The gutter surrendered with a groan and a scatter of rust flakes. Eleanor pressed her palm flat against the sodden felt, feeling the water well up between her fingers, cold and insistent. Below her, the cottage garden held its breath, roses bowed under the downpour, the herb beds turning to shallow pools. She should not have climbed up here. Her shoes were ruined. Her mother's voice surfaced, sharp as vinegar: "You never could leave well enough alone, Eleanor. Some roofs are not meant for women." But the bucket beneath the new hole had filled twice already, and the floorboards in the corner cupboard were beginning to rise like bread.
Brutus watched from the potting she'd roof, a grey smear of judgment.
"You're a coward," she told him. "You cannot climb a ladder."
He yawned, showing teeth, and resumed his vigil.
She worked another ten minutes before the rain found the gap in her coat and ran, icy, down her spine. The ladder rungs were slick. She counted them on the way down, a habit from childhood, a way to make manageable what felt too large. One. Two. Three. The grass, when it met her feet, was shockingly cold. She carried the bucket to the path and set it beside the others, three in a row, a still life of deferred maintenance.
The kitchen, when she pushed through the door, smelled of yesterday's bread and the lavender she had hung to dry. Her cottage was not large, but it had been her refuge for three years now, ever since London had become unbearable and the archivist's position had become a cage of other people's grief. She had come here to forget. The town had a way of forgetting with you, if you let it.
She peeled off her coat and hung it on the peg by the door. The kettle, mercifully, was still warm. She poured herself tea into a cup that had been her aunt's, chipped at the rim, and stood at the window watching the rain turn the lane into a river.
It was then she noticed the man.
He was walking up the drive with a toolbox in one hand and, in the other, a waxed paper parcel that smelled, even through the closed window, of the bakery on the corner. His coat was the colour of good decisions. He walked with the unhurried certainty of someone who knew exactly where he was going, even when the path was not clear. At the gate he stopped, looked up at the cottage as if taking its measure, and then at the buckets on the path, and then, slowly, with the patience of someone who had been waiting some time, he smiled.
Eleanor set down her cup.
The doorbell rang, low and unhurried. She crossed the kitchen, noting without surprise that her hands were steady. The man on the step was taller than she remembered, which was strange, because she had only seen him once before, at the post office, and she had thought him modest of stature. He was, in fact, not. He had a face that seemed to have been weathered into kindness, the kind of face that asked nothing of you and expected nothing in return.
"Miss Vance," he said, and inclined his head.
"Mr. Ashworth," she said. "You are out early."
"I had business at the Hall," he said, and lifted the parcel slightly. "I brought you a pasty. The bakery had some left. I thought you might not have eaten."
The directness of it caught her off guard. Men, in Eleanor's experience, did not bring pasties. They brought excuses, or complaints, or, occasionally, proposals. But never pasties.
"How did you know I had not eaten?"
"Your light was on at five," he said, as if this explained everything. "And your gutter has been falling for a fortnight. I have been watching from the lane."
Eleanor felt a small, unexpected warmth at the base of her throat. "You have been watching my gutter."
"I have been watching your cottage," he corrected, gently. "Your aunt asked me to."
The words landed softly, but they landed. Eleanor felt the room tilt, slightly, the way it does when someone says something you have been waiting to hear without knowing you were waiting.
"My aunt," she said.
"Miss Eleanor," he said. "May I come in? I would rather not say this on the step. The rain is poor company."
She stepped aside. He came in, set the pasty on the table, and stood, hat in hand, looking around the kitchen as if confirming something he had long suspected. He smelled faintly of sawdust and rain, and beneath that, something warmer, perhaps the wool of his coat, perhaps the man himself.
"Your aunt," he said, "hired me two months ago to care for the grounds. I am the estate's caretaker."
The rain beat against the window. Brutus chose this moment to materialise at the back door, demanding entry with a single imperious note. Eleanor crossed to let him in, grateful for the distraction. The cat stalked past Theodore's boots, sniffed them once, and then, with the deliberateness of a small diplomat, sat on the mat and began to wash.
"I did not know," Eleanor said, turning back. "She did not mention it in her letters."
"She would not have," Theodore said. "She was a private woman, in the end. She did not want to trouble you. But the grounds were too much for her, even before the illness, and she did not want them to go to ruin. She asked me to keep the lawns mown, the hedges trimmed, the roses fed. She paid me in advance, through to the end of the year."
Eleanor sat down. She had not realised she was going to until she found herself in the chair. The pasty sat on the table between them, waxed and promising. She did not reach for it.
"Through to the end of the year," she repeated.
"She was thorough," Theodore said. "She left instructions. Everything written down, in a notebook she kept by her bed. I have it, if you want it. It is in my workshop, for safekeeping. She was particular that it should not be left in the house alone."
