care.

After breakfast, she tried to wash a dress. The green wool she had worn on her journey, muddy from the lane. She found soap in the kitchen and a basin and she scrubbed. The soap would not lather. She scrubbed harder. A seam tore under her fingers. She stared at the torn dress in the grey water and her eyes burned. She blinked hard and kept scrubbing and wrung it out and hung it over a chair. It dripped into a puddle and would dry in a shape no dressmaker would recognise.

She considered it a success.

She looked at the list. Forty-seven items. She found the shortest entry. Loose door handle, kitchen.

The handle had come off in her hand that morning. She examined it. A simple mechanism: two screws, a plate. One screw was missing. The other was stripped smooth.

She found a nail in the yard. She needed a hammer. She did not have a hammer. She looked around the kitchen. Her gaze fell on the meat carver. The handle was solid wood. It might serve.

She sat on the flagstones, her left leg stretched before her. She braced the handle against the door frame, positioned the nail, and brought down the butt of the knife.

She missed the nail entirely and hit the door.

She repositioned and swung again. The nail went in crooked. She pulled it out with the blade and tried again. She swung. The handle connected. With her thumb. She dropped the carver and sucked in a sharp breath, holding her thumb tightly with the other hand. Her eyes watered.

The door opened. It was him. His eyes went to her legs on the floor, her stockinged ankles showing, then to the knife still loose in her hand. His jaw muscles bunched and relaxed before his expression flattened. She tugged her skirt over her ankles. His eyes met hers.

“Are you going to say something or just stand there?” she asked.

He did what he did best. And most often. He turned and walked away.

She rose to her feet with effort, picked up her cane, and sat in the dining chair. Then she saw him return with a hammer in his hand. He walked in and set it on the kitchen table. Then he left.

Audrey spent twenty minutes attaching the door handle. It was not right. The handle sat crooked and the nail would work loose within the week. But it worked. For today, it worked. She opened and closed the door four times and felt unreasonably proud.

One item crossed off. Forty-six to go.

The kitchen was cold again. The range had died overnight, as it did every night, because she had not yet learned to bank a fire properly and had been too preoccupied with avoiding the man upstairs to ask how it was done.

She stood in the doorway and looked at the table.

The oats were measured into the pot. Beside the pot sat a jug of water. On the table, a scrap of paper torn from the edge of something larger, and on it two words in blunt handwriting.

Lower heat. Stir constantly.

She picked up the paper and turned it over. Nothing on the back. She held it for a moment, then set it beside the pot and looked at the range.

The flint was where she'd left it. The kindling was not—someone had restacked it, looser this time, the way she'd learned worked better after four days of failure. She struck the flint. Her thumb was still split from the first morning and the steel bit into the wound, but the spark caught on the third strike and the kindling took, and she fed it carefully and blew on it and the flame held.

She poured the oats into the pot with the water and set it on the range and stirred. Constantly. The porridge thickened at its own pace rather than hers, and she resisted the urge to add more heat, and the oats did not seize into stone. They went lumpy in places where she stirred unevenly, and the bottom caught once when she stopped to adjust her grip on the spoon, but the result, when she ladled it into a bowl, was porridge. Porridge that did not need to be chiselled out of the bowl.

She ate standing at the range. It tasted of oats and not much else. She had no sugar and the honey was on a shelf she couldn't reach, and she was not going to stand on a chair again after what had happened with the tea caddy.

The side door opened. Kit. He crossed the kitchen without looking at her, took a bowl from the shelf, and ladled porridge from the pot. Her porridge. He sat at the table and picked up the spoon and ate.

She watched him from the range. He did not grimace. He ate steadily and without expression. When the bowl was empty, he stood and carried it to the basin and washed it and dried it and set it on the shelf and left through the side door. The whole thing had taken four minutes.

Chapter four

Weight of a Name