Page 57 of The English Wife

“My garden is this way,” Viola informed Mr. Burke and skipped off down the stairs with the obvious assumption that her retinue would follow.

Janie and Mr. Burke followed somewhat more sedately, proceeding in the proper way, Mr. Burke first, then Janie. From behind, Janie could see that his hat was well made, but worn. Aping the apparel of a gentleman, her mother would call it. Janie sometimes suspected her mother would be all in favor of sumptuary laws, statutes making it a penalty for the peasants to live like their betters. And mandatory coronets for all Van Duyvils, of course.

Mr. Burke paused at the bottom of the stairs, holding out a hand to help her alight.

She was tall for a woman. Mr. Burke was of average height. When Janie stood on the bottom step, she could look him directly in the eye. “What is it that you needed to tell me?”

Mr. Burke handed her down. “I don’t want to alarm you…”

Janie looked up at him with some annoyance. “There is nothing more alarming than being told one isn’t to be alarmed.”

Mr. Burke choked on a laugh. “And it was plain speaking you wanted, wasn’t it?” They followed after Viola to the back of the house, past furniture shrouded in sheets and the dim portraits of past Van Duyvils, painted by local artists who hadn’t quite got their perspective down, resulting in babies with bulbous heads and men with broad chests and tiny arms. “All right, then. I’ll be plain. There’s been an Englishman staying at Hudson House.”

“In the village?” She didn’t know Cold Spring well; it was dominated by the iron foundry, many of the houses company-owned, the shops on Main Street catering to the workers, not the neighboring gentry. The Van Duyvils had exercised their feudal prerogative on the countryside, not the village. “There are other Englishmen in the world.”

Some might even have perfectly legitimate reasons for visiting the village of Cold Spring.

“True.” Mr. Burke reached over Viola to help her with the latch on the door that led out onto the garden front. “He signed the register as Mr. Smith. Mr. George Smith.”

“How very inventive,” said Janie.

“Come this way,” demanded Viola, and then remembered herself. “If you please.”

This way was around the side of the house, where the old kitchen garden lay beneath a layer of frost, lavender plants bedded for winter, bare stalks tidied away. They had been practical people, Janie’s father’s family; there had never been formal gardens, save for her grandmother’s roses, bare stalks now, which had twined sweetly along the side of the house, sending their scent up to the windows above.

“If it makes you feel any better,” said Mr. Burke, pausing by the garden wall, “he’s not there now. At least, not at Hudson House.”

“That is not entirely reassuring, Mr. Burke.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.” Mr. Burke crossed the garden to her side in two brisk steps. “I didn’t think you’d thank me for false words of comfort.”

Janie glanced away, up at the bare windows of the house. Imagination presented her with the image of someone standing there, at the nursery window, watching.

Viola was playing a complicated game with Polly the duck, skipping in circles around the garden, engrossed in her own imaginings.

“I think someone might have been staying in the house, in the nursemaid’s room,” Janie said at last.

Mr. Burke looked sharply at her. “Here?”

“There were ashes in the grate, and the coverlet was rumpled. Of course,” she added quickly, “there might well be a dozen other reasons.”

“Mice?” suggested Mr. Burke. “Rodents of unusual habits?”

“I doubt a rodent, even an unusual one, could manage the coal scuttle.” Raising her eyes to his, Janie felt her shoulders relax a little. “You don’t think I’m imagining horrors out of shadows?”

“When you’re living in a nightmare, even the shadows have claws.” The sun went behind a cloud, leaving the garden bleak and cold. More prosaically, Mr. Burke added, “No, I don’t. May I?” He gestured towards the house.

Janie tucked her cold hands beneath her arms. “You were planning to anyway, weren’t you?”

Mr. Burke’s lips crooked up on one side. “Perhaps. But,” he added with mock solemnity, “I imagine it would soothe your harrowed spirits to have a bit of male company about the place. I could be persuaded to join you for lunch. Purely for altruistic purposes.”

Altruistic her foot. “There won’t be anything elaborate. Mrs. Gerritt wasn’t expecting guests.”

“And didn’t I say my motives were selfless?” Mr. Burke leaned back against the base of her grandmother’s sundial, turning time to nothing. “I’ll settle for a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and an apple beneath the bough.”

“The boughs are bare.” Something about Mr. Burke’s easy banter brought out the perverse in her. “And it’s a book of verses underneath the bough, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.”

“That, too, then,” said Mr. Burke, unperturbed. Straightening, he added, “We may want the jug of wine before the day is over.”