She drew a breath again, as if she could not speak. Then her words were so soft he had to lean towards her to catch them. “I am with child,” she said.

For a moment he did not understand what she was saying; he could not hear the words. Each single word made sense, but together they made no sense at all and he could not understand it—coming from her, to him.

“What?”

“I am with child.”

“How?” he asked stupidly.

She found a ghost of a smile. “The way it usually happens. When we were in the hayloft together.”

“But how?” he asked again. “How could it be?”

“What should prevent it?”

“I thought you would prevent it!” he retorted, too loudly for caution.

“Hush,” she said again, and led him farther down the path to the bottom gate, so that they could not be heard from the house.

Irrelevantly, he suddenly thought how much he hated a winter vegetable garden, so dark and muddy and nothing growing. He thought how poor it was, and how ugly. He thought how much he disliked it that the hens recognized her voice and clucked back at her. The future Lady Avery should not pull turnips and feed her own hens; and her hand in his was rough. “Are you sure?”

Now she smiled. “Of course I am sure.”

Her smile infuriated him, as if she thought him a fool. “I do understand well enough,” he snapped. “It’s not that I know nothing. It’s just that I thought that you—a married woman, a wisewoman—would have made sure that it did not happen.”

She shook her head; she was maddeningly serene. “I don’t do that sort of work.”

“It’s not work when it is for yourself!” he argued like a Jesuit. “It would be work, and a sin, if you were preventing the child of another: a sinful woman, or an adulteress. But for yourself there is no sin in a woman choosing to eat some herbs, or drink some drink, as soon as you knew. Or better still, before you did the act!”

“Did the act?” she repeated, as if she could not understand his words.

“Then it would be no sin at all as there would be no intent. D’you see? If there is no evil intent then there is no sin. Why did you not take the herbs the morning that we parted?”

“I was thinking of nothing but us, nothing but us and the hayloft as if it were a time outside time,” she admitted. “I was longing for the evening when I would see you again. Then you were gone, and I was just longing.”

She tightened the shawl across her rounded belly. “Of course, once I knew, I thought what I should do. I thought about it all night long. It was a long night, and a cold one . . .” She trailed off. She wanted to tell him how bright the beach of shells had been in the moonlight, the heavy stones that she had chosen, the thought of walking into the mire, the certainty of death by drowning, and her revelation that the life of their baby was a joy to her.