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When they finished, it was past noon. Lydia sat back on her heels.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” He took in the three piles, the boxes around them, the light through the little window. “She will always be part of my life. I do not want to forget her. I spent five years forgetting her and calling it grief. Her death need not decide what happens next. It never had to. I was the one that let it.”

Lydia reached across the boxes and took his hand.

That evening they walked through the house together.

He had not planned it. They returned from the lodge, and Lydia went to wash. In the hall, Tristan looked at the staircase, the long passages, and the doors as if he had never seen them before. When she came down, he took her hand. “Come with me.” She followed.

The chest went back into the south parlor. He had it set by the window where the light fell on the painted flowers, and told Mrs. Bell to leave it there, open, so that Lydia might keep her seed packets in it if she wished.

“Her aunt gave it to her as a wedding gift,” he told Lydia. “She kept letters in it at first, and then everything else too, because she hated sorting things.” He touched the worn place at the front. “I would like someone to use it. I would like it full of seeds, and string, and labels, and all the things you leave lying on tables.”

Lydia’s eyes were bright. “Then I shall have to find something worthy of keeping in it.”

Then he took her through the rest of the house. In the library he asked where she wanted her botanical books, and she told him, and he said they would rearrange the books on Monday. In the long gallery he asked whether she would like her framed drawings there, between the portraits of his disapproving ancestors, and she laughed and said the ancestors would never recover. In the morning room he asked whether the yellow walls had always seemed so tired, and she said yes, and he said then they would paint them whatever color she liked.

At the end of the east passage, they stopped before the nursery door, untouched for five years.

He stood before it a long moment. Lydia held his hand without urging him or drawing him away.

He opened the door.

There was a light layer of dust over everything. The shutters were closed and the furniture covered with sheets. The walls were still yellow. He crossed the room and opened the shutters, and the evening light crossed the bare floor.

Neither spoke. Tristan drew a full breath. Lydia’s hand remained in his. For the first time in five years, he could stand there without wanting to flee.

“You are very interested in redecorating all of a sudden,” Lydia said at last, softly.

He looked down at her. “I want to make room,” he said. “In every part of this house. For things between us to grow.”

EPILOGUE

A few weeks later

Within six weeks of the conservatory’s completion, the Hale children had told half the village that Lydia grew oranges in a glass house and let visitors smell the leaves. Soon people were asking to see the conservatory.

Lady Fairchild came, admired the conservatory, and told Lady Ellsworth. Lady Ellsworth drove over from Wexcombe in her barouche with two cabinet ministers’ wives and declared it the prettiest thing in Hampshire. After that, the requests multiplied. Lydia finally agreed to open the house for one evening at the end of October, with supper and music among the lantern-lit plants. She told Tristan to expect a dozen people, perhaps twenty.

Sixty came.

Lady Fairchild brought a cousin with strong views about citrus trees, despite owning none herself. Esther admired the drawings along the brick wall and asked Lydia for a study of a lily in her mother’s garden. The two went off arm in arm to see the white flower from the wood. Henry and Edmund came down from London together, both claiming to have come for the supper. Henry shook Tristan’s hand on the steps and held it a moment too long, his eyes hard. Then he grinned and said Lydia had written that Tristan could now tell a root from a stem and he would require a demonstration. Sebastian and Amelia brought their son and a cloth large enough to protect any waistcoat in the house. Julian came alone and stood a long time before Lydia’s drawings, then turned to Tristan and said quietly, “I am glad,” and nothing else, and Tristan understood him perfectly. Under the lemon trees one of the Hale children was whispering to her mother, asking whether it was polite to smell the leaves; Lydia overheard, smiled, and showed her the lowest branch.

Tristan stood in the conservatory doorway and watched his wife receive them.

She wore green tonight, a deep leaf-green silk, her hair swept up and adorned with the thin band of sapphires from Wexcombe. Lanterns hung among the lemon trees and threw a warm wavering light over everything, and the glass overhead held the dark and the first stars. She moved through the crowd with her straight back and her clear voice, and she no longer paused when someone called her Duchess. She still turned toward him whenever she laughed, as if some jokes improved when he heard them too. He crossed the room each time, until Sebastian asked whether he had quarreled with every chair he tried to sit in.

“Only the ones on the far side of the room,” Tristan said.

After supper there were cards in the drawing room and music in the long gallery, among Lydia’s framed drawings and the disapproving ancestors, who had not yet recovered. Samuel, called in from the potting shed to answer a question about the lemons, settled a dispute between two guests more decisively than either would have liked. Mrs. Hale’s daughter had brought the mint cutting from the children’s visit, now potted and flourishing, and stood beside it in her best frock while Lydia told Lady Ellsworth whose care had kept it growing.

Tristan’s mother came late, with Lady Pembroke.

He had not seen his mother since the wedding. He had written her one short letter from Ashcombe, telling her Lydia had come home and asking her plainly to make no more arrangements on their behalf. She had answered with a single line: Very well. I shall try. He had read it several times, standing at the study window, and found it harder to bear than an argument.

Now she stood in the conservatory doorway in gray silk and took in the lanterns and the drawings and the lemon trees and the sixty guests who seemed to have forgotten they were visiting a duke. He watched her hands. He knew the gesture before it began: the slight lift of the chin, the glance at the chairs, the breath drawn to begin putting everything in order.