I thought of my friends moving awed through the wide front hall, craning their necks up that mysterious winding stairwell, and then I’d guide them upstairs to the room where, in such-and-such a year, So-and-so had endured a difficult childbirth. I’d do research on the house and compile my findings in a leather-bound book, to be placed in the pentagonal recess in the narrow hall that led to the former servants’ quarters. All my life I’d believed I’d someday live in a place like this, had suffered the distance between such places as they existed in my imagination and the places in which I’d actually lived (before Kay, with Kay, after Kay left): their low ceilings, ugly heat vents, hollow pine doors. To live here would be, I imagined, a sort of exorcism of all the limitations I’d ever felt. Here one sensed—craftsmanship, yes, but also, my God—the past, the living past: the parties held, the food served, the dust motes of 1862, the war goodbyes of 1917, the whispered late-night dramas that had forever altered the lives of the people who’d once moved down these very hallways and now lay buried in the village graveyard I’d visited on the way over, trailing my hands over the mossy stones, reading names aloud, thinking, Poor bastards, you no longer walk in the sun.

Hays paused us at an orchard. Apples and pears had once hung thick on the trees and carpeted the ground, he said. Now, well, no. There was some sort of disease. He’d been preoccupied.

And he gestured up at the window of the sickroom of the wife.

I’ll hire a gardener, I thought, get it back to health. He seemed to read my mind and the look on his face said: You showing up here, now, to steward this beloved place, and with the means to do so, proves that such a thing as good fortune truly exists.

Our handshake seemed to mean: Let’s burn through the technicalities, get the thing done.

It kills me, he said. To think of losing this place forever.

I get that, I said.

And I did. My mind leapt ahead, to that sad future someday when I, too, would lose it forever.

It’s heaven, he said. It’s been a heaven for the two of us.

I believe it, I said.

Maybe, he said, and a look came over his face, a self-doubting look, and I found myself wanting to offer whatever he needed.

It was strange, very strange, to like someone so much on a first meeting.

Go on, I said.

Maybe I could drop by now and then, he said.

And I thought: Well, yes, sure, it would be good to see him once in a while.

But then he went on.

Spend a day or two, he said. Stay in the guest room, maybe.