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“The glass is wrong,” she told him.

“So the driver informed me on the drive. He says Her Grace knows more about windows than the man who supplies them.”

“Her Grace can measure.”

“A dangerous accomplishment. Collins will stop trusting any of us.” He took the paper she held out and read the note. “You have already settled it.”

“I have asked them to settle it. I shall claim nothing more until the right panes arrive.”

“Then what may I do?”

She had prepared a defense of the room, the figures copied out twice, in case he asked why a supplier’s error had not discouraged her. He asked instead where he could help. Nothing in her preparation covered that.

Samuel pointed to a stack of old staging. “Those boards need carrying out. Some may be sound enough to mend. If Your Grace is willing.”

Tristan set his gloves on the bench. “I prefer a request before an instruction. It preserves the illusion that I am in charge.”

“Certainly, Your Grace,” Samuel said, and handed him the first board.

Lydia turned away to hide a laugh. Tristan caught the movement and raised a brow. His sleeve brushed a dusty clay pot that left a pale mark on the cloth. He considered it, then took off the coat, laid it beside the gloves, and rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow. Samuel went to fetch the barrow.

They worked for almost an hour. Lydia scraped dead leaves from the lower shelf supports while Tristan carried the boards outside and came back with a broom. She expected him to stop after the first trip and remember an account or a letter, but he stayed. He lifted the heavy staging without effort, the muscles of his forearms moving under the skin, his shirt loose at the back and clinging damply between his shoulders, and Lydia discovered that she had been scraping the same bracket for some time.

“You are staring,” he said, without turning round.

“I am not.”

“You have scraped that bracket for five minutes. It is the cleanest bracket in Hampshire.”

“I am thorough.”

He turned then, a board on his shoulder, and smiled at her slowly. She felt it all the way to her feet. “Thorough,” he said.

“Go and carry your board.”

He went, but he caught her looking again on the way back, and again after that, and the third time she threw a handful of dead leaves at him and he laughed and threatened her with the broom. She retreated behind the basin. He came round it. She backed into the corner where Samuel’s old potting bin stood, a big wooden box on legs that held years of dry earth, and put a hand on it to steady herself, and felt it shift.

“Lydia, that bin…”

Samuel had asked them to leave it alone. She remembered the request as the bottom gave way.

Dry earth spilled over them both in a roaring brown rush. It struck the basin and rose in a choking cloud, and for several seconds neither of them could see anything. When it settled, Tristan stood in front of her holding the broken frame of the bin, its bottom gone, brown from his hair to his boots.

“That,” he said, coughing, “belonged where it was.”

Lydia examined him. She examined herself. Her gown was brown. Her arms were brown. She could feel earth in her hair and down the back of her neck and inside her stays. She opened her mouth to apologize and began laughing instead, helplessly, until she had to lean against the wall.

“You have no right to laugh,” he said.

“I am laughing at the bin.”

“Then the bin may share its amusement.” He set the broken frame aside with exaggerated care, came toward her, and touched one dusty finger to the tip of her nose.

She caught his wrist, still laughing, and tried to wipe the mark away. Her hand left a worse one. The laughter went slowly out of his face, and something else came into it. His thumb moved along her jaw, through the dust. Her back was against the brick. He stood close.

Samuel came back to find them in the wreckage of his potting earth with a broom between them and no suitable remorse on either face.

“I meant to say the bottom was gone,” the gardener said.