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“Together,” he said.

“You will come and find me. When you are frightened.”

“I will come and find you.”

“Even if I am in a greenhouse.”

“Especially then.”

She laughed, unsteady but audible. Tristan let his shoulders drop for the first time since he arrived.

“Say it again,” she said.

He opened his arms. “I love you.”

She smiled through her tears and stepped the last inch into his arms.

He drew her against him in the middle of her mother’s morning room, his dusty coat brushing her gown, the door still open. When she lifted her face, he kissed her, tasting the salt on her cheeks. The kiss lasted until her hands eased against his ribs. When it ended, neither of them stepped away.

From the adjoining room came a discreet cough. Then the countess’s chair scraped, rather loudly, and her footsteps went out by the other door.

Lydia laughed against his chest. “I think Mama has decided you may stay to dinner.”

“I am not fit to sit at her table.”

“No,” said Lydia, tipping her face up to his. “You are filthy. You smell of horse. You have not shaved.” She put her hand against his rough cheek. “I have never been so glad to see anyone in my life.”

They went home to Ashcombe two days later. The wooden horse lay wrapped in its shawl on the carriage seat between them, and Lydia kept her hand in his the whole way.

The morning after they arrived, they rode to the lodge together.

The night before, he had asked her to help him decide which of Eleanor’s belongings to bring back to the house, which to give away, and which to keep in storage. She had said yes, then asked whether he was certain he wanted to begin so soon, and he had said he had waited five years already, and she had kissed him.

Pruitt had lit a fire in the main room and opened the shutters. Light streamed through the little window in the back room under the eaves. Tristan pulled the dust sheet from the boxes, and they knelt together on the bare boards.

He lifted out the gloves first and gave them to her. Lydia turned the mended finger toward the window.

“She used gray thread,” she said. “On white kid.”

“She said nobody would see it under candlelight.”

“Everybody would see it under candlelight.” Lydia smiled. “I think I should have liked her.”

“She would have argued with you about leaves.”

“Then I should have liked her even more.”

They went through the first box together: ribbons, combs, a little silver thimble, a sewing case full of half-finished work, pieces of jewelry to keep for whoever might one day want them. There were letters, tied in bundles. Lydia put those into his hands without looking at them, and he understood that she knew where to hold back, and loved her for it.

The second box held gowns, pelisses and shawls, carefully folded, smelling faintly of lavender and cedar.

“These are good,” Lydia said quietly, smoothing a sleeve. “The silk is still sound. Women in the village would be glad of them. Mrs. Hale’s eldest girl is nearly grown. And the curate’s wife has three daughters and not a penny.”

He waited for it to hurt, and it did, a little. Less than he had feared.

“Yes,” he said. “Give them to people who will wear them. She would have hated them shut in a box.”

They made three piles on the bare floor. One to keep. One to give away. One to pack again properly in boxes labeled in Lydia’s small square hand and store at the house where they could easily be found. The lace collar from the wedding went into the third. The prayer book went into the first. The drawing of the horse, with its laughing question in Eleanor’s hand, Tristan put inside his coat.