The second week of April. It took, it seemed, a single morning to see off what was left of the winter, of pure winter. Perhaps it took no more than an hour. The housekeeper opened windows in rooms that had spent six months in stunned inward concentration, rooms where in January there were frost flowers on the inside of the glass. With the windows up on their sashes the world rolled in—cool air tipped with warmth, the noise of the rooks. A fly sunned itself at the edge of a mirror. A humble bee settled, exhausted, on a window sill.

She started heating water on the kitchen range for a wash day. She would soak things today, scrub and rinse tonight and hang in the morning. She went upstairs to collect his sheets. He was kneeling on the floor, on the rug. All around him were the old books of music that had belonged to his father. He looked up at her and for a moment his face was bright as a boy’s.

“You’ve got them out then,” she said. The air in the room was stale. She noticed it after airing the other rooms. She went to the window and braced the heels of her palms against the bar, pushed until it shifted.

“I had a dream of them,” he said. “Last night. And this morning I went to find them.”

“It was a spring dream,” she said. She was a countrywoman and knew perfectly well the importance of dreams.

“And look at this,” he said, holding up to her a pressed flower—a ragged purple head, a stem that had darkened from green to grey. He held it very gently. It looked as if, blown upon, it would scatter to dust.

“It’s devil’s-bit,” she said. “The herbals use it.”

“I had forgotten he put flowers in the books. I have found campion, cuckoo flower, ox-eyes. But this one escapes me.”

“Devil’s-bit,” she repeated, more loudly.

He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “but it has another name too, I think.”

She stripped the bed and took the linen down. An hour later she came back with a tray of lunch for them both and found him still on his knees with the books. He left them open on the floor and sat at the table with her. Lunch was a broth with the last of the chimney bacon. She served him. He cleared his plate and immediately spooned on more, pushed squabs of bread into the juice. The books have changed him, she thought. The music in the books, the memory of his father. She said it was good to see him eat so well.

“And drink,” he said, filling both their cups with cider. She had made the cider herself the previous autumn, the old press in the outhouse, wasps crawling over the pommy.

“It’s all soldiers think about,” he said. “Eating and drinking. Beef and beer.”

“And what did you eat,” she asked, “when you were away?”