She had never heard a man breathe in the dark.
It was a strange thing to learn at twenty-nine. She lay on the narrow cot in the red twilight of the stove with the gray wool blanket pulled to her chin and her eyes open, and listened to the sound across the room. It was low and slow and regular, with a faint catch at the top of each inhale, like a latch just failing to lift. It rose and fell. It filled the lodge as water fills a basin. She had thought, somewhat vaguely, that she would find it intrusive. She found instead that she could not stop listening to it, and that every time the wind howled and the rain flung itself against the shutters, the quiet rhythm went on beneath, steady and unbothered, a small warm certainty in the middle of the roaring.
*Three paces,* she thought. *It is three paces. I could count them.*
She did not count them.
The storm had settled into a long, grinding, patient rage. The roof creaked. The stovepipe moaned. Every so often a gust would lean against the door with the whole weight of the valley behind it, and the latch would rattle, and she would feel the air in the room tighten, as though the lodge itself were holding its breath. Then the pressure would ease, and the breathing across the floor would resume, and she would let her own go.
She turned onto her side. The cot creaked. The breathing paused.
"You're awake," said Joren, very low.
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not asleep."
"Neither am I."
"I gathered."
She smiled into the pillow. It was ridiculous. She was lying in a warden's lodge in the middle of a hurricane, wrapped in a stranger's blanket, with a man she scarcely knew lying on a cot three paces away, and she was smiling like a schoolgirl at a midnight feast. She pressed her lips together to stop it. It did not help.
"Do you always sleep like that?" she said.
"Like what?"
"On your back. With your hands folded on your chest. Like a knight on a tomb."
A pause. Then, with great dignity: "I do not."
"You do. I can hear it."
"You can't hear a man's *posture.*"
"I can hear that you're holding very still." She rolled onto her back again, and stared up at the beams, ruddy with the light of the stove. "It's the sound of someone who has been alone for a long time. You don't turn over. You don't sprawl. You take up the least possible room."
The silence stretched. She thought she had gone too far. She heard him shift, a rustle of linen, a creak of the cot, and then, after a moment, the sound of a man slowly, deliberately, turning on his side to face her.
"You're very observant," he said.
"It's my profession."
"It is rather unnerving."
"I've been told."
"I did not mean it as a complaint."
The words hung in the dark. The stove ticked. She became acutely aware of her own pulse, of the weight of the blanket, of the faint warm smell of cedar and smoke. She did not know what to say. It was an extraordinary thing, she thought, that a man could say *I did not mean it as a complaint* in a voice so low and rough that it made her toes curl.
"What is your favorite food?" she said, abruptly.
A startled pause. "What?"
"It's a perfectly ordinary question. I should like to know. I've eaten your turnip soup, and I feel I ought to know whether it was a cry for help."
He laughed. It was a short, soft, breathy sound, barely above a whisper, and it went through her like warm wine. "Honey cake," he said. "Odalie's. The dark kind. With walnuts."
"Mine's a lemon tart."
"You hardly seem like a lemon tart."
"What do I seem like?"
"I don't," he said, slowly, "know."
It was the most honest thing anyone had said to her in years. She lay quite still.
They talked until the stove burned low. Not of anything that mattered. She told him about the Academy canteen, where the tea was gray and the buns were petrified, and a certain professor of botany who kept a tame hedgehog in his desk drawer. He told her that the valley's river had a name, the Sennet, which meant *the one that listens*, and that as a boy he had believed it could hear him if he whispered on the bank. She told him that she had never learned to swim. He told her that the apple orchard on the eastern slope smelled, in May, of honey and pepper, and that she must see it. She said, drowsily, that she would like to. He said nothing. But she heard him breathe in, once, slowly, and out, and she thought that something in the dark had shifted.
She fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. She did not know it. She only knew, in the last blurred moment, that his voice was still going, low and quiet, saying something about the way the mist came up from the river in the mornings, and that she did not want it to stop.
* * *
In the morning, the storm had broken, and the lodge smelled of damp wool and woodsmoke and strong tea.
She woke to a thin, watery light, and a rhythmic knocking, and the sound of a kettle singing. She lay in the cot a moment without moving, bewildered by the beams, by the blanket, by the faint, fading ache in her shoulder from the cold. Then it all came back in a rush, and she sat up so fast that the room swung.
"Careful," said Joren.
He was at the stove, with his back to her, wearing yesterday's shirt, now dry and badly creased. He had rolled the sleeves to the elbow. He was scraping something into a pan with a wooden spoon, and the air was thick with the smell of porridge. His hair stood up on one side. There was a pillow crease along his cheek.
She had, she realized, been staring at it for some time.
"Good morning," she said.
"Mm."
"You have a, there's a mark. On your face."
His hand went to it. He rubbed it with the heel of his palm, scowling, and she watched the color climb his neck. It was, she thought, quite possibly the most endearing thing she had ever seen.
