“You are murdering the comfrey,” Violet said.
Henry sat back on his heels and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. The June sun was on the garden and on his neck and on the earth between his knees. The feel of earth between his fingers was warm and still surprised him.
“I am dividing the comfrey,” he said.
“You have been dividing it for the past half an hour. At what point does division become carnage?”
“When I say so.”
“Even the chamomile is attempting escape.”
“Perhaps because—”
Bessie appeared from the corner with two glasses of lemonade and a look of mild alarm at the state of his trousers. Henry helped his wife to her feet and led her to the iron table in the sun.
He brushed the dirt from his hands and sat across from her. The lemonade was sharp and cold.
“If anyone could see you now,” Violet said, surveying the mud on his shirt and the soil beneath his fingernails, “they would put you in an asylum.”
“I would consider that a holiday.”
“You may withdraw from the task if you wish.”
“And let my wife toil alone?” He shook his head. “I should rather you delegate the whole enterprise to servants and enjoy this glass of lemonade in a civilised manner in our drawing room.”
“No,” she said with finality.
Her hand reached across the table for his. He looked at their fingers, hers brown with soil, his no better, laced together over the iron. A year ago, he would not have believed he could be content with dirt under his nails. A year ago, he had not believed he could be content at all.
“You will thank me when you need to chase the babe through the dirt,” she said. “It will not be as foreign to you, thanks to me.”
Henry set down his glass. The word sat between them.
“Was that a hypothetical?” he said. “Do I dare hope?”
She was smiling. The wide, unguarded kind she had given him only a handful of times, each one worth more than anything in the house. “Dr Bainbridge confirmed this morning.”
He did not remember standing. The chair went over behind him, and the lemonade went with it, and the next thing he knew he had his wife in his arms and was turning her in the afternoon light. Her laughter was in his ear and against his throat. He set her down and took her face in both hands and kissed her forehead, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth. He held her against him until his breathing steadied, and even then, he did not let go.
“I love you,” he said.
She wiped his face with her thumb. “I love you too. I had no idea it was possible to be this happy.”
“Is smearing dirt over my face some sort of ritual at Thornwick?”
She laughed again. He kissed her once more and released her, and they went back to the garden because she would not be kept from it.
He wrote to Edmund that evening. He wrote it himself, in his own hand, with the door open so that he could hear Violet moving about the corridor.
Edmund,
You will wish to know. Your cousin expects a child in the new year. Violet is well. I am, for the first time in a considerable while, something that might pass for happy if you can believe it.
Bring the boy at Michaelmas. I should like to meet my nephew.
H.
He looked at the wordnephewfor some time. It was not, strictly, accurate. The boy was his cousin’s natural son. But Henry had paid for the child’s keeping for a decade under a dead man’s name, and the least he could do now was give the living one a place in the family he was trying, at last, to build.