He said this last with a weight that Eleanor recognised. A house alone was not a thing she had ever thought to fear, but her aunt had. A house alone, in her aunt's country, was a house that waited. And her aunt had not wanted the house to wait unattended.
"The grounds," Eleanor said. "You have been mowing them."
"I have been mowing them," he confirmed. "And feeding the roses. And clearing the gutters, until yours, which I was leaving to you, because she said you would want to do that yourself."
Eleanor looked up. He met her gaze without apology.
"She said you would want to climb the ladder yourself," he said, "even if you should not."
The room was very quiet. The kettle ticked as it cooled. Brutus purred, a small, rhythmic engine.
"She knew me," Eleanor said.
"She knew you," Theodore agreed. "She spoke of you often. She said you had a good heart and too many questions, and that you would come home when you were ready, and not a moment sooner."
Eleanor pressed her hands flat against the table, feeling the grain of the wood, the faint warmth where her cup had been. She had not come home. She had come because there was an inheritance, and inheritances were not optional, and because the solicitors had written twice. But she had not, she realised, been ready. And her aunt had known.
"The grounds," she said again, and this time the word held something else. "You have been caring for them."
"Two months," Theodore said. "Every Tuesday and Friday. I have mowed the lawns and fed the roses and cleared the drives. I have not entered the house. I have not opened the windows. I have kept the gate mended and the path clear. I have done what she asked."
Eleanor thought of the estate she had driven past on her way in, the lawns she had glanced at without seeing, the hedges she had noticed were tidier than she remembered. She had thought the town had changed. She had not thought that change had a name.
"Why did you not tell me sooner?" she asked. "When I arrived. You could have come to the door."
"I could have," Theodore agreed. "But you had only just arrived. You had not yet had your tea. And I thought, if I came to the door too soon, you might send me away, and then I would not have been able to do the work she had asked me to do. And she had asked me very nicely."
He said this last with the faintest smile, the kind of smile that admits a small vanity and does not apologise for it. Eleanor felt, against her will, the corner of her own mouth lift.
"You are a stubborn man, Mr. Ashworth."
"I am a patient man, Miss Vance. There is a difference."
She looked at him then, properly, as she had not allowed herself to do at the post office. He was perhaps sixty, or near it. His hands were the hands of someone who worked with wood, broad across the palm, the knuckles swollen in the way that spoke of years at the bench. His eyes were the colour of the sea on a cloudy day, and they held, she noticed, a steadiness she had not seen in a man's face in a long time. He did not look at her as if she were a question to be answered. He looked at her as if she were a person who had arrived, tired, from somewhere far away, and needed only to be allowed to set down her bag.
"The pasty is getting cold," he said.
Eleanor looked at the pasty, and then at him, and then at the cat, who had begun, with great deliberation, to wash his face.
"Will you have tea, Mr. Ashworth?"
"I will, if you will call me Theodore."
"Will you have tea, Theodore?"
"I will."
She rose to put the kettle on, and as she passed him, he said, quietly, so quietly she almost missed it: "She would have been glad, you know. That you came."
Eleanor did not answer. She set the kettle on the hob, and the gas caught with a small blue flame, and the kitchen filled, slowly, with the sound of water beginning to warm.
The kettle sang. Eleanor reached past Theodore for the mugs, the one with the chip on the rim and the one without a chip that she had brought from London, wrapped in newspaper, for reasons she could no longer quite recall. She set them on the counter, and the small domesticity of the gesture, the two mugs side by side, the cat washing, the man at her table, was so far from the life she had expected to be living that she had to stand very still for a moment and simply breathe.
"Milk?" she asked.
"Please."
She poured. She carried the mugs to the table. She sat. And then, because the silence had become the sort of silence that required filling, she said, "Tell me about the heating."
Theodore took a mouthful of tea, considered it, swallowed. "There isn't any."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Not working central heating. There hasn't been for some years. Mrs. Penhaligon used a paraffin heater in the parlour and an electric blanket in the bedroom and called the rest of it character."
"Character," Eleanor repeated, and the word came out flat.
"She was a woman of decided opinions." Theodore turned the mug slowly in his hands. "The pipes run under the floorboards, and they're sound, but the boiler itself is a dead thing. Condemned, the man said, when last he looked at it. Past praying for, was his phrase."
"And the roof?"
A pause. "The east wing has a leak. Has had one for some years, by all accounts. Mrs. Penhaligon put a bucket under it and called it a feature."
"A feature."
"That's what she told the surveyor who came to value it, I am told. He did not appear convinced."
Eleanor set her mug down. The china clicked against the wood with a small, precise sound. "Theodore, I have paid, with my own money, for a house with no working heating and a roof that leaks in the east wing. You will forgive me if I find this less than charming."
"You haven't paid for it yet. The paperwork goes through at the end of the week. There is still time to withdraw."
