The bell above the door of Perks Pages chimed a discordant welcome, its brass throat long overdue for tuning. Steam curled from a cracked espresso machine behind the counter, and the air held the bitter perfume of over-extracted roast mingling with old paper and furniture polish. Morning light slanted through windows fogged with condensation, throwing pale gold across shelves of secondhand novels and a table cluttered with ceramic mugs.
Henrietta Whitfield was already seated.
She occupied the corner booth with the territorial certainty of a woman who had once chaired the county flower show committee. Her gloves were folded beside her teacup. Her posture could have been sketched onto a Royal Mail stamp. She wore a navy wool coat over a cream blouse buttoned to the throat, and a single strand of pearls caught the window light when she turned her head.
Callum Voss spotted her before she spotted him. He nearly turned around twice. The shop was his, technically, a cramped two-story building on a side street that tourists never found and locals forgot, its front window displaying a Waterford bibliography and a chipped bust of Tennyson. Henrietta had insisted on neutral ground. He had insisted on his own back room. They had compromised on the front, because Henrietta's definition of compromise usually involved her getting most of what she wanted.
He approached. His sneakers squeaked on the warped floorboard by the register.
"Miss Whitfield."
"Mr. Voss." She did not rise. She gestured to the seat opposite with the tip of a fountain pen. "Sit. The foam on that cappuccino will collapse by the time you finish looming."
He sat. The chair wobbled. He placed both palms flat on the table to steady himself, and also himself.
"I ordered you a flat white," she said, sliding a saucer toward him. "I assumed you'd find anything else too theatrical."
"Cheers." He wrapped his hand around the cup. It was lukewarm. Of course it was.
A folded sheet of paper rested between them, dense with Henrietta's looping cursive. She tapped the top with one gloved finger.
"Three weeks," she said.
"Three weeks," he confirmed.
"A proposal of marriage, by mutual arrangement, conducted with sufficient decorum to satisfy the trustees of Dunmore Hall and the editorial sensibilities of the Whitfield family. Beginning Monday fortnight. Culminating in a public gala on the twenty-third. The engagement will then be dissolved in a manner sufficiently convincing to satisfy the tax authorities, the society pages, and my granddaughter's frankly exhausting expectations."
He nodded. He had read her letter. He had read it three times. He still found certain clauses clinically absurd.
"Ground rules," Henrietta continued, smoothing the paper with the flat of her hand. "I have drafted a preliminary list. You will find it exhaustive. You may find it insulting. I assure you it is neither."
"I didn't say anything."
"Your eyebrows said quite enough." She turned the page toward him. "Read."
He read.
1. Hand-holding permitted in public venues where observation is probable. Duration not to exceed the duration of a photograph. 2. Light touch to the small of the back acceptable at entrances and exits, or when crossing uneven terrain. 3. No kissing above the cheek line. No kissing below the collarbone. The décolletage, as I'm sure you know, is for charity galas and the ballet. 4. Terms of endearment to be selected from the approved list appended hereto. 5. No public displays of affection during meals. The digestive process is private.
Callum set the paper down.
"There's an approved list," he said.
"There is an approved list."
"Of terms of endearment."
"Naturally. One does not simply arrive at 'darling' by accident. There is a grammar to these things. I have appended it on page 3."
He turned the page. The list was alphabetised.
"Darling, dearest, love, beloved, pet, poppet, treasure, my dear, old thing."
"Old thing?" he said.
"My late husband preferred it. It stuck." Henrietta sipped her tea. "We are not married. You may not call me 'my wife' in any circumstance. The fiction has limits."
"What about 'sweetheart'?"
"Page 3, second column. Acceptable, but only after the second public appearance."
"And 'Hen'?"
The teacup paused halfway to her mouth. Her eyes, pale grey and famously sharp, found his. He met them. He had learned, over the past six weeks of increasingly irregular correspondence, that Henrietta Whitfield respected a man who did not flinch.
"Mr. Voss," she said, "if you call me 'Hen' in public, I will break the engagement and blame you for the trustees."
