She produced the small low laugh that had been disordering him since January.
He kept his face angled toward the path. He did not permit the sound into his mouth as a smile. He permitted no alteration in his pace. He corrected for it. He would not produce another sentence of that kind until he had himself in hand.
Theywentalongthepath behind the lower wall.
The mere was visible now through the gaps in the orchard trunks—grey under the pale sky, the western reeds lifted in a wind that barely moved at their level. He did not mention the water. It was her walk to it, not his leading of her.
She took her hand from his arm to reset the crutch where the path dipped.
He missed the contact at once. He kept his arm at the same angle, because she would need it again in three steps, and held the silence the situation required. After three steps she did take it up again.
“Have you,” she said, “been avoiding the parlour these last two days?”
He had not expected the question. She delivered it in the tone of a woman remarking on a stair that needed repair.
“I have had correspondence.”
“Of course. I asked yesterday. You told me nothing disagreeable was in it. I am forming a theory that the wordcorrespondencein this household is a kind of polite fiction, likeindisposedornot at home to callers. One uses it when one means to be left alone.”
“I was not avoiding the parlour.”
“Then you were merely not crossing the passage to it, which is a different thing.”
“It is a different thing.”
“I am satisfied with the distinction. I mention it only because Mrs Reeves has begun to talk about you in the voice she reserves for those she expects to have to feed against their will. I think she means to corner you at supper and produce a pudding.”
“I have been cornered before.”
“I trust you survived.”
“At a cost to dignity I am not at liberty to describe.”
She laughed again. He did not answer that sentence. There would have been no safe answer. He let her laugh stand on the cold air between them and walked on. The path rounded the last of the orchard trunks and the mere opened before them in a wide grey sheet that ran from their feet almost to the far reeds without interruption.
She stopped.
The water lay under the pale sky at whatever the tint of mid-morning mere water in late February was not black, not stained, not actively bright. A shade lighter than he had expected after Hadley’s report of last week. A shade lighter than he had expected after his own view of it from the study window this morning.
A single moorhen worked the reeds at the far side and was silent.
Elizabeth looked at the water a long while. He did not speak. He held his arm at the angle she needed for balance. She stood on the crutch and on the sound foot and took her own time. “Help me down.”
He looked at her. Her eyes were on the water.
“I should like to touch it,” she said. “Only my hand. If you will keep me upright.”
He did not ask her why. He did not permit himself to ask her why. He put his arm under hers more firmly and braced his feet on the bank, and she leaned on him to the full of his offered support for the first time that morning, and lowered herself by careful degrees until she was kneeling on the edge of the bank with the crutch laid in the frosted grass behind her and his arm across her back and under the shoulder to hold her where she was.
She pulled off her left glove with her teeth.
She reached over the edge and put two fingers into the water.
He was watching the water because he could not safely watch her face. The water was at her fingertips, and then the water was not the same water at her fingertips. The stained dark that had lain across the shallows below the reeds withdrew from the point of her contact—did not boil, did not move in any way the eye could call movement, simply wasno longer there in a small clear circle around her hand. He could see the pebbles of the bottom under her fingers. He could not see the pebbles a foot to either side.
She drew in a sharp small breath.
She took her hand out of the water.
