The twins were playing by the fire. With their dolls in their hands they looked at him coldly until their mother embraced him. She squeezed his fingers, gazed at him with such directness he was glad to have the distraction of the children. He touched their heads, the silk of their hair. “Hello, young friends,” he said. He had no hope of telling them apart.

Lucy laughed at him. “I suppose young friends will do for now,” she said.

They spent the heart of the afternoon together, the four of them. The room, ample with light, smelled of coal smoke and some floral scent of his sister’s, violets he thought. There was a mirror above the fire, a clock with a sturdy tick. It was good to remember such places existed, were common even.

The children, once they knew he was theirs, would not allow him to have any interest but themselves. He played on his knees with them, answering his sister’s questions over his shoulder, the ones that he heard. She asked about the house, about Nell, about their country neighbours. She asked, in a general way, about his return from Spain, though did not press him as their sister Sarah would have done, wanting details, specifics. He answered her in the same spirit—lightly, vaguely—while wondering what she knew of the world beyond this warm, safe house, the tea-parties, the Sunday psalm singing at the new chapel. When he was able to, when she was drawn into the children’s game (they had posed her a riddle) and he was released for a while, he studied her, a woman of thirty-three in a long-sleeved dress that suggested propriety more than fashion, her figure angular, sharp, slight as a girl’s, her thin fingers white and cold-looking. She had suffered with chilblains as a girl, from coughs that lingered for months. Was she naive? Ignorant? What could she possibly know of the things he had seen, of how things could be? And yet she had almost died when the twins were born, was—so he had heard from Sarah—given over by the doctor attending her, and in the years since then had lost at least one child before its term, probably more. He had not ever paid it much heed. He had not, he feared, paid it any. Now the image of his sister sweating on a bloody sheet became muddled in his head with things he would do well to keep at a distance, certainly here, in a room where children played.

She turned to him, caught him at his staring. “What is it, John? I shall begin to think I have a blemish.”

He dropped his gaze to the rug and shook his head “No,” he said. “Not at all.”