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He stopped. “I thought, this morning…” He heard himself and stopped again. “You are right. May I?”

She made him wait. She took a pin from the dish and set it in her hair, turned her head to examine the effect, and took the pin out again. “How many shirts?”

“Fewer than Whitmore supposes I need.”

“That is not a number.”

“I fear the actual number might affect your answer.”

She laughed and turned on the stool to face him. “Yes. You may. Provided your boots do not displace the botanical books.”

He crossed the room and bent to kiss her, as she tipped her face back towards his. She caught his face in her hands and held him there, and when he straightened, Mary’s careful pins had come loose on one side and neither of them cared.

At breakfast the next morning Lydia asked him to spend the day with her.

“I should like to see the whole estate,” she said. “The real parts, beyond the ones a guest sees. The farms and the cottages and the places nobody has walked in years. I want to know what I have married.”

He would have liked nothing better. He glanced at the stack of letters by his plate and the account Collins had sent up that morning, and felt the old pull of work as refuge, and recognized it with a pang of shame. Still, some letters could not wait. “Give me the morning,” he said. “Collins has held three decisions for me since before the wedding. When I finish them, I am yours for the rest of the day. All of it.”

“What sort of decisions?”

“A lease that wants renewing. A boundary dispute between two farmers who have hated each other since the Peace of Amiens. A widow in the village who has fallen behind on her rent through no fault of hers.” He stopped. “Dull, mostly.”

“The widow is not dull.”

“No,” he said. “The widow is not dull.”

He could feel her gaze following his as he went to the study, and he was halfway down the passage before he realized he was smiling at nothing.

She found him three hours later.

He had finished the lease and was halfway through the boundary dispute when the study door opened without a knock. Lydia stood there with a cobweb on her sleeve, dust on her hem, a smear of green on one cheek, and such open delight in her face that he glanced past her for the cause.

“Come,” she said. “Come now. You must see.”

“See what?”

“Come.”

She took his hand in the passage and pulled him through the house, out by the garden door and along the path past the kitchen garden and the peach wall, into a part of the grounds he had not walked in years. Nettles grew waist-high along the path. Brambles spilled over the wall. At the end, half hidden in ivy, stood the old south conservatory.

His grandfather had built it for citrus trees. His father had loved it; Tristan remembered fetching him from it as a boy and finding him among the lemons with his sleeves rolled up, happier than he ever seemed in the house. After his father died, nobody went there. The family put off repairs through one winter and another and then stopped discussing them. Now the door hung on a single hinge. Ivy had come in through three broken panes and spread across the brick. Iron supports at the far end marked where shelving had stood. Brown water filled the stone basin, a fern grew from a joint in the tiles, and a young sycamore had pushed up through the floor and was reaching, with great determination, for the roof.

Lydia stood in the middle of it and turned to him with her face alight.

“This,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You knew it was here.”

“I knew there was a structure.”

“A structure?”

“One tries not to grow attached to every derelict building one inherits.”

“It is beautiful.”