"There's tea," he said, to the porridge.
There was. It stood on the table in a heavy blue-glazed pot, steaming. Beside it stood two cups. She poured, and tasted, and nearly choked.
It was black. It was bitter. It was so strong that the spoon would have stood in it. She put her cup down, very carefully, and looked at the second cup, and then at the man at the stove.
"Joren."
"Yes?"
"Do you always make it like this?"
"Like what?"
"Like tar."
"It is the proper strength."
"It is the strength of an ox." She pushed the pot an inch away. "I can't drink that. You've been giving me a milder blend all week, haven't you?"
His back stiffened. He turned the spoon in the pan. "I might have."
"You have. You've been watering it down for me."
"I did not water it."
"You *diluted* it. You made a second pot."
"I made two pots," he said stiffly, "because the first was too strong for a person with a sensible stomach, and I did not wish to listen to you grumble about it."
She stared at him. He did not turn round. The tips of his ears had gone scarlet. A long, slow, helpless delight welled up in her, so fierce that she had to press her knuckles to her mouth.
"Every morning," she said, through her fingers.
"It's only tea."
"You have been brewing me a separate pot of tea for nine days, and you never said a word."
"It would have been," said Joren, to the stove, "a great deal of fuss."
She laughed. She could not help it. She laughed until her eyes watered and her ribs hurt, with her hand pressed against her chest, and he stood rigid at the stove and endured it, and from the way his shoulders shook she knew that he was not far behind her.
* * *
They fell into it without discussion.
By midmorning the rain had slackened to a drizzle, and it was clear that the lane would not be passable for a day at least. The ford was under four feet of water. A message had come up from the village by way of Pip, who had waded the shallows with his boots strung round his neck and shouted the news across the flooded lane from the safety of the far bank. *Mum says to say you're to stay put, and the baker's lost a hen, and old Hale's roof's come off, but it's all right, nobody's hurt.* They had waved. He had waved back, and fled.
So they stayed. And the lodge, with its two cots and its single stove and its low smoky ceiling, began to take on a shape she had never expected.
She noticed the small things. That he folded his blanket in four precise squares, corners aligned, like a soldier. That she did not. That he put his boots by the door, toes out, and she kicked hers beneath the cot. That he hung his coat on the same nail every time, and always touched it, lightly, as he walked past. That he read the ledgers at the table in the afternoon with his lips moving very slightly, like a child, and was ashamed of it, and stopped whenever she looked up. That he kept the stove at a precise, steady heat, and fed it twice an hour, and never needed to be reminded.
She noticed, too, that he was noticing her.
It was in the way his eyes went to her when she crossed the room. In the way he moved the ink pot closer to her side of the table without remark. In the way he brought her a second blanket when she shivered, and a cushion for her back, and set a cup of the weak tea at her elbow just before she looked for it. He never touched her. He did not need to. He had made, she realized, a kind of invisible architecture around her, a framework of small provisions and anticipated needs, and she moved through it as through a warm room.
*I am being looked after,* she thought, with a kind of wonder. *I haven't been looked after since I was a child.*
It frightened her a little. It frightened her more that she did not want to stop.
* * *
At noon she was hunting for her pencil, and found the ring.
She had not been looking for it. She had been standing on tiptoe at the shelf above the table, running her fingers along the row of ledgers, searching for the stub she was certain she had left there. It was a dim corner. She patted blindly at a gap between two volumes, and her hand closed on something small and smooth and round.
She drew it out.
It lay in her palm, a small, plain, delicate thing, no larger than the first joint of her thumb. It was carved of pale wood, apple, she thought, or pear, rubbed to a satin finish by long handling. The edges were soft. Along the inside of the band, so fine she had to tilt it to the light, ran a thin line of lettering, and a tiny, five-petaled flower.
She had time to see that it had been made by hand. She had time to see that it was far too small for a man's finger. She had time, in one clear cold flash, to understand what it was.
"Don't."
It was not a shout. It was worse. It was a low, flat, breaking voice that came from directly behind her, and before she had turned, a hand had closed round hers and the ring was gone.
She swung round.
Joren stood a foot away with his fist locked round the little wooden band and his face drained to the color of ash. He was breathing hard. His eyes were fixed on her with an expression she had never seen on him, not anger, not the cool hurt she had grown to know, but a raw naked terror, a feral and devastating grief. It was the face of a man who has been caught in the one place he cannot bear to be seen.
"I'm sorry," said Aveline. "I was looking for my pencil, I didn't, I did not know."
"Don't."
"I'm sorry."
"*Don't touch it.*" The words cracked. He took a step back, and another, and put his hand with the ring behind his back, as a child hides a stolen sweet. "It's not. It isn't for. You were not meant to."
"I know. I know I wasn't. I'm sorry."
