Alinor was waiting at the front door with a shawl over her head. “I’ll shut up the hens,” she called back to the firelit room.

As they stepped out into the still cold air James could see the pale outline of her face and her dark eyes in the light of the sickle moon. He thought that he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life than this woman in this bleached and blackened landscape, with the harbor water shining like a sheet of pewter behind her, and the sliver of an ice-white moon in the sky above her.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked, and put his arms around her as if he would straighten her shawl, but found himself holding her, as easily and naturally as if they had never been parted. She came into his arms but at once he felt a difference in her. Through the layers of homespun he could feel her body but it was strange to him. Something about her touch horrified him, as if she was a shape-changer in a frightening story, and he flinched, stepped back, and looked at her. He saw that the pallor of her face was not just moonlight.

“J-James,” she said, stumbling over his name.

“My love?”

“You came back for me?”

“As I promised, the minute that I could.”

She sighed, and he realized she had been holding her breath from the moment he had stepped over the threshold. Her anxiety only alarmed him more. He glanced back at the darkened doorway, and she took him by the hand and led him around the corner of the house and through a gate into the vegetable garden that ran alongside the deserted road.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

At the sound of her voice, the hens, warm in their house, clucked sleepily to her. She bent, and latched the door of their house, bolting it at the top and at the bottom.

“I have to tell you something first,” he said rapidly. “I met with my parents, with my mother and my father. I told them of you. I told them that I will pay my fine to parliament and regain our house. I will take you there, and in six years’ time, when you are declared a widow, we will marry.”

He saw her blanched lips tremble and he was afraid that she was about to argue. But, to his surprise, she consented at once: “Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I will marry you and live wherever you wish. Yes. And I have something to tell you.”

“You will come with me?” He could hardly believe her words.

“I will. But I have to—”

“My love! My love! You will come with me!”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Anything! Anything!”

The hens clucked again at the voices. “Hush,” she said, drawing him away from the henhouse. “I have to tell you . . .”

He took her hand. “Of course. What is it, my love?”