“What are you thinking about?” said Herman, after a brief silence.

“I’m thinking about your glaciers, from yesterday evening,” she said, “the ones that hold the town on the mountain tightly in their arms. I’m accustomed to glaciers that offer no refuge. O’Brien’s father is on Dartmoor.”

“And that young man who looked at you with so much soul?”

“That’s his other son, Christopher. I run contraband wheat for the starving people of Ireland. At the very least, I act as the go-between, because Christopher said I looked like a bird and could get past the fences. At the Four Fields fair, I was supposed to meet the man who’ll drive the carts to the landing, near the mouth of the Severn. I did meet him. I’ll be leaving you tomorrow evening.”

There was a very long silence.

“I’m a country girl,” she said.

“I could tell,” he said.

“Is it obvious?”

“No, it’s a feeling. I knew, even before I saw you—after I heard you talking to old O’Brien. I’m a man who’s tangled a few times, face-to-face, with at least three of the four elements, and there’s only one thing that gets you through: the soul. Elsewhere, you can get along without it; but there, no. There was an earthiness in your voice. I wondered how all of that could fit in with genteel society (I’d seen your gloved hand), and then I didn’t ask myself any more questions.”

“If you knew the house I was born in, you’d be astonished by my dresses and my hands.”

“I’m not easily astonished,” he said, “especially when I see things that are clear and easy to understand.”

“On an old engraving of my village,” she said, “you can see my house on the side of the hill. I’ve drawn a heart around those walls and some of the fields where I spent my days. It’s not so very long ago that I drew that heart. One evening, just like any other, in the house where I live now, I suddenly felt the desire, you see, to trace the shape of a heart. Yes, to watch my fingers draw that shape with the quill. The line that starts from the middle, swells out as it rises, fills with tenderness, and then curves down, still inflated, to come together at the bottom tip. On an ordinary evening, with my husband in his usual place in his armchair, with my child—I have a four-year-old son—with my son upstairs in his bedroom, the clock ticking, the fire in the chimney, the tranquility. . . I felt the urge to draw a heart. Sometimes you feel the need to make sure that certain things exist. As soon as I was in my bedroom, I opened the drawer where I kept the old engraving, and that’s where I drew the heart: around my old house.

“It was a farm with worn-out soil, but the Whites (that’s my maiden name, the one I gave you just before) had made it into a wonderful refuge. Don’t go thinking I’m soft and sensitive. I’m tough enough. That was a strict household. There were five of us children: I have three brothers and a sister. The oldest of the lot, Harold, isn’t funny—a word you’re fond of. If I’m telling you this, it’s because I was talking just a moment ago about my husband in his armchair.