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Lydia woke to gray light and rain on the window, and for a moment did not know where she was. Then she moved and felt the linen against her bare skin and the unfamiliar ache of her own body, and remembered everything at once. Heat climbed from her chest to the roots of her hair. She lay still with her eyes shut and let it.

When she opened them, he was there.

Some part of her had felt certain he would go, that she would wake to the empty pillow and the closed door and the return of the cold courtesy of the last ten days. He sat in the chair by the window in his shirtsleeves, his hair disordered, his cravat still on the floor where she had dropped it, watching her with an expression she had never seen on him. It was quiet and open, and it made her want to pull the coverlet over her head.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning.” Her voice came out a croak. She cleared it. “You stayed.”

“I wanted to.”

“I thought you would leave once I fell asleep.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “I meant to leave before you woke. Then you woke, and here I am. I cannot account for it.”

“I am glad you did.”

She sat up, drawing the coverlet with her. The fire had gone out, and the room smelled of candle smoke and rain. Her shift lay in a heap on the floor beside his coat. Seeing the discarded clothes lying there together made her face burned again.

“You are blushing,” he said.

“You are observing.”

“I find I cannot stop.”

She wanted to laugh and wanted to cry and did neither. She sat with her knees drawn up under the coverlet, and the gray morning came into the room around them, and she thought: this is my husband. This one, in the chair, watching me. The man I married.

“I cannot wait,” she said, before she could stop herself.

He went still. “For what?”

“For more. For all of it.” The words tumbled out, and she could not catch them. “I want you here every night. I want you at breakfast without the newspaper. I want to wake up and find you in that chair. I want…” She stopped, her face on fire. “I am sorry. That was forward. A lady does not…”

“Do not apologize.” His voice had gone low. “Not for that.”

But she had seen his face change on the word every, and change again, harder, on a word she had not quite said. The openness was going. She watched it go, as she had watched it at the breakfast table and in the greenhouse, and a hundred other times already, and something in her chest went cold.

“Lydia,” he said. “Some of what I told you before we married still stands. You must know that before anything else happens between us.”

“Which part?”

He studied his hands, then made himself meet her eyes. “I told you that day in the corridor that I was not the man you wanted. I’ve realized I want a wife. You. I want it more than I have wanted anything in my life. The rest, however, has not changed. I cannot give you children.”

The rain went on against the glass.

“Cannot,” she said. “Or will not?”

“Will not.”

“Why?”

He turned his face to the window, and his jaw tightened. She knew that look now, and every time it ended with his back going out of a door.

She got out of bed. She wrapped the coverlet around herself and crossed the cold floor in her bare feet and knelt on the rug beside his chair, so that he had to look at her.

“You promised me daylight,” she said. “It is daylight. You said you owed me a conversation. I am asking for it now. Why?”

For a long moment she thought he would get up and go. His hands gripped the arms of the chair until the knuckles showed white. She did not touch him. She knelt and waited, as he had waited for her in the library with the cloth and the basin, and the rain ran down the window behind his head.