"It was on the shelf. It has always been on the shelf. I had forgotten that you." He pressed his lips together. He turned his face away, so that she could see only the hard line of his jaw, and the vein pulsing in his temple. "I'd forgotten it was there."
"Joren."
"Please."
It was only one word. It was the same word he had said to her on the first morning, in the garden, with his hand raised before the bud, and she heard in it exactly what she had heard then, a man standing at the edge of a drop.
She stopped. She did not move toward him. She did not reach out. She did the one thing she knew how to do, which was to hold very still and let a wounded creature decide for itself.
"All right," she said, softly. "I won't ask."
He did not look at her.
"I won't ask. I promised, and I'll keep it. I only want you to know that I'm sorry I made you afraid. I would never knowingly do that." She drew a breath. "I will go and see about the roof. I will leave you here, and I will not touch the shelf again."
He said nothing.
She picked up her notebook from the table, and, with infinite care, crossed to the door and went out into the dripping gray morning. She closed it behind her without a sound. She stood on the step with the cold air on her face and her arms wrapped round herself and her heart hammering, and for a long time she did not move.
She had never in her life wanted so badly to go back inside.
* * *
He stood in the middle of the lodge with the ring in his fist.
It had been in his hand a long time. He did not know how long. The light in the window had moved, and the fire had burned down, and still he stood, with his arm held rigidly at his side as though the small thing in it weighed a hundredweight.
He had not forgotten it was there. That was the lie. He had told it to her, and to himself, and it had come out so smoothly that for a moment he had believed it. But he knew exactly where every object in this room had stood for six years. He knew the dust on the cup. He knew the drawer. He knew, to the quarter inch, the gap between the ledgers where a thing the size of a ring could rest.
*I wanted her to find it.*
He had not known that until now. He closed his eyes.
It was a dreadful thought. It was the sort of thought a man could not hold and go on living in his own skin. He had told himself, for a fortnight, that he was keeping her at a distance. He had stood on walls and locked doors and said *no* a hundred ways. But the ring had been on a shelf at the height of her shoulder, in a room where she would be trapped by weather, and some small, treacherous, truth-telling part of him had known precisely what it was doing.
*I wanted her to see. I wanted someone to see.*
He opened his eyes. He looked at the ring.
It was a simple thing. He had carved it himself, one winter night in the garden, with a borrowed knife and a scrap of apple wood, and it had taken him a week to get the flower right. He had meant to give it to her in spring. He had meant to put it on her finger in the orchard, among the blossoms, in the honey-and-pepper smell of May. She had never seen it. She had died in the first week of March.
He had kept it for six years, and he had never once taken it out.
Slowly, he opened his hand. The ring lay in the center of his scarred palm, light as a feather, pale as a bone. He stared at it. Then he closed his fist again, very gently, and put it in his pocket, and went out into the rain to find the woman who had asked no questions.
* * *
He found her in the little shed behind the lodge, sitting on an upturned crate, with the wet ledgers.
She had gone to the roof. She had, she said, been to look at the roof, and found it entirely intact. She had come back to the shed instead, and discovered, in a corner by the door, a stack of garden journals that had been soaked in the night through a leak in the thatch, and she had spread them out on the workbench in rows to dry. She was copying them. She was copying them by hand, onto fresh paper, page after page, with her tongue between her teeth and her sleeves rolled up and ink to the wrist.
He stood in the doorway and watched her.
She did not look up. She had not heard him. Her whole attention was fixed on the page, on the careful reproduction of a long column of figures, and her left hand was moving over the paper in small, sure, patient strokes. The shed was cold and smelled of damp straw and old rope. A single shaft of watery light fell through the roof and lay across her hair, turning it to copper.
*She is saving the records,* he thought. *She has no reason in the world to do it. They are not hers.*
"Rooke," he said.
Her pencil stopped. She did not turn. "Yes?"
"These are my mother's."
"I know." Her voice was steady. "They had her name on the cover. The ink had run, but I could read it. I thought, if they dry like this, the pages will fuse. I thought, someone should." She paused. "I'm sorry. I should have asked."
He crossed the shed. He stood beside her, looking down at the page, the small cramped hand, the brown ink, the little pencil notes in the margin in Aveline's own upright script, *smudged, probably 7th*, *illegible here*. His mother's handwriting was beautiful. It had a long, looping, elegant slant. Aveline's copy was neat, small, and perfectly accurate.
"She would have liked you," he said.
It came out thick. He had said it before. He said it again, and found that it was no longer a thing that hurt.
She looked up then. Her eyes were very clear and very tired. She did not smile. She only looked at him, and he saw her take in his face, the red-rimmed eyes, the hand in the pocket, the stiff set of the shoulders, and understand, with perfect and terrible tact, that nothing at all would be said.
"Sit with me," said Aveline, and moved over on the crate.
He sat.