She looked at him. He was not smiling, but there was something at the corner of his mouth that suggested he might have been, once, recently. "You are enjoying this."
"I am enjoying your tea. I have not yet formed an opinion on the house."
"You formed it when you walked in."
"I formed an opinion on Mrs. Penhaligon when I walked in. The house is a separate matter."
Brutus, who had finished washing his face, lifted his head and regarded Theodore with an expression of profound suspicion. Then, with the slow deliberation of a creature who has decided that the current situation is acceptable but not ideal, he rose, stretched until his back formed a low arch, and padded across the floor. He did not go to Theodore. He went to the armchair by the hearth, which was the only armchair in the room that looked as though it had been sat in by a person who weighed more than a cat, and he jumped onto it, turned three times, and settled into the centre cushion with the air of a magistrate taking the bench.
"There," Theodore said. "You see."
"I see a cat."
"You see a feature."
Eleanor looked at the cat. The cat looked at Eleanor. The cat blinked, slowly, with the insolent patience of a creature who has never once doubted his welcome anywhere. She had been told, by the woman at the estate agent's, that the cat came with the house. She had been told this as though it were an incidental detail, a minor furnishing, like the curtains or the brass door knocker. She had not, at the time, understood what it meant.
"Brutus," she said.
The cat's ears pricked, fractionally.
"You cannot have the chair."
The cat settled more deeply into the chair.
"I have not yet sat in that chair since I arrived, and I intend to."
The cat closed his eyes.
Theodore made a noise that might, under duress, have been classified as laughter. "He has had that chair for nine years. He will not be moved by argument. He may be moved by fish."
"There is no fish."
"Then he will not be moved."
Eleanor sat back in her own chair, which was wooden, and upright, and entirely without comfort, and regarded the cat with the expression of a woman who has begun to suspect she has been outmanoeuvred by a small orange mammal.
"Tell me," she said, "about the leak."
"It is in the east wing. Over what was, in Mrs. Penhaligon's day, the morning room. There is a stain on the ceiling that has the shape, if you squint, of the Italian lakes."
"I am not squinting."
"No. You are not. The surveyor said it would want a new section of flashing and a few tiles replaced. Not a small job, but not a ruinous one. Mrs. Penhaligon had a quote, done some years ago, that I can give you the name of the man for, if you wish."
"I wish."
He nodded. He took another mouthful of tea. Outside, the rain had begun again, a soft, persistent sound against the windows, and the kitchen light, which was the yellow light of an old bulb behind a shade that had gone slightly brown with age, made the room feel smaller and warmer than it was.
"The east wing also has a small fireplace," Theodore went on, "that draws well, by all accounts. The west wing has two fireplaces. The hall has none. Mrs. Penhaligon used to say the hall was cold on principle."
"On principle."
"She held that a hall should be a passage, not a parlour. She did not hold with the modern fashion for heated hallways."
"And the kitchen?"
"The kitchen has the Rayburn, which works, and which she used for cooking and for heating the room immediately around it, and that was enough for her. She was a woman of simple needs in the matter of warmth."
Eleanor looked at the Rayburn, which squatted against the far wall with the resigned solidity of an appliance that has been asked to do more than it was designed for and has done it without complaint. "The Rayburn works?"
"The Rayburn works. It is old, and it has opinions, but it works. You will need to feed it before bed, and again first thing, and if you let it go out entirely you will regret it for a week."
"I see."
"There is also," Theodore added, "a cat."
"There is also a cat."
"Brutus will require feeding twice a day, at the same times, and he will require the armchair. He will require, also, that you do not move the armchair."
"I had not intended to move the armchair."
"He will require that you do not intend to move the armchair. He is a cat of considerable sensitivity on this point."
Eleanor looked at Brutus. Brutus, with his eyes still closed, appeared to be smiling, in the way that cats smile, which is to say that he appeared to be slightly more at ease than any creature had a right to be. His paws were tucked under him. His tail curled once around his flank. The chair contained him entirely, and he contained the chair entirely, and between them they had the air of a single small sovereignty.
"He is, I take it," Eleanor said carefully, "not for rehoming."
"He is not for rehoming. He is for sitting in. He has been sitting in that chair since Mrs. Penhaligon took him in from the lane, nine years ago, and he will sit in it after we are all gone, if the chair holds."
"The chair," Eleanor said, "appears to be holding him."
"The chair," Theodore agreed, "is built of sterner stuff than either of us."
He finished his tea. He set the mug down. He did not, Eleanor noticed, look at his watch, or shift as though he had somewhere to be, or make any of the small restless movements that men make when they have stayed as long as is polite and are beginning to calculate the length of the drive home. He simply sat, and looked at the rain on the window, and waited, in the patient way of a man who has nowhere in particular to be and no one in particular waiting for him, for her to speak again.
She did not speak again, for a long moment. The rain tapped. The Rayburn ticked. The cat breathed.
