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“No.”

If I say one more word about that letter I will cry in front of him. I go for him instead.

“Well.” I turn my cup round on the table. “You’ll be pleased. Six days of me talking at you from one end of this table to the other, and now you’ve got your quiet back.”

His hands stop on the table. That hurt him. I can see that it did. I am glad. Then I feel sick.

He does not defend himself. He sits with his hands either side of his plate, and after a while he says, “I told you on the first night that I did not like it when you stopped. I would rather you talked.”

“Then let me go and see him.”

“No.”

I am going to cry. I take my plate to the scullery myself so that he will not see my face. I go to bed at nine o’clock like a child, and I lie in the dark with my ears working and Katell’s letter under the pillow, frightened for a man a day’s ride away.

That night he comes, as agreed. I let him in and I do not say one word. Every word I have is angry, and every one of them belongs to the man who sat by the fire at noon and told me no. This is the same man. These are the same hands.

I could tell this one about the letter. He would listen. My own rule stops me: nothing about daylight.

Two nights ago I had him by the coat before the door was shut. Tonight I stand back, and he waits. When he lifts a hand to my cheek I turn my face away, and he lets the hand fall.

I catch it before it reaches his side.

“Here,” I say, and put it at my waist.

I want him. I am furious with him and I want him anyway, and I hate that. His hand closes where I have placed it and I pull him into the room, furious at the relief of having his weight against me.

When he tries to kiss my forehead I stop him. When I want his mouth I take it. He follows what I ask for and does not make me tell him that we are all right.

We are not all right. I think it while I am holding him, and afterward, when his thumb finds the place behind my ear. On another night I would have laughed. I move his hand down and keep it against my ribs. I can bear that much tenderness. I cannot bear to give him more than I have.

Afterward he dresses in the dark, and at the door he stops.

“Tell me when to come back,” he says.

In two nights. It is my rule. I have it ready.

“Tomorrow,” I say.

The word is out before I can call it back. I am angry with him and now with myself, because tomorrow is not an answer to anything I asked in daylight.

He stands there. Then the door shuts behind him, quietly, and I turn my face into the pillow and count the hours.

Much later, after he has left my room, I hear the gate. I did not hear the bell. Only the gate.

He has gone out on a night when nothing called him.

ENORA

On the tenth day I put the candle out an hour early.

He waits for my candle. I worked that out on the second night. He stands somewhere in this house until the light under my door has been out for an hour, and then he comes. So I put it out early, a full hour early, and I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark with my hands between my knees and listen to my own house.

The hall downstairs has come back halfway to being a room. Malo is asleep at the far end of the corridor and snores in threes. Out past the shutters the fen is dead quiet.

Ten days married. Twenty left.

He has come every night since I said tomorrow. No names, and nothing about daylight.