They worked until the light began to fail. She copied, and he dried, and now and then he turned a page for her, or fetched a fresh bottle of ink, or held the lamp. Neither of them spoke. There was a great peace in it. The rain had stopped. Somewhere, outside, water was dripping from the eaves in a slow, hypnotic rhythm, and the evening wind was sweet and wet and smelled of earth.
At some point her head began to nod.
He did not notice at first. He was reading a faded entry, *the north bed, dressed with ash and pear-leaf, 14th Oct,* and when he looked up she was slumped against the post with her pencil still in her fingers and her lips slightly parted. She had gone to sleep sitting up.
He put down the page.
"Aveline," he said, very softly.
She did not stir.
He knelt. He took the pencil from her fingers. He took the ink-stained paper from her lap. She murmured something, a word or two, indistinct, and her head slid sideways, and came to rest against his shoulder, and stayed there.
He stopped breathing.
She was warm. She weighed almost nothing. Her hair fell across his sleeve in a soft dark fan, and he could smell the ink on her, and wet wool, and under it something faintly sweet, like crushed leaves. Her breath was slow and even. He sat with his arm held out stiff and awkward and did not dare move it. A long time passed. He had no idea how long.
At last he drew a breath, and gathered her up.
* * *
He carried her across the yard in the blue dusk, with her head tucked under his chin.
She did not wake. She muttered something into his collar and curled closer, and he felt it through his whole body, a long slow shock like a struck bell. He went carefully, as one carries a full cup. The mud sucked at his boots. Overhead the clouds had broken, and between them a single early star burned, small and clear.
He took her into the lodge. He laid her on the narrow cot, the bare one, and drew the gray blanket over her. She turned her cheek into the pillow with a little sigh. A strand of hair had fallen across her face, and he saw it stir with her breath.
He should have gone. He knew it.
He reached out instead. He did not decide to. His hand was simply moving, slowly, as a man's hand moves in a dream, and his fingers touched the strand of hair and lifted it from her cheek, and tucked it behind her ear. It was soft. It was warmer than anything he had touched in six years. His fingertip grazed the curve of her ear and the faint pulse beneath her jaw, and he felt his own heart stop, and start, and stop.
He drew back his hand as if it had been burned.
*No,* he thought. *No. You will not.*
He rose. He went to the stove, and fed it, and sat down on the floor beside it with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, and took the little wooden ring from his pocket, and held it in both hands.
* * *
She was not asleep.
She had woken at the lodge door, when the latch clicked. She had lain with her eyes closed, absolutely still, through the long slow cross of the room, through the weight of the blanket, through the touch, that single, light, impossible touch, on her hair. She had not breathed. She had thought, *If I open my eyes, it will stop.*
It had stopped anyway. He had pulled his hand away as though she were a fire. She had heard his steps retreat, and the creak of the stove door, and then a long rustling silence, and she had known, without looking, that he was sitting on the floor in the dark.
She opened her eyes by a hair.
The stove glowed. In its red light she could see him, a low dark shape against the wall, with his head bent and his hands cupped before him. He was holding something. He was turning it over and over, very slowly, with his thumbs. His shoulders had the slackness of a man who has set down a weight and is too tired to pick it up again.
He was not weeping. She had half expected it. His face, in profile, was perfectly dry and perfectly still, and that was worse. It was the face of someone who had cried so long and so often that there was nothing left to come.
She lay and watched him, and felt something in her chest that had no name.
She wanted to speak. She wanted to say, *I am awake, I saw, it's all right.* She wanted to cross the three paces of floor and kneel beside him and put her arms round his neck. She was shaking with the wanting. But he had said *please*, and she had promised, and she knew with a certainty that went down to the bone that if she moved now she would break something that could not be mended.
So she lay still, and watched, and let him have his dark.
Hours went by. The stove burned down to embers. The wind outside died to a whisper, and the dripping from the eaves slowed, and slowed, and stopped. The quiet grew vast and deep. She had almost drifted off again when she heard it, his voice, so low that it was hardly a sound, a breath of a thing.
"I know you're awake."
She did not move.
"I'm not angry." A pause. "I would not blame you."
She considered lying. She considered it for the space of a heartbeat. Then, very softly, into the dark, she said, "I'm sorry I heard."
"There was nothing to hear."
"No. I know."
He drew a long unsteady breath. She heard the faint dry click of wood against wood, as the ring turned in his fingers.
"Someday," said Aveline. "If you want to. You could tell me about it. Not now. Only, someday."
It was a long time before he answered. She lay with her eyes on the ceiling beams and counted her own pulse, and thought that perhaps he would not. The ash shifted in the stove with a faint sigh.
"Someday," said Joren.
It was barely a word. It was scarcely more than a shape in the dark. But she heard it, and she held it, and she kept it close against her chest like a small bright coal as the night went slowly gray into morning, and the long storm blew out, and, somewhere beyond the wall, in the wet black garden, the buds of the Crimson Bloom opened, one by one, a hair's breadth wider.
