“Everything with garlic and oil. In Lisbon they live on fried fish. The city stinks of it.”

“They have bacon?” she asked.

“Bacon? Yes.” He paused.

She waited. She had not thought there could be anything difficult in asking about bacon.

“I saw one time,” he said, “soldiers attack a herd of swine they found in the woods. They were so in a rage from hunger they cut pieces from them while they still lived then cooked the meat on kettle lids, though I think most barely singed it before they started to eat.”

“Mercy,” she said. “And were they sick after?”

“I don’t know. They were infantry. We were riding through. I stopped to watch them. It was amusing at first.”

“Well,” she said, “I hope the French were just as hungry.”

“Who?”

“The French. That they were hungry also.”

“The French we thought were better served. The men believed it at least. They were always hopeful of finding something in a Frenchman’s pack.”

“And how would they have Frenchmen’s packs?” she asked, but understood the answer before the question was out of her mouth.

All afternoon there was a picture in her head of men in red coats running at swine and hacking at them. She had watched Briffit cut out a pig many times, knew the noise of it, knew how the blood ran. But the men in the woods . . . the sheer wildness of it! And it surprised her a little that she could imagine it at all, as though she, a woman of forty-three, neat in her dress, knew more about such things—wildness, savagery—than she could have guessed. As if, perhaps, everyone did.

She was worried that the new mood had been spoiled, but that night, drowsing on the chair in the kitchen, she woke to hear music in the house. It was so faint she was not sure at first what side of sleep it came from. She put on her slippers and went out into the hall. The dog followed her and stood with her at the bottom of the stairs. Anything? Nothing. So, she had merely dreamed it. But after half a minute it started again, a little reel played stop-start, phrase by phrase, like a poem once had by heart but not, for long years, brought to mind.

He would, of course, have known where to find the fiddle. It was where he himself had left it, under the writing table in the study. His father’s fiddle. His fiddle when he was mad for music and had a master in Wells, those days when the young men called at the house with instruments under their arms and disappeared for hours, not eating much, drinking a great deal, always playing. They even played on the roof when the mood was on them and it was a miracle none broke his neck in a fall. (A year after they came down for the last time, Tom, fixing slates, found a wine bottle full of rain.)