Jack is already milking when Gwen enters the parlour. He fails to hide his surprise as she collects her stool and pail.

‘What?’

‘I was expecting Nora, that’s all.’

‘Were you hoping for Nora?’

‘No, just expecting her.’

‘Nora’s gone.’ When he doesn’t react, she presses the point. ‘For good.’

She waits, but all he does is nod, his hands moving rhythmically under the cow’s udder, the jets of warm milk splashing into the pail at his feet.

‘Did you want Nora to help you this morning?’ It is like a scab she can’t leave alone. She is determined to pick it from the wound, however sore and exposed it might leave the flesh underneath. ‘Did you? Did you want Nora to walk through that door?’

He stops milking. He shunts back the stool and stands, smoothing his hand over the cow’s haunch, whispering soothing words as he retrieves the pail.

Gwen awaits his answer. He stops alongside her, their shoulders just inches apart.

‘It was never Nora that I wanted.’

He continues to the hanging scales and proceeds to weigh his pail.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The letter arrives three days later. Gwen is feeling horribly tired, her attention divided between the stack of post she is opening and Jack’s recounting of the night’s events that had so disturbed her sleep.

She had been rudely awoken in the early hours by hammering on the back door. Jack had bustled in when she had finally opened up, offering a harried explanation that a fox was prowling around the chicken coop. With no time to spare, he had retrieved the twelve-bore from the gun cupboard in the kitchen, loaded it with cartridges and disappeared back out into the night. She heard the blast of both barrels and was just pulling on her coat when he arrived back. The fox, he assured her, had been dispatched.

Parts of the shotgun are now spread across sheets of newspaper upon the kitchen table, and Jack is carefully cleaning each one as Tom perches next to him, agog at the drama he is relaying. Gwen smiles as Muriel asks when she might expect to have her table back.

It is then that she comes across the cream envelope, its thick nap and colour differentiating it from the flimsy brown ones that denote bills and statements. She stares at her typed name. The postal mark says Helvedon. A tiny dip appears between her brows.

‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ she murmurs.

A deep-seated instinct advises her to be alone and her withdrawal from the kitchen goes unnoticed. She strays into the office and pushes the door to, though not hard enough to close it completely. Laying the other letters on the desk, she turns the cream envelope over in her calloused hands and inserts her finger under the fold. Ripping paper tears the silence.