You've reached the end of this chapter
She had never heard a man breathe in the dark.
It was a strange thing to learn at twenty-nine. She lay on the narrow cot in the red twilight of the stove with the gray wool blanket pulled to her chin and her eyes open, and listened to the sound across the room. It was low and slow and regular, with a faint catch at the top of each inhale, like a latch just failing to lift. It rose and fell. It filled the lodge as water fills a basin. She had thought, somewhat vaguely, that she would find it intrusive. She found instead that she could not stop listening to it, and that every time the wind howled and the rain flung itself against the shutters, the quiet rhythm went on beneath, steady and unbothered, a small warm certainty in the middle of the roaring.
*Three paces,* she thought. *It is three paces. I could count them.*
She did not count them.
The storm had settled into a long, grinding, patient rage. The roof creaked. The stovepipe moaned. Every so often a gust would lean against the door with the whole weight of the valley behind it, and the latch would rattle, and she would feel the air in the room tighten, as though the lodge itself were holding its breath. Then the pressure would ease, and the breathing across the floor would resume, and she would let her own go.
She turned onto her side. The cot creaked. The breathing paused.
"You're awake," said Joren, very low.
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not asleep."
"Neither am I."
"I gathered."
She smiled into the pillow. It was ridiculous. She was lying in a warden's lodge in the middle of a hurricane, wrapped in a stranger's blanket, with a man she scarcely knew lying on a cot three paces away, and she was smiling like a schoolgirl at a midnight feast. She pressed her lips together to stop it. It did not help.
"Do you always sleep like that?" she said.
"Like what?"
"On your back. With your hands folded on your chest. Like a knight on a tomb."
A pause. Then, with great dignity: "I do not."
"You do. I can hear it."
"You can't hear a man's *posture.*"
"I can hear that you're holding very still." She rolled onto her back again, and stared up at the beams, ruddy with the light of the stove. "It's the sound of someone who has been alone for a long time. You don't turn over. You don't sprawl. You take up the least possible room."
The silence stretched. She thought she had gone too far. She heard him shift, a rustle of linen, a creak of the cot, and then, after a moment, the sound of a man slowly, deliberately, turning on his side to face her.
"You're very observant," he said.
"It's my profession."
"It is rather unnerving."
"I've been told."
"I did not mean it as a complaint."
The words hung in the dark. The stove ticked. She became acutely aware of her own pulse, of the weight of the blanket, of the faint warm smell of cedar and smoke. She did not know what to say. It was an extraordinary thing, she thought, that a man could say *I did not mean it as a complaint* in a voice so low and rough that it made her toes curl.
"What is your favorite food?" she said, abruptly.
A startled pause. "What?"
"It's a perfectly ordinary question. I should like to know. I've eaten your turnip soup, and I feel I ought to know whether it was a cry for help."
He laughed. It was a short, soft, breathy sound, barely above a whisper, and it went through her like warm wine. "Honey cake," he said. "Odalie's. The dark kind. With walnuts."
"Mine's a lemon tart."
"You hardly seem like a lemon tart."
"What do I seem like?"
"I don't," he said, slowly, "know."
It was the most honest thing anyone had said to her in years. She lay quite still.
They talked until the stove burned low. Not of anything that mattered. She told him about the Academy canteen, where the tea was gray and the buns were petrified, and a certain professor of botany who kept a tame hedgehog in his desk drawer. He told her that the valley's river had a name, the Sennet, which meant *the one that listens*, and that as a boy he had believed it could hear him if he whispered on the bank. She told him that she had never learned to swim. He told her that the apple orchard on the eastern slope smelled, in May, of honey and pepper, and that she must see it. She said, drowsily, that she would like to. He said nothing. But she heard him breathe in, once, slowly, and out, and she thought that something in the dark had shifted.
She fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. She did not know it. She only knew, in the last blurred moment, that his voice was still going, low and quiet, saying something about the way the mist came up from the river in the mornings, and that she did not want it to stop.
* * *
In the morning, the storm had broken, and the lodge smelled of damp wool and woodsmoke and strong tea.
She woke to a thin, watery light, and a rhythmic knocking, and the sound of a kettle singing. She lay in the cot a moment without moving, bewildered by the beams, by the blanket, by the faint, fading ache in her shoulder from the cold. Then it all came back in a rush, and she sat up so fast that the room swung.
"Careful," said Joren.
He was at the stove, with his back to her, wearing yesterday's shirt, now dry and badly creased. He had rolled the sleeves to the elbow. He was scraping something into a pan with a wooden spoon, and the air was thick with the smell of porridge. His hair stood up on one side. There was a pillow crease along his cheek.
She had, she realized, been staring at it for some time.
"Good morning," she said.
"Mm."
"You have a, there's a mark. On your face."
His hand went to it. He rubbed it with the heel of his palm, scowling, and she watched the color climb his neck. It was, she thought, quite possibly the most endearing thing she had ever seen.
