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I have thought about nothing else all day. I thought about it over a dead woman with my hands on her, which is not something I have ever done, and I am not sorry.

Malo takes the horse at the gate and says, “Madam is up, sir.”

“I know.”

Inside, she is at the long table with a candle and a bit of chalk and a drawing of my gate bell on the wood, showing the strap and the stock and what she says is a crime against the crown. She looks up when I come in and does not look away, and I stand in my own doorway and let her look.

“You’re late,” she says.

“Lannoz.”

“Is that a person or a place?”

“A place. Four houses. A woman died there on Sunday.”

“People die. That’s your trade.” She looks at me properly. “You’ve got a face on you. Is something wrong with this one?”

“Yes.”

She puts the chalk down. “The old man in Trevern. The one you told me about from the ladder, the one still alive. Is this the same thing?”

“Yes.”

“Is he still alive?”

“No. Guillou died on Saturday.”

“Saturday.” She looks at the chalk. “You didn’t say.”

“No. I should have.”

“Are you any closer to knowing what it is?”

A week ago I would have given her half an answer. I give her all of it, standing at the end of my own table with the fen still on my boots.

“I know what kind of house it goes to. A house that has lost somebody and is still waiting for them. It comes to the door as the one they lost. The Guillou daughter made it tea for five weeks and thought it was her brother, nine years drowned. The woman at Lannoz let in her mother, nineteen years in the ground, twice a week, and was glad every time.

“It never met either of them. It sits in the kitchen first as a stranger, a pedlar, a man about a debt, and it gets told who the house is missing, and then it comes back wearing them.”

She has gone very still.

I have seen her still before. On the block, with two hundred people watching, when she locked her knees. It is not like that. The color has gone out of her face from the top down, and her hand has gone into her apron pocket.

“Enora.”

She takes out a letter, folded small and gone soft at the folds, and puts it on the wood between us, on top of the chalk drawing of my bell.

“Read it,” she says.

I read it. A woman’s hand, large and uneven.

Corentin is not worse in himself, but he is thinner, and he sleeps most of the day now. He is cheerful, which is the strange thing. He says he has had good company in the evenings. He told me on Sunday that you had been by.

“I was hanging a tapestry in your hall,” she says. Her voice is perfectly level and her hands are not. “That Sunday. I was up a ladder in your hall and he told Katell I sat with him and talked about the bells.”

I read it again.

“He sleeps all day,” she says. “He says the sleep is restful. He’s cheerful, which he has never been in his life. He has company in the evenings. And the physician doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, no fever, no failing organs the physician can find, and I have read that note until it’s soft and said it out loud like a joke about a useless doctor.” She stops. “Say it. You’ve got that face again.”