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.

“We have brought his trunk,” said the captain. “From Spain. Now the dust has settled things have been finding their way back to us. Though I dare say he’ll be surprised to see it.”

“He’s out,” she said.

“Oh?”

“He took the dog out. I can’t say when he’ll be back.”

“But he will not walk all day, I hope?”

“No,” she said. “No. He’ll be back before dinner.”

She led him through to the drawing room. The morning sun had been coming in the window for the last two hours and the air was warm, the room scented with the soft smell of itself—wood, old fabrics, the coal-breath of the fireplace.

“We were in the Peninsula together,” he said. “Shared billets in Lisbon. An onion loft, believe it or not.”

She nodded, her hands clasped in front of her apron.