A week went by. The weather was cold and clear. Snowdrops stood in clumps beside the pillars of the gate. He was sitting up to eat now and eating solid food—eggs, bread, slices of cold pork. Finally—nine days after arriving at the house—he climbed out of bed, sat there a while, pale and breathless, then said, “I’ll need some clothes, Nell.”

She fetched things from his dressing room. Salt-and-pepper trousers, a moleskin waistcoat, a quilted housecoat that had belonged to his father and that she had managed to keep the moths away from with little linen bags of lavender in the pockets. He dressed in front of her and tottered as he put on his trousers so that she had to steady him. She pushed the armchair closer to the fire, and later brought up a folding table, an old card table, which she spread with a cloth and served his meals on. She chattered to him, asked him harmless questions—about his health, about what he wished to eat, how he had slept, if the room was cold at night. Sometimes these questions went unanswered and she began to notice this happened most commonly when she spoke without his looking at her. She stood behind him one afternoon, behind the armchair, and spoke his name, softly at first, then louder. At the fourth attempt he turned to her, looked up. It might improve, she thought, in time. It might recover with his strength.

As for the news the doctor had anticipated, it did not come from John Lacroix but from the brush seller, a pedlar who crisscrossed the county like some industrious insect and who had called at the house for years. He told the housekeeper (as he laid out his brushes like pieces of best porcelain along the kitchen table) that the army had been chased out of Spain, that there had been a battle at a place whose name he could not recall for the moment and that the British general had been killed by a cannonball that took off his shoulder. What was left of the army, which was little enough, the sweepings, had escaped in ships, though at least one of these had foundered in a storm, perhaps others.

The following Sunday the parson read them pieces out of his newspaper. It was a dark morning, the church dark, and he held the paper so close to the candles in the sconce beside the pulpit it seemed certain it must catch fire, as once before—the news of Admiral Nelson’s death—it had, flying out of his hands, then swooping above the congregation, a small fiery angel that settled at last beside the font and was stamped on.