"Noted."
"Cross it off."
"I'll consider it."
She set the cup down with a clatter that made the barista look up. "Mr. Voss. Callum. I am attempting to save a house that has been in my family for two hundred and forty years. I am attempting to save a family reputation that has taken rather more knocks than it deserves. And I am attempting to do this with a man who smells faintly of bookbinding glue and owns four jumpers, all of them identical."
"They're not identical. One's navy."
"The navy is a different jumper?"
"Technically."
She folded her hands. "I am doing this with you because your bookstore is also at risk. Your father's legacy. Your living. We are, if you will forgive the vulgarity, in the same boat. A leaking, rather undignified boat, but a boat. I need you to take this seriously."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The espresso machine hissed.
"I am taking it seriously," he said. "I have read the list. Twice. I have questions."
"Ask."
He pulled a folded receipt from his jacket pocket and flattened it beside her paper. He had scribbled notes during the small hours, when sleep refused to come.
"Item seven," he said. "No physical affection of any kind in private, unless witnessed by a third party approved in advance."
"Yes."
"That one I genuinely don't understand."
"Then I shall explain." She leaned forward, lowering her voice with the precision of a woman who had once whispered scandal at garden parties. "Dunmore is staffed. My granddaughter has opinions. The staff have opinions. Beatrice has photographs. If anyone photographs us in a private moment, the trustees will require a marriage. An actual one. With witnesses. And a registry office, and a church, and a caterer, and my sister-in-law's hats. I cannot survive my sister-in-law's hats twice in one decade."
"So we can never be alone."
"We can be alone. We simply cannot be alone in a way that photographs well."
"That's almost worse."
"Mr. Voss. I am seventy-one years old. I am tired. I am widowed. I am attempting to prevent my granddaughter from marrying a man whose principal qualification appears to be a jawline. I have not the energy for impropriety, even of the innocent variety. Item seven stands."
He nodded. He had expected it. He crossed nothing off.
"Item eleven," he said. "No lingering eye contact during toasts."
"People photograph toasts."
"They do."
"And if our eyes linger, they will assume feeling."
"And if our eyes don't linger, they will assume we're acting."
"They will assume we're acting whether we are acting or not." She waved a hand. "We are two people of a certain age and disposition entering into a contractual arrangement. The gossips will be sceptical regardless. We do not need to provide additional ammunition."
"Who's going to be at the toasts?"
"My family. My late husband's goddaughter, Margot, who is a solicitor and therefore emotionally constipated. Her niece, Tabitha, who is junior to her and therefore doubly so. My granddaughter Beatrice, who is the actual reason for all of this. Her intended, Arthur, who is handsome and useless and will inherit a title I do not wish to dwell upon."
"And your son?"
Henrietta's hand stilled on the teacup. It was a small thing. Callum noticed.
"My son," she said, "is in Geneva. He sends flowers on my birthday. He calls on Boxing Day. He has not set foot in Dunmore in seven years. He will not be attending the gala. We have agreed that his absence is, on balance, preferable."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It is what it is." She straightened. "Now. The timeline."
She drew a second sheet from her handbag. This one was a calendar, hand-drawn, with days blocked out in neat blue ink.
"Week one. Public outings. The parish fête. A luncheon at the County Club. Perhaps a stroll along the High Street. Small potatoes. Whetting the appetite of the local press."
"Local press being your old friend at the Courier."
"Margaret is not old. She is merely persistent. We were at school together. She owes me a favour. Several favours. I intend to collect."
"Week two?"
"Week two. London. The theatre. A charity auction. Perhaps a gallery opening. The point is visibility. The point is photographs. The point is convincing the trustees that Dunmore is not, as they suspect, on the verge of being sold to a hotel consortium."
"And week three?"
"Week three. The gala. Final performance. Public announcement. Then dissolution."
Callum looked at the calendar. He looked at his flat white. He looked at the dust motes turning in the window light.
"And after?"
