When she knocked at the bedroom door there was no answer. She thought he might not have heard her and she opened the door, slowly. He was lying on top of the bed, fully clothed. She was alarmed for a moment; there was something in his pose, his face turned to the side, one arm flung out across the bed, but going closer she heard the slow tiding of his breath and was easy again. She wanted to put a blanket over him but thought even a light touch might rouse him. She left the newspaper on the table, put coal on the fire (lifting, for quiet’s sake, the nuggets from the scuttle), wiped her fingers on her apron and crept out of the room.

She saw him next when she brought up his supper. It was a pie she had made from a pair of pheasants that had been hanging all week from a peg in the cool of the scullery. He was standing by the window. The newspaper was lying open on the rug beside the armchair.

“I’ll go out tomorrow,” he said.

“You feel strong enough?” she asked, then seeing he had not heard her, said, “Your feet are healed then?”

He shrugged. He wanted to know who she had fetched the paper from and when she told him he asked what the farmer had said. He knew Farmer Nicholls and knew he would have said something.

“He asked,” said the housekeeper, “if you had finished with fighting.”

“With fighting?” He looked for a moment as if he might laugh. “I have lost my sword, Nell. My uniform. My boots.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding as though it all made sense to her.

“My horse too. Poor Ruffian. You remember him.” He turned to look out of the window. She did not think he could see anything out there. Perhaps a light in the village or the glow of a charcoal burner’s fire in the woods. Most likely he saw only the shadow of his own face in the glass. “At Corunna we did not embark more than twenty. The war was very hard on horses, Nell.”

She waited. Now, she thought, he might be ready to speak of it all. Horses, men, ships. The mountains they had crossed. The killing of the general. All of it. She waited but he said nothing else, only went on looking out of the window, letting the silence grow between them until she was ashamed of her curiosity and wished only that he would turn back, sit with her and eat.