The fiddle would have needed tuning, and she was not sure, listening from the bottom of the stairs, if he had made all the strings as they should be, if his hearing, his damaged ears, had made it hard for him to do. She supposed it must have, but she had listened to enough village players in her time who did not trouble themselves with anything beyond the loudness of their playing and keeping the dancers’ feet in time. A little sharp, a little flat, it was all music.

Then silence, a hush filled by the tick of the clock, her own breath, the dog’s. Then it was back, and more confident now, freer. His fingers were warmed, he was remembering the old tricks. The tune was as familiar to her as her own face, and in the hall, where moonlight hung like a luminous dust, she moved one slippered foot, toe down, then heel down, toe then heel.

Through the week that followed he would play for an hour or two in the day, and at night, when she had settled herself in the kitchen, he would often play for another hour. She became used to hearing him as she went about her business. Tom came into the house, smiling, and said he had heard it as he crossed the back field and it had come on him like a memory, if she knew what he meant. She said she did.

“Are we as we were, then?” he asked. He had new gaiters on, red ones, in honour of the new season.

“It would seem we are,” she said, though she did not believe it. She had been too much in the man’s company to believe in any simple restoration of easier times. She would not drop her guard and knew Lacroix had not dropped his, music or no. They were waiting for something, for the moon to crash through the tiles of the roof, for old Lacroix to shoulder his way out of his grave, for the French to show up on the ridge with their plumes and whatnots. Her sleeping thinned out to scraps. She listened to owls, to spring rain that seemed to fall inside the house. She began to imagine her blood was not quite right, that she was spoiling for something (she who had been ill, properly ill, twice in her adult life). It was, then, not so much a surprising thing as a necessary one when a gig pulled by a pair of grey horses swung into the yard and she answered the door to a stranger, a man who, while not in uniform, she immediately recognised as a soldier.

He smiled at her, wished her a good morning. “Captain Wood,” he said, “to see Captain Lacroix.”

He was about the same age as Lacroix or a little younger, spoke with a big-house voice, had the side whiskers and moustache the regiment favoured and perhaps demanded. Another man stood by the heads of the horses. This, she assumed, was his servant.