"After?" She blinked. "After, Mr. Voss, we revert to our previous arrangement. You continue to sell books. I continue to not visit your shop because the carpet gives me asthma. We meet once a year, perhaps, to toast my late husband's memory and pretend we are not both relieved this is over."
"That's the plan."
"That is the plan."
He exhaled. He had not realised he had been holding his breath.
"I have one more question," he said.
"Inevitably."
"Why me?"
She regarded him. The pen tapped the table. Once. Twice.
"Because you are not trying to take anything from me," she said. "Every other man in my acquaintance wants something. The roof. The land. The name. The collection of Sèvres porcelain in the east wing. You want to keep your shop open. That is a small, honourable, and entirely manageable want."
"That's the only reason?"
"That is the primary reason." She paused. "Also, your father's bookshop once sold my late husband a first edition of Gibbon in 1962. He paid sixpence over the cover price. My husband remembered this for the rest of his life. He mentioned it in his memoirs. I have a soft spot for the place. Don't tell anyone."
"Your secret's safe."
"It had better be." She gathered her papers into a neat stack. "Now. The hand-holding."
"The what?"
"You read item one. We must rehearse."
"Rehearse?"
"We are not animals, Mr. Voss. We are not going to fumble our way through a public engagement like a pair of uncoordinated adolescents at a sixth-form disco. We will practise. Here. Now. Briefly."
"You want to practise hand-holding. In a coffee shop. At half nine in the morning."
"I want to ensure that when Margaret's photographer catches us at the fête, our hands do not look like two strangers attempting to shake with a fish."
He looked at his own hand. He looked at hers. He looked at the barista, who was very deliberately not looking at them.
"This is clinically absurd," he said.
"Yes," she agreed. "Extend your hand, please. Palm up. Fingers relaxed. Pretend you are holding a small bird you do not wish to startle."
"This is really happening."
"It is really happening. Palm up, please."
He extended his hand. She placed hers in it. The bones were light, the skin cool and paper-thin. Her grip was surprisingly firm. Her gloves smelled faintly of lavender and something older, like the lining of a church pew.
"Thumb here," she said, adjusting his. "Fingers curled, not clenched. We are walking, not arm-wrestling."
"Right."
"Now. The small of the back. Stand."
They stood. The chair wobbled. She positioned herself at his left side.
"In a moment of transition," she said, "you will place your hand here. Lightly. Indicating guidance. Indicating protection. Indicating nothing more than gentlemanly concern."
She demonstrated on him. Her palm was small and precise against his spine. He felt the warmth of it through his jumper. The navy one.
"Like that," she said.
"Like that," he confirmed.
"Now you."
He placed his hand where hers had been. The wool was softer than he expected. She smelled of lavender and something else. Something starched.
"Acceptable," she said. "Marginally."
"I'll work on it."
"You'll have to. We have nineteen days."
She gathered her gloves. She gathered her papers. She gathered, somehow, the dignity of the entire Whitfield family onto her shoulders and rose.
"Monday," she said. "The parish fête. Ten o'clock. I shall send a car."
"A car."
"We cannot arrive separately. It would defeat the purpose."
"And after the fête?"
"The County Club luncheon. Wednesday. One o'clock. Wear the navy jumper. It suits you."
"You've seen me in the navy jumper."
"I have seen the navy jumper on the hook behind your counter. I have excellent eyesight and a long memory. Wear the navy jumper."
She swept toward the door. The bell chimed behind her, just as discordant, just as overdue for tuning.
He sat back down. His flat white was cold. His hand still held the impression of her glove. He looked at the receipt where he had scribbled his questions, and found he had answered none of them.
He took a sip of the cold coffee. It tasted of nothing in particular. It tasted of three weeks, and a leaking boat, and a house two hundred and forty years old.
He set down the cup. He picked up the list of terms of endearment. He crossed out 'old thing' with a small, precise stroke of his pen.
He considered crossing out 'poppet'.
He left it.
Outside, a car door closed. Henrietta Whitfield was already halfway to Dunmore, rehearsing her lines for Margaret at the Courier, and preparing, with quiet ferocity, to save a house.
