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The door has a bolt on my side. I slide it across and back, twice, to hear that it works. Nobody in Morlac said anything about a bolt. I am so relieved that I have to sit down on the bed.

Then I am sitting on a bed in my husband’s house on my wedding night, and nobody has told me where he sleeps. I think of the table in the counting room. My face goes hot. If he knocks on that door tonight I am going to open it. I’m frightened of how much I want to, and I am not going to bolt it.

I wash my face in cold water and go down.

Supper is at the long table, at the end, the two of us with a stretch of empty oak going away into the dark. Malo brings eel and bread and a dish of samphire, and the food is good, and I say so twice.

I am nervous, so I talk. Riwal eats. He eats on purpose, one bite and then the next, and he answers when I leave him room.

I watch his hands on the knife. They are long and careful. Last night they were under my back, and I know what they do when he stops being careful. I want them on me. I am sitting at the Ankou’s table eating his eel, and that is what I am thinking about.

So I talk faster. Somewhere in the middle of the day we poured Anna, I hear myself, going and going, and I stop.

The silence comes down on the table.

I sit in it, and I am back in the shop in June, with Corentin in the chair and me not saying anything.

“Keep going,” Riwal says.

“You don’t have to be polite.”

“I am not polite.” He puts his knife down. “I have eaten at this table on my own for longer than you have been alive and it has never bothered me, and you stopped talking for four seconds and I did not like it.”

My ears go hot. I want to tell him how badly I needed him to ask me to keep talking, and I don’t.

“I didn’t like it either,” I say.

Was that you? I have it ready, the same question as this morning. He has already lied to me across one table today, and I could not stand to watch him do it twice. I pick up my bread.

“Go on about the pour,” he says. “What does the bronze do when it goes into the mold?”

So I tell him. All of it, the smoke, the color, how a dry mold sounds different under your knuckle before you ever look at it, the noise fifteen hundredweight of bronze makes going down a runner, and he listens to every word of it with his face doing nothing at all, and asks two questions, and both of them are good.

After supper I go back up. My bag is on the bed where Malo left it, and the fire has burned low.

It is going to be quiet in here at three in the morning. A bare stone room throws every small noise back hard, and between noises it gives me nothing. For fifteen years I have slept with Corentin on the other side of a wall. I miss him so badly my throat hurts.

So I do what I would do to any bad room. I take the blanket off the bed and hang it over the door, because cloth soaks up sound. It helps about a finger’s worth. I put my one good shawl over the back of the chair. Then I stand in the middle of the room and clap once, to hear what comes back.

It is marginally better.

There are nine rooms on this floor and Malo said the linen press is at the end, and a linen press in a house like this will have forty years of sheets in it.

I get three steps into the corridor with a candle before Malo comes out of the dark with a lamp, and neither of us pretends.

“The linen press, madam?”

“How did you know that?”

“You said the word linen three times at supper.” He holds the lamp up and looks at me, sixty years old and unmoved as a post. “Take the grey sheets, madam. The white ones are for laying out the dead.”

He turns to go. Two steps down the corridor he stops, with his back to me.

“Two housekeepers kept this house before me, madam. Neither stayed three months. It was the gate bell. It rings at any hour, and it is loud, and every time it rings somebody in the fen is dying. They lay awake after it. I would sooner you heard that from me tonight than found it out at three in the morning.”

“Thank you,” I say. I mean it. I am also frightened, and I keep that off my face until he has gone.

He goes.