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Riwal drops the reins. He crosses the shop floor, which takes him three strides, and picks me up off the flags.

“I love you,” he says, against my ear. It stays where he puts it, as his voice always has. It does not carry past me, and it does not need to.

From the bench Corentin says, “We heard him, girl. Let him go, the man’s got a job to do.”

RIWAL

It has been a week, and I have carried three people in it.

I sleep now. A few hours, at night, in a bed, with the shutters open so that I will hear the bell. Malo has noticed. Malo has not mentioned it, which is how I know he has noticed.

On the Monday Malo comes up to the study and says, “Madam is on the causeway, sir. In a cart. With the bell-founder.”

I am at the gate before the cart has stopped, which I have never done for anything.

Corentin is in the back on a bed of straw, with a strap of seasoned oak across his knees and an opinion of the road, which he gives me before he gives me good day. He is thin. He is sixty-one. He is here, four miles into the fen in a borrowed cart, and he looks up at the bell over my gate before he looks at my house.

“Iron strap,” he says. “She wasn’t exaggerating.”

“She never is,” I say.

Enora gets down without waiting for a hand. Malo takes the bag out of the cart.

“Your room is made up, madam,” Malo says. “I lit the fire when I saw the cart on the causeway.”

“Thank you, Malo.”

She goes up to her room, and when I join her she has the mask in her hands, face down, with a fortnight’s dust on it.

I follow her along the corridor to the linen press and say nothing. She opens the press and kneels, and puts the mask at the bottom, behind the white sheets Malo changes every spring for the dead this house has never had. Then she shuts the press and stays there, kneeling, with her hand flat on the door.

She gets up and looks at me.

“I thought about burning it,” Enora says. “In the kitchen, the morning we left. I didn’t. I’m not pretending the fortnight it belongs to didn’t happen. It did, and I was in on it. It can stay with the dead, where it came from, and if I ever want to look at it, I know where it is.” She looks at the shut press. “Unless you want it burned?”

“No,” I say. “I wore it to a ball, and a woman in a dead woman’s dress told me the hall was all roof and no belly. I do not want that burned.”

In her room she shuts the door and starts on my coat.

“Corentin,” I say.

“Is at your woodpile with Malo, being told about the causeway. I asked Malo to take the long route.”

“You planned this.”

“For most of the journey. Hold still. You’ve acquired too many buttons.”

I am not still. I find the fastening at the back of her dress, and between us we get two things open and one sleeve caught, and she laughs into my mouth while I work out which hand belongs where. The dress goes on the chair. My coat misses it. Neither of us corrects that.

She puts me against the headboard and gets onto the bed facing me, and settles astride my thighs, because she can get at me that way, and says so.

I have had her in the dark and I have had her by two lamps. Now the fen light comes in flat across the bed and there is nothing on her at all. I look. She lets me. She has never once minded being looked at, and I have spent three weeks finding that out.

“That’s better,” she says. “I can get at you.”

She kisses me as though I have been keeping my mouth somewhere unreasonable, and I have; there has been a week of fen between us. Her hands come down my chest. Mine come up her back and draw her against me, and I am hard against her belly before either of us says a word about it, and she knows, and takes her time.

Her mouth goes to my throat. I let my head go back against the wood. Her fingers find the seam and lie along it, flat, and stay.