The bell above the door was still ringing.
The parish fête opened at half past nine with a clap of thunder that wasn't thunder at all, but the vicar's son dropping the trestle table legs onto the gravel car park. By ten o'clock, the green was busy. White stalls striped the lawn like the spines of books set out for inventory. The smell of frying onions drifted from the WI tent, mingling with the sweeter perfume of the rose competition and the faint, ecclesiastical mustiness of Reverend Whitfield's surplus hymnals.
Callum arrived on foot. He wore the navy jumper.
He stood at the lychgate for a moment, watching. He had never been to a fête in Dunmore. The last fête he had attended had been in his grandmother's village in Lancashire, when he was seven, and he had won a second-prize rosette for a rock he had painted to look like a sheep. He had not known then that sheep did not have blue faces. He knew now.
Henrietta's car slid up the lane at five minutes to ten. It was a vintage Alvis, dark green, polished to within an inch of its life, driven by a man in a peaked cap who moved as though the steering wheel were a church organ. It pulled up beside the lychgate with the precise whisper of expensive machinery. Callum could hear the clock inside the village hall strike ten through the open windows.
The passenger door opened. A foot appeared. A glove. A hem of dove-grey linen. Henrietta Whitfield unfolded herself from the low seat with the dignity of a monarch arriving at a coronation she had not asked for but would certainly grace.
She saw him. She saw the jumper. Something in her face softened by a fraction. Then it hardened again, because Henrietta Whitfield did not soften in public car parks, especially not when Margaret from the Courier was already visible across the green, sharpening a pencil.
"Ah," she said, crossing the gravel toward him. "There you are. You look almost presentable."
"I washed," Callum said.
"Washed and ironed. One can but dream." She reached him. She looked up. She looked him over. "Hands. Show me your hands."
He held them out, palms up, like a man offering alms.
She examined them. She turned them over. She peered at his knuckles. "Acceptable. No ink stains. No bookshop grime. Well done." She tucked her hand into his arm without waiting for him to offer it. "Now. We walk. We stop at three stalls. We are seen by Margaret. We leave before the tombola, which always descends into violence."
"Right."
"And we do not hold hands like a pair of adolescents at a youth hostel disco. We hold hands like a couple who have known each other long enough to be comfortable, and not so long that they have forgotten how to be tender."
"I see."
"You do not see. That is why we are practicing."
They began to walk. The gravel crunched under their feet. The lychgate shadow fell across them, then didn't. The sun came out, watery but determined, and lit the green in patches.
"Now," said Henrietta, releasing his arm. "Take my hand. Naturally."
He took her hand.
"Limp fish," she pronounced.
"I'm trying to be gentle."
"You are trying to be dead. I am eighty-three, not a haddock on a slab. There should be life in it. Warmth. Intent."
"I have intent."
"You have the intent of a man picking up a hot teapot he isn't sure belongs to him." She extracted her fingers. "Again. This time, close your fingers around mine. Not too much. Not the death grip of a man afraid I'll float away. Just. Holding."
He took her hand again. He closed his fingers around hers.
"Better," she said, grudgingly. "Less dead. Now walk. Don't look down. Don't look at our hands. Look at the world as though I am not even there, but also look at me as though I am the only thing that matters. Strike the balance."
"I can't do two things at once."
"You can, because you have done so for every customer who has come into your shop wanting both a first edition and a quiet sit-down. You balance rare books and company every day. Now balance me."
They walked. She was smaller than he had expected, birdlike under the linen, but there was iron in her. He could feel it through the glove. Her hand was cool and precise, her fingers narrow and dry. He held them as though holding a quill pen, lightly, near the tip.
"Don't hold my fingers like a quill," she said. "I am not a quill. I am a woman."
"Sorry."
"You are going to apologize every time I correct you?"
"Probably."
"Then I shall correct you less. There. Like that. That was almost natural." She glanced sideways at him. "You are staring at our hands."
"I was checking."
"Stop checking. Check on Monday, before we arrive. Not during." She looked forward again. "Now. Conversation. We must appear to be having it."
