“When I was young . . .” She pauses. “When I was young, and Selwyn was in love with me, Lady Brock asked me if I knew what a mariage blanc was. I thought it was a white wedding. But Althea corrected me. She said that, like many men whose nerves were damaged in the Great War, Selwyn would never be able to give me children. Then he told me so himself, and pleaded with me to forget him. I brushed all that aside. I wanted him, not his offspring. We were intensely happy for over thirty years. If ours was not a marriage, then the word has no meaning. But . . .”

“Ellen, you don’t have to say—”

“The flights were very long, you see. I had too much time to think. For all I knew you’d be gone when I returned. So by the time I landed in England, well, I had talked myself out of you. Out of the idea of you.”

“Yes, I see—”

“I forgot I was a grown woman, a confident person, somebody open to new experiences—”

“Ellen, really, I understand—”

“Especially those experiences which everybody seems to agree are very, very enjoyable indeed. And now I see you I can’t—can’t believe I nearly missed you—”

I hold out my arms. She enters my embrace willingly, and I feel a few warm breaths against my shoulder.

“James.” Her voice is muffled. “I’m absolutely terrified.”

I bind my arms tightly around her.

“Whatever you wish us to be,” I say, “we will be. I promise you. Ellen. All will be well.”

—

We walk on, eventually. We don’t want to leave each other, and we don’t want to be inside. Ellen isn’t the slightest bit cold now. She needed to be moving through her own landscape, I think. Feeling the woodland floor and the turf beneath her feet. She belongs here. I hope I will too.

We’re on the track leading up to Beacon Hill. It is bordered on each side by the thin fields where gray clods, cut by the blade of the plow, shine in the flashes of sun. The humped outline rises in front of me and I feel my breath coming short. I gesture at the skyline. “This hill must have been quite daunting to ancient people.”

Ellen doesn’t immediately reply. I listen to the wind buffeting my ears, the peal of a gull overhead. Our boots tramping over the dry ground.

“Why do I have the feeling,” she says, “that it is you who are daunted?”

I’m already picturing the hillocks and dips of the summit, the soft short nibbled turf, the rampart facing south. “I have ghosts to lay to rest.”