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Amelia took both her hands. “Lydia. Listen to me. I nearly left Sebastian once. Did he tell Tristan that? I packed a trunk.” She held on tightly. “You are not mad. You are not unreasonable. Whatever you decide, you are right to want what you want.”

They left without the chest. Lydia stood on the steps for Sebastian’s careful farewell. He held her hand a moment longer than he needed to, and seemed about to say something, and did not. She was grateful. She could not have borne a prediction.

After the carriage had gone, she went back to the south parlor and sat on the window seat beside the chest while the light moved across the floor.

She dined alone. Tristan sent no word from the lodge. She stayed long enough to finish the meal instead of fleeing at the first silence, thanked Whitmore, and went upstairs.

His shirts hung in her wardrobe. His book lay on the table on his side of the bed. She undressed without ringing for Mary and lay down in the dark. For a long while no tears came. When they did, she pressed the pillow to her mouth so no one would hear. I should never have married you. The words returned again and again. Beneath them came I love you, hurled at her as if it were the worst thing he had to say. She could not tell which one he had meant. She feared he had meant both.

Near dawn she got up and lit a candle and sat at her dressing table. She studied her own face in the glass for a long time.

She loved him. She would love him tomorrow and next year; that much was settled. The question was whether she could live in a house where every conversation about the future ended with his fear closing the door, and his walking away, and her alone in a room with something that had belonged to someone else.

She could not. She had told him so. And she would not stay here and wait for him to come back from the woods and tell her, kindly, that it had been the heat of the moment, and let her go on being careful for another year.

She rang for Mary.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The hunting lodge stood at the far edge of the north woods, a low stone house with a slate roof and one chimney. His great-grandfather had built it for the October shooting parties; no one had used it since Tristan’s father died. Tristan rode the last mile at a gallop. In the yard, the horse blew hard beneath him, its neck dark with lather. Tristan stayed in the saddle a moment longer, reins trembling in his fists.

I should never have married you.

He had said it. He had looked at her standing beside that chest with her hands clasped and her face white, and said it, and walked out. He could still hear the silence behind him as he crossed the hall. He could still see her face.

The keeper came out of the stable, an old man named Pruitt who had served his father, and took the horse without a word. Tristan went in by the side door. The lodge smelled of cold ashes and damp stone and wood long shut away from the sun, and his steps echoed on the flags. He stood in the main room in his riding coat, and the anger that had driven him here still coursed through him with nowhere to go. No chest here. No parlor. No wife in the light from the window saying you do not get to decide that risk for me.

He built a fire badly and stayed on his knees on the cold stone, watching it.

She had said she loved him.

He had heard it at the time and answered it with a shout about corridors and dead children, and then he had said the same thing back to her, in fury, like a curse. I cannot risk losing another woman I love. He had told his wife he loved her for the first time while declaring that he would rather she hated him. Here, on his knees in an empty house, he heard what she had risked by saying it first, beside another woman’s chest. He heard what he had answered.

He did not eat. He sat by the fire until it burned down and the room went dark. Then he lit a candle and went upstairs.

The small back room under the eaves held a narrow bed, a washstand, and three wooden boxes beneath a dust sheet. He had known they were here. After the funeral his mother had sent Eleanor’s things from the house, when he refused to decide what to do with them, and he had allowed it and then stopped asking where anything went. The painted chest must have stayed behind with the larger furniture.

For five years he had known what lay behind this door without finding the courage to open it

He opened it now. He set the candle on the washstand and pulled the dust sheet away. A card in Mrs. Bell’s hand hung from the nearest lid: gloves, ribbons, small articles. She had listed the contents to ease his eventual task. He had left her careful work unread for five years.

His hands shook as he lifted the lid.

On top lay a pair of pale kid gloves with one finger mended in darker thread. He picked them up. He remembered the evening she mended them, by the fire at Ashcombe with her feet tucked under her, squinting at the needle. He had told her she could simply have another pair. She had asked whether a duke meant to solve every inconvenience by commissioning a new version of it, and he had laughed because he thought the answer obvious.

He sat down on the edge of the narrow bed with the gloves in his hands.

For five years, when he thought of Eleanor, he had thought of one thing. A white face on a pillow. A closed door. A physician’s hand on his arm. He had returned to that day so often that it had become the whole of her, as if she had begun and ended in that room and lived nowhere else. And here were her gloves, mended with the wrong color of thread, because she was impatient and stubborn and could never find the right silk.

She had disliked a pudding the cook thought she adored, and had eaten it every Sunday for a year to spare the woman’s feelings. She had hated his mother’s corrections and cheerfully argued back every time. He had once found her in the kitchen in her nightgown at midnight, eating a peach over the sink to keep the juice off her wrapper, juice running to her elbow, and she had laughed up at him with her mouth full. He had forgotten that. He had forgotten all of it. He had let one terrible afternoon swallow her whole.

Under the gloves, tied in a ribbon, lay a small drawing. She had made it in pencil on the back of a letter: a wooden horse, its legs comically stiff, its expression one of great dignity. Beneath it, in her quick slanting hand: And where, Your Grace, do you imagine putting this until its owner can sit up?

He stared at it.

He had bought the horse in the fourth month, absurdly proud of it, and carried it upstairs to show her, and she had laughed at him until she cried, and then drawn it and written that and left it on his pillow. He had kept the horse somewhere. He had not been able to look at it.

She had wanted that child. She had wanted it before he ever said the word heir, and gone on wanting it after she grew afraid, and when she asked him whether she would survive, she had wanted him to be afraid with her. She had never asked him to stop wanting it. And he had refused her, because he was twenty-four and could not bear it, and told her not to be foolish.