"What should we talk about?"
"The house," she said. "Naturally. But not about the leaking roof. About the house as though it were a character in a novel we both adore. About the proportions of the drawing room. About the way the light falls in the east gallery in October. About the roses in the south border, which are, admittedly, a disaster this year, but which we forgive because the soil is wrong and the gardener is grieving."
"You have a gardener who is grieving?"
"His wife. Last spring. He has not been the same since. One makes allowances." She paused. "What about your shop? What do you love about it?"
Callum thought. "The smell," he said. "The smell of the stockroom in winter, when the heating clicks on. Paper and dust and pipe smoke that isn't there anymore. The ghost of my father's pipe."
"Good," said Henrietta. "Use that. Say it to Margaret if she asks. Say it with feeling. Say it as though you have never said it to anyone before, and as though you would say it to me."
"I would say it to you."
"I know you would. That is why we are allies." She squeezed his hand. Just slightly. Just enough.
They passed the WI tent. Three women in pinnies looked up. One of them fanned herself with a recipe card. Henrietta inclined her head like a queen acknowledging a bow.
"Mrs Whitfield," called one of them. "And who's this, then?"
"My young man," said Henrietta, without hesitation. "Callum. He has a bookshop in the village."
"A bookshop." The woman beamed. "How lovely. How long have you two?"
"Long enough," said Henrietta. "Not so long."
They walked on. Henrietta's hand tightened in his for a moment. Not the death grip. The grip of a woman who had just said something daring and was steadying herself on the nearest solid object.
"That," she said, very quietly, "was the first time I have called anyone my young man since Arthur died. It felt strange. It felt right. It felt like a lie I am willing to tell for the sake of the house."
"For the sake of the house," Callum agreed.
"For the house. For Beatrice. For Arthur's memory. For the wallpaper in the east gallery, which I will not allow to be replaced by magnolia, as the surveyor suggested." She took a breath. "Again. I am shaking. Can you feel me shaking?"
He could. Just. A tremor through the glove, like a plucked string.
"I feel it."
"Good. Then you must hold me as though you cannot feel it, but also as though you are holding me together. Do you see?"
"I think so."
"You think so. That is not the same as knowing."
"I will know by Monday."
"You had better." She stopped walking. They had reached the rose tent. The blooms were laid out on boards in mismatched vases, each with a handwritten card. The judge's rosette, purple, sat on the largest of them, a blowsy crimson the color of a Conservative association tea.
"Look," said Henrietta, releasing his hand to bend closer. "That one. Third from the left. The white one. It has been entered in the wrong category. It is a climber. It should not be in the bedding rose section."
"Are you going to tell them?"
"Heavens, no. I shall tell Margaret, in passing. Margaret loves a small scandal. It will give her something to write that is not about us, and we shall be free to slip away to the luncheon on Wednesday unobserved." She tilted her head. "Now. The hand. Again. I want to see if you can do it without looking."
He took her hand. He closed his fingers. He did not look down.
"Better," she said. "Warmer. Still slightly too much like a man comforting a widow at a funeral, but we can work on that." She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. "We walk now. Slowly. Through the middle of the green. Past the vicar. Past Margaret. We do not stop until we reach the tea tent, and there we stop for exactly one cup, no biscuits, and we leave."
"No biscuits?"
"I am dieting. I have been dieting since I was twenty-three. It is the one constant in my life. I shall not be seen eating a digestive in public by Margaret Hastings, who once wrote that I had put on a pound at Ascot in 1987 and was never, ever, to be forgiven." She steered him forward. "Come. The vicar is waving. He is going to want to talk about the roof."
They crossed the green. The sun came and went. The WI onions sizzled. Somewhere, a child dropped a lemonade bottle and burst into tears. Henrietta walked through it all with the steadiness of a woman who had crossed many greens and would cross many more.
At the tea tent, she paused. She looked up at him. Her eyes, behind the glasses, were very clear.