"There's tea," he said, to the porridge.
There was. It stood on the table in a heavy blue-glazed pot, steaming. Beside it stood two cups. She poured, and tasted, and nearly choked.
It was black. It was bitter. It was so strong that the spoon would have stood in it. She put her cup down, very carefully, and looked at the second cup, and then at the man at the stove.
"Joren."
"Yes?"
"Do you always make it like this?"
"Like what?"
"Like tar."
"It is the proper strength."
"It is the strength of an ox." She pushed the pot an inch away. "I can't drink that. You've been giving me a milder blend all week, haven't you?"
His back stiffened. He turned the spoon in the pan. "I might have."
"You have. You've been watering it down for me."
"I did not water it."
"You *diluted* it. You made a second pot."
"I made two pots," he said stiffly, "because the first was too strong for a person with a sensible stomach, and I did not wish to listen to you grumble about it."
She stared at him. He did not turn round. The tips of his ears had gone scarlet. A long, slow, helpless delight welled up in her, so fierce that she had to press her knuckles to her mouth.
"Every morning," she said, through her fingers.
"It's only tea."
"You have been brewing me a separate pot of tea for nine days, and you never said a word."
"It would have been," said Joren, to the stove, "a great deal of fuss."
She laughed. She could not help it. She laughed until her eyes watered and her ribs hurt, with her hand pressed against her chest, and he stood rigid at the stove and endured it, and from the way his shoulders shook she knew that he was not far behind her.
* * *
They fell into it without discussion.
By midmorning the rain had slackened to a drizzle, and it was clear that the lane would not be passable for a day at least. The ford was under four feet of water. A message had come up from the village by way of Pip, who had waded the shallows with his boots strung round his neck and shouted the news across the flooded lane from the safety of the far bank. *Mum says to say you're to stay put, and the baker's lost a hen, and old Hale's roof's come off, but it's all right, nobody's hurt.* They had waved. He had waved back, and fled.
So they stayed. And the lodge, with its two cots and its single stove and its low smoky ceiling, began to take on a shape she had never expected.
She noticed the small things. That he folded his blanket in four precise squares, corners aligned, like a soldier. That she did not. That he put his boots by the door, toes out, and she kicked hers beneath the cot. That he hung his coat on the same nail every time, and always touched it, lightly, as he walked past. That he read the ledgers at the table in the afternoon with his lips moving very slightly, like a child, and was ashamed of it, and stopped whenever she looked up. That he kept the stove at a precise, steady heat, and fed it twice an hour, and never needed to be reminded.
She noticed, too, that he was noticing her.
It was in the way his eyes went to her when she crossed the room. In the way he moved the ink pot closer to her side of the table without remark. In the way he brought her a second blanket when she shivered, and a cushion for her back, and set a cup of the weak tea at her elbow just before she looked for it. He never touched her. He did not need to. He had made, she realized, a kind of invisible architecture around her, a framework of small provisions and anticipated needs, and she moved through it as through a warm room.
*I am being looked after,* she thought, with a kind of wonder. *I haven't been looked after since I was a child.*
It frightened her a little. It frightened her more that she did not want to stop.
* * *
At noon she was hunting for her pencil, and found the ring.
She had not been looking for it. She had been standing on tiptoe at the shelf above the table, running her fingers along the row of ledgers, searching for the stub she was certain she had left there. It was a dim corner. She patted blindly at a gap between two volumes, and her hand closed on something small and smooth and round.
She drew it out.
It lay in her palm, a small, plain, delicate thing, no larger than the first joint of her thumb. It was carved of pale wood, apple, she thought, or pear, rubbed to a satin finish by long handling. The edges were soft. Along the inside of the band, so fine she had to tilt it to the light, ran a thin line of lettering, and a tiny, five-petaled flower.
She had time to see that it had been made by hand. She had time to see that it was far too small for a man's finger. She had time, in one clear cold flash, to understand what it was.
"Don't."
It was not a shout. It was worse. It was a low, flat, breaking voice that came from directly behind her, and before she had turned, a hand had closed round hers and the ring was gone.
She swung round.
Joren stood a foot away with his fist locked round the little wooden band and his face drained to the color of ash. He was breathing hard. His eyes were fixed on her with an expression she had never seen on him, not anger, not the cool hurt she had grown to know, but a raw naked terror, a feral and devastating grief. It was the face of a man who has been caught in the one place he cannot bear to be seen.
"I'm sorry," said Aveline. "I was looking for my pencil, I didn't, I did not know."
"Don't."
"I'm sorry."
"*Don't touch it.*" The words cracked. He took a step back, and another, and put his hand with the ring behind his back, as a child hides a stolen sweet. "It's not. It isn't for. You were not meant to."
"I know. I know I wasn't. I'm sorry."
