Lucy had come up with him on the pretext of seeing he had all he might need. Now she lingered by the door, candle in hand. He knew he should turn to her, talk to her; knew she understood there was, in this journey of his, something unexplained. He should try to set her mind at ease, though he had no real sense of how to do it and was aching with tiredness. Why had he not stayed in a hotel or a lodging house? Family always saw too much. Family could not be fooled, not for long, not entirely. But surely there was something he could tell her, some anecdote of the kind that might appear in a newspaper under the heading “The Campaigning Life”? If he could make her laugh! He would love to hear her laugh. And he could recall moments of comedy, of comic confusion. An impromptu band of pots and kettles at a bivouac outside Vila Franca, two officers waltzing together like lovers. Or how, on cold evenings in their billets in Salamanca the ladies of the house sat with charcoal braziers under their skirts so that it seemed likely—if they did not actually combust—they might rise suddenly into the air and float over the furniture. Or that time a young trooper in Murray’s squadron, coming in off piquet duty, somehow shot his own horse and for days afterwards any mention of it provoked gales of laughter—laughter that seemed now beyond comprehension. What was comical about the shooting of a horse?

He heard her speak his name and he turned away from the window. The candle rather hid her face than showed it. He wondered if she had been calling him for some time.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

“I was thinking . . . how glad I am at your way of life here. How settled you are.”

“I am,” she said. “I have much to give thanks for.”

“Well, I am pleased for it,” he said.

“John,” she said, “are you well enough for a sea journey? You could stay here a while. A week or two. Learn to tell the children from each other. And there will be other ships.”

He made himself smile at her. “I have set my heart on the Jenny,” he said.

She took a step deeper into the room. He saw her face now, balanced on the light. More their father’s face than their mother’s, though his memory of their mother’s face was, each year, a little less convincing.

“I wonder,” she said, “if in all this soldiering you have sometimes forgotten our Comforter?”

For a second or two he was perplexed, as if the comforter might be an item of gear, something worn under the shirt or laid across a saddle.

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.