"You are doing well," she said. "Better than I expected. You have a gift for listening, which is rarer than you know, and a face that does not lie, which is rarer still." She paused. "But you are holding my fingers as though you expect me to vanish."
"I don't want you to vanish."
"Then don't hold me as though I will. Hold me as though I am already gone, and you are remembering." Her voice softened. "That is how the world will read it. That is how Margaret will read it. A man holding the hand of a woman he loves, knowing she is not forever. Knowing that the house will outlast them both."
Callum looked at her. He looked at the white hair under the hat. He looked at the gloved fingers in his.
"Hold me like that," she said. "And no one will doubt us. No one will doubt that we are what we say we are. No one will doubt that I have found, at the end of my life, a reason to keep my hand in another's." She straightened. "Now. The tea. One cup. No biscuits. And then we leave, because I have done my duty and you have learned your lesson, and I should like to go home and take my shoes off before my feet swell to twice their size."
They entered the tea tent. The urn hissed. The vicar beamed. Margaret sharpened her pencil.
And Callum, who had not held anyone's hand in a very long time, held Henrietta Whitfield's as though she were already a memory he was keeping warm.
It was, he realized, the least he could do.
Henrietta paid for the tea. Callum held the saucer for her, because she had insisted on a proper cup and not a paper one, and her gloves were not designed for balancing hot porcelain across uneven ground. They left the fête at half past four. The churchyard grass had grown long under the yew trees, and the graves tilted at the angles of the very old. A sparrow landed on a headstone and considered them.
They walked, slowly, because her feet were as promised.
"I shall require new shoes," Henrietta said. "I shall require them by Tuesday. There is a shop in the high street that does a sensible brogue, if they have not closed. If they have closed, I shall require them from somewhere else, because a woman cannot campaign in slippers."
"Would you like me to look online tonight?"
"I should not dream of it. A man who buys his mistress's shoes online is a man who invites the wrong sort of rumour. I shall go to the shop. You shall accompany me, because you will have to carry the boxes. A mistress who arrives with her young man and no boxes is a mistress who is being kept in reduced circumstances, and that will not do at all."
"Yes, Mrs Whitfield."
"And the books. We should look at the books. There is a shop on the corner that I used to frequent, in the old days, when I had a father who bought me first editions for my birthday. I have not been in for years. The proprietor was a Mr Voss, an older man, with spectacles and a kind way of handling a spine."
"That was my father."
Henrietta stopped walking. Callum stopped walking with her, because his hand still remembered its duty.
"Your father," she repeated.
"Yes."
She looked at him. She looked at the low stone wall they had reached, the iron gate into the lane, the lavender that grew over it from a neighbour's garden. She looked at all of these things, and then she looked back at him.
"And you have kept the shop."
"Yes."
"With the spines."
"Yes."
"And the dust."
"Particularly with the dust."
Henrietta Whitfield, who had once dined with a prime minister and not been impressed, who had edited the Tatler's correspondence column for six years without ever once using the word "nice", who had buried a husband and a son and most of her friends and had not yet, at seventy-eight, allowed the world to see her weep, put her free hand up to her mouth and laughed.
It was a small laugh, and it was not ladylike, and she did not apologise for it.
"Well then," she said. "Well then. That settles it. We shall go to your shop, and you shall sell me something I do not need, and I shall buy it because I have always had a weakness for a man who knows his stock. Take me to your shop, Callum. Take me home."
The shop was four streets away, through the market that was closing for the day, past the bakery that had already turned its sign to CLOSED, past the chemist where a teenager was slowly and with great dignity locking the door. Callum unlocked his own door with the key he kept on a leather cord inside his jacket. The bell, as always, did not ring. He had been meaning to fix the bell for nine years.
The shop smelled, as it always did, of paper and binding glue and the particular staleness of a room that had not been opened to the air for too long. It smelled, if one were honest, of the particular staleness of a room that had not been opened to the air for too long by a man who was not yet thirty and who had not yet learned to throw things out.
"Henrietta," Callum said, "welcome to the rest of my life."