"It was on the shelf. It has always been on the shelf. I had forgotten that you." He pressed his lips together. He turned his face away, so that she could see only the hard line of his jaw, and the vein pulsing in his temple. "I'd forgotten it was there."
"Joren."
"Please."
It was only one word. It was the same word he had said to her on the first morning, in the garden, with his hand raised before the bud, and she heard in it exactly what she had heard then, a man standing at the edge of a drop.
She stopped. She did not move toward him. She did not reach out. She did the one thing she knew how to do, which was to hold very still and let a wounded creature decide for itself.
"All right," she said, softly. "I won't ask."
He did not look at her.
"I won't ask. I promised, and I'll keep it. I only want you to know that I'm sorry I made you afraid. I would never knowingly do that." She drew a breath. "I will go and see about the roof. I will leave you here, and I will not touch the shelf again."
He said nothing.
She picked up her notebook from the table, and, with infinite care, crossed to the door and went out into the dripping gray morning. She closed it behind her without a sound. She stood on the step with the cold air on her face and her arms wrapped round herself and her heart hammering, and for a long time she did not move.
She had never in her life wanted so badly to go back inside.
* * *
He stood in the middle of the lodge with the ring in his fist.
It had been in his hand a long time. He did not know how long. The light in the window had moved, and the fire had burned down, and still he stood, with his arm held rigidly at his side as though the small thing in it weighed a hundredweight.
He had not forgotten it was there. That was the lie. He had told it to her, and to himself, and it had come out so smoothly that for a moment he had believed it. But he knew exactly where every object in this room had stood for six years. He knew the dust on the cup. He knew the drawer. He knew, to the quarter inch, the gap between the ledgers where a thing the size of a ring could rest.
*I wanted her to find it.*
He had not known that until now. He closed his eyes.
It was a dreadful thought. It was the sort of thought a man could not hold and go on living in his own skin. He had told himself, for a fortnight, that he was keeping her at a distance. He had stood on walls and locked doors and said *no* a hundred ways. But the ring had been on a shelf at the height of her shoulder, in a room where she would be trapped by weather, and some small, treacherous, truth-telling part of him had known precisely what it was doing.
*I wanted her to see. I wanted someone to see.*
He opened his eyes. He looked at the ring.
It was a simple thing. He had carved it himself, one winter night in the garden, with a borrowed knife and a scrap of apple wood, and it had taken him a week to get the flower right. He had meant to give it to her in spring. He had meant to put it on her finger in the orchard, among the blossoms, in the honey-and-pepper smell of May. She had never seen it. She had died in the first week of March.
He had kept it for six years, and he had never once taken it out.
Slowly, he opened his hand. The ring lay in the center of his scarred palm, light as a feather, pale as a bone. He stared at it. Then he closed his fist again, very gently, and put it in his pocket, and went out into the rain to find the woman who had asked no questions.
* * *
He found her in the little shed behind the lodge, sitting on an upturned crate, with the wet ledgers.
She had gone to the roof. She had, she said, been to look at the roof, and found it entirely intact. She had come back to the shed instead, and discovered, in a corner by the door, a stack of garden journals that had been soaked in the night through a leak in the thatch, and she had spread them out on the workbench in rows to dry. She was copying them. She was copying them by hand, onto fresh paper, page after page, with her tongue between her teeth and her sleeves rolled up and ink to the wrist.
He stood in the doorway and watched her.
She did not look up. She had not heard him. Her whole attention was fixed on the page, on the careful reproduction of a long column of figures, and her left hand was moving over the paper in small, sure, patient strokes. The shed was cold and smelled of damp straw and old rope. A single shaft of watery light fell through the roof and lay across her hair, turning it to copper.
*She is saving the records,* he thought. *She has no reason in the world to do it. They are not hers.*
"Rooke," he said.
Her pencil stopped. She did not turn. "Yes?"
"These are my mother's."
"I know." Her voice was steady. "They had her name on the cover. The ink had run, but I could read it. I thought, if they dry like this, the pages will fuse. I thought, someone should." She paused. "I'm sorry. I should have asked."
He crossed the shed. He stood beside her, looking down at the page, the small cramped hand, the brown ink, the little pencil notes in the margin in Aveline's own upright script, *smudged, probably 7th*, *illegible here*. His mother's handwriting was beautiful. It had a long, looping, elegant slant. Aveline's copy was neat, small, and perfectly accurate.
"She would have liked you," he said.
It came out thick. He had said it before. He said it again, and found that it was no longer a thing that hurt.
She looked up then. Her eyes were very clear and very tired. She did not smile. She only looked at him, and he saw her take in his face, the red-rimmed eyes, the hand in the pocket, the stiff set of the shoulders, and understand, with perfect and terrible tact, that nothing at all would be said.
"Sit with me," said Aveline, and moved over on the crate.
He sat.