Henrietta took off her hat. She set it on the counter, carefully, the way one sets down a small and well-behaved animal. She looked at the shelves, the piles, the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall behind the till. She looked at the framed photograph of his father above the door to the back room, the one where the older Mr Voss was holding a copy of Audubon's birds and looking pleased with it and with the world.
"I have been a fool," she said. "I have been a fool, Callum, and you must forgive me, because I have spent six weeks treating you as a solution to a problem, and you are not a solution to a problem, you are a person who has lost his father and is trying to keep the lights on, and I have not once asked you how you are."
"Mrs Whitfield."
"Don't. Don't Mrs Whitfield me. I am Henrietta. I have been Henrietta since I was a girl, and I have been Mrs Whitfield for the wrong reasons for far too long. Henrietta. Please."
"Henrietta," he said. "I am not all right. But I am better than I was. And I am better than I was, in part, because I have had a problem to solve that was not my own, and that has been, if I am honest, a kind of gift."
"That is either the most generous thing anyone has ever said to me, or the most damning, and I cannot decide which."
"Both," he said. "It is both."
She walked into the shop. She trailed her gloved finger along a shelf. She came to a stop in front of a small pile of poetry chapbooks he had set out the week before and not sold.
"Sir Thomas Wyatt," she said. "Who can be called this. Who can be called a lover's hand, and so on. I should like this one. Wrap it for me, because I am not carrying a paper bag down the street, and if I am seen carrying a book in a brown paper bag I shall be recognised, and the whole fiction will be revealed."
"Yes, Henrietta."
"And Callum."
"Yes, Henrietta."
"I should like to come here on Tuesdays. I should like to come here on Tuesdays and look at what you have, and buy the things I do not need, and sit in the back room if you have a back room, and read for an hour. I should like to do this because I have not had a place to go on Tuesdays since Margaret died, and I have been filling Tuesdays with the vicar and the dentist, and both of them are better in small doses."
"I have a back room."
"Good. Then I shall come on Tuesdays."
She looked at the Wyatt. She looked at the shop. She looked at him.
"Tabitha will need to be told about the shoe shop on the high street," she said. "She will need to be told that we did not buy the shoes from a national chain. She will need to be told that we bought the shoes from the independent retailer, because the independent retailer will not, in six months' time, produce a database record of a Mrs Whitfield and a Mr Voss buying matching brogues in a size eleven and a size five. Do you take a size eleven?"
"Yes."
"Then we shall take a size eleven and a size five, and we shall not use a card, and I shall pay cash, and Tabitha will be satisfied."
"Henrietta."
"Yes."
"What are we doing?"
She picked up the Wyatt chapbook and turned it over in her hand, the way one turns over a small, well-made object one is about to commit to memory.
"We are saving two houses," she said. "We are saving a shop and an estate and a small amount of personal dignity, which is all I have left to spend. We are also, I suspect, making a friend. I have not made a friend in some time. I am out of practice. You must be patient with me if I am slow at it."
"I have time."
"Yes," she said. "You do. That is the one advantage of being young and not yet broken. You have time. Spend some of it on Tuesdays. That is all I ask."
The shop bell, which had not rung in nine years, chose that moment to ring. It rang because a sparrow had landed on the doorframe outside and the door, which did not fit properly, had shifted in the breeze, and the small brass bell that Callum had meant to fix and had not fixed had swung on its pin and given out its small, clear note.
Henrietta looked up at it.
"There," she said. "That is the first sign. That is the bell ringing on a Tuesday, for a customer who is not yet a customer but who is about to be. Wrap the book, Callum. We have a campaign to run, and I have not yet put my shoes back on, and the pavement outside is uneven, and I shall require your arm."
He wrapped the book. He tied it with the brown paper and the string, and he handed it to her, and she took it, and she set her hat back on her head at the correct angle, and she picked up her handbag, and she walked out of the shop with him, into the lane, into the evening, into the small and uncertain and entirely possible future of two people who had decided, against their better judgement, to be friends.
The bell did not ring again behind them. It had done its work.