They worked until the light began to fail. She copied, and he dried, and now and then he turned a page for her, or fetched a fresh bottle of ink, or held the lamp. Neither of them spoke. There was a great peace in it. The rain had stopped. Somewhere, outside, water was dripping from the eaves in a slow, hypnotic rhythm, and the evening wind was sweet and wet and smelled of earth.
At some point her head began to nod.
He did not notice at first. He was reading a faded entry, *the north bed, dressed with ash and pear-leaf, 14th Oct,* and when he looked up she was slumped against the post with her pencil still in her fingers and her lips slightly parted. She had gone to sleep sitting up.
He put down the page.
"Aveline," he said, very softly.
She did not stir.
He knelt. He took the pencil from her fingers. He took the ink-stained paper from her lap. She murmured something, a word or two, indistinct, and her head slid sideways, and came to rest against his shoulder, and stayed there.
He stopped breathing.
She was warm. She weighed almost nothing. Her hair fell across his sleeve in a soft dark fan, and he could smell the ink on her, and wet wool, and under it something faintly sweet, like crushed leaves. Her breath was slow and even. He sat with his arm held out stiff and awkward and did not dare move it. A long time passed. He had no idea how long.
At last he drew a breath, and gathered her up.
* * *
He carried her across the yard in the blue dusk, with her head tucked under his chin.
She did not wake. She muttered something into his collar and curled closer, and he felt it through his whole body, a long slow shock like a struck bell. He went carefully, as one carries a full cup. The mud sucked at his boots. Overhead the clouds had broken, and between them a single early star burned, small and clear.
He took her into the lodge. He laid her on the narrow cot, the bare one, and drew the gray blanket over her. She turned her cheek into the pillow with a little sigh. A strand of hair had fallen across her face, and he saw it stir with her breath.
He should have gone. He knew it.
He reached out instead. He did not decide to. His hand was simply moving, slowly, as a man's hand moves in a dream, and his fingers touched the strand of hair and lifted it from her cheek, and tucked it behind her ear. It was soft. It was warmer than anything he had touched in six years. His fingertip grazed the curve of her ear and the faint pulse beneath her jaw, and he felt his own heart stop, and start, and stop.
He drew back his hand as if it had been burned.
*No,* he thought. *No. You will not.*
He rose. He went to the stove, and fed it, and sat down on the floor beside it with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, and took the little wooden ring from his pocket, and held it in both hands.
* * *
She was not asleep.
She had woken at the lodge door, when the latch clicked. She had lain with her eyes closed, absolutely still, through the long slow cross of the room, through the weight of the blanket, through the touch, that single, light, impossible touch, on her hair. She had not breathed. She had thought, *If I open my eyes, it will stop.*
It had stopped anyway. He had pulled his hand away as though she were a fire. She had heard his steps retreat, and the creak of the stove door, and then a long rustling silence, and she had known, without looking, that he was sitting on the floor in the dark.
She opened her eyes by a hair.
The stove glowed. In its red light she could see him, a low dark shape against the wall, with his head bent and his hands cupped before him. He was holding something. He was turning it over and over, very slowly, with his thumbs. His shoulders had the slackness of a man who has set down a weight and is too tired to pick it up again.
He was not weeping. She had half expected it. His face, in profile, was perfectly dry and perfectly still, and that was worse. It was the face of someone who had cried so long and so often that there was nothing left to come.
She lay and watched him, and felt something in her chest that had no name.
She wanted to speak. She wanted to say, *I am awake, I saw, it's all right.* She wanted to cross the three paces of floor and kneel beside him and put her arms round his neck. She was shaking with the wanting. But he had said *please*, and she had promised, and she knew with a certainty that went down to the bone that if she moved now she would break something that could not be mended.
So she lay still, and watched, and let him have his dark.
Hours went by. The stove burned down to embers. The wind outside died to a whisper, and the dripping from the eaves slowed, and slowed, and stopped. The quiet grew vast and deep. She had almost drifted off again when she heard it, his voice, so low that it was hardly a sound, a breath of a thing.
"I know you're awake."
She did not move.
"I'm not angry." A pause. "I would not blame you."
She considered lying. She considered it for the space of a heartbeat. Then, very softly, into the dark, she said, "I'm sorry I heard."
"There was nothing to hear."
"No. I know."
He drew a long unsteady breath. She heard the faint dry click of wood against wood, as the ring turned in his fingers.
"Someday," said Aveline. "If you want to. You could tell me about it. Not now. Only, someday."
It was a long time before he answered. She lay with her eyes on the ceiling beams and counted her own pulse, and thought that perhaps he would not. The ash shifted in the stove with a faint sigh.
"Someday," said Joren.
It was barely a word. It was scarcely more than a shape in the dark. But she heard it, and she held it, and she kept it close against her chest like a small bright coal as the night went slowly gray into morning, and the long storm blew out, and, somewhere beyond the wall, in the wet black garden, the buds of the Crimson Bloom opened, one by one, a hair's breadth wider.
You've reached the end of this chapter