"There is a leak," she said at last, "in the east wing."
"Yes."
"And no working central heating."
"No."
"And a cat in the only armchair."
"Yes."
She looked at him. "And you are telling me this because you think I should not buy the house."
"I am telling you this because you asked. And because Mrs. Penhaligon, who was a friend of mine, and a good woman, asked me to. She asked me to make sure that whoever came after her understood what they were taking on. She did not want the house to go to someone who would be cross with it."
"Cross with it."
"She felt the house had been crossed with enough."
Eleanor turned her mug in her hands. The china was warm. The kitchen was warm, or warm enough, for the Rayburn was doing what it could, and the rain outside made the warmth feel more particular, more chosen. She thought of the surveyor, and the figure she had not yet been told, and the woman in London who had sent the papers, and the rooms she had not yet walked through, and the leak in the east wing that she would have to look at, and the boiler she would have to replace, and the cat who would require fish, and the chair she would not be permitted to move.
"She sounds," Eleanor said, "as though she would have been difficult to live with."
"She was," Theodore said. "She was very difficult. And I miss her every day."
The words were said simply, without ceremony, and Eleanor felt them land, and did not answer, because there was nothing to be said that would not have been too much.
She rose, and took his mug, and refilled it without being asked, and set it back before him, and he thanked her, and they sat for a while longer in the kitchen, while the rain fell, and the cat slept, and the house, around them, held its breath.
The truce, when it came, was not negotiated in so many words. It arrived instead in a series of small accommodations, offered and accepted, like two people learning to pass each other in a narrow corridor.
Theodore rose first. He rinsed his mug at the sink, turned the tap off firmly, and set the mug upside down on the drainer beside Eleanor's. The two mugs sat side by side, his brown and sturdy, hers white and chipped at the rim. He did not comment on the chip. He did not move it.
"I should go," he said. "Before it gets later."
"Of course." Eleanor stood as well. The cat, disturbed by the movement, lifted his head, regarded them both with mild displeasure, and settled again. "Theodore. About the arrangement."
He turned at the door. The kitchen was behind him, warm and dim, and his face was partly in shadow. He had the look of a man who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and was trying not to show that he had been waiting.
"I have been thinking," Eleanor said, "about what you said. That you would like to continue with the caretaking. And I have been thinking about the letter from the solicitor, and the fact that I have not yet had the survey done, and the fact that I do not, in fact, know how to bleed a radiator."
"You don't."
"I do not. I have never, in my life, bled a radiator. I imagine it involves keys, and towels, and possibly language."
"A little language," Theodore agreed. "Yes."
"And so." She took a breath. "I think, if you are willing, that we should arrange something. A division of labour. You know the house. You know the systems. You know where the stopcock is, which I suspect is information that will become vital at some point in the next six months."
"Behind the panel in the larder," Theodore said. "Left side."
"Behind the panel in the larder, left side." Eleanor nodded. "I could not have told you that yesterday. I could not have told you that an hour ago. And so it seems sensible that you should continue to look after the house. The physical house. The pipes, and the roof, and the gutters, and whatever else it is that houses require."
"And the rest?"
"The rest," Eleanor said, "I will do. The legal correspondence. The financial arrangements. The reading of deeds, and the signing of things, and the speaking to people I do not know about sums of money I do not yet understand. I will do the part that is done at a desk, with a cup of tea, and a telephone that I am learning to mistrust."
"The telephone is fine," Theodore said. "It's just old."
"Old telephones are not fine. Old telephones are where solicitors live."
He almost smiled. Almost. The corner of his mouth moved, and then settled again into its usual line, which was patient, and kind, and not quite amusement.
"And the kitchen?" he said.
"The kitchen," Eleanor said, and hesitated, because this was the part she had been turning over in her mind while he spoke, and she had not yet found the shape of it. "The kitchen is the house's heart. Mrs. Penhaligon used it. I will use it. You will need to use it, I expect, when you are working. Coffee. Washing up. The necessary intrusions."
"That's right."
"So we share it. We share the kitchen, and we share the Rayburn, and we share the cat, who I am told has opinions on all of these things. But we do not share anything else. The kitchen is common ground. The rest of the house is mine to learn, at my own pace, and yours to maintain, at yours. We do not rearrange each other's things. We do not comment on each other's habits. We do not, unless invited, enter each other's rooms."
"That's fair," Theodore said.
"It's not generous."
"It's fair," he said again, more firmly. "It's more than fair. It's what I would have asked for, if I had thought I had the right to ask."
"You have the right to ask," Eleanor said. "You have been looking after this house for a woman who trusted you. You have the right to ask for whatever makes that work bearable."
He did not answer at once. He stood in the doorway, with one hand on the frame, and the light from the hall falling across his shoulder, and his face unreadable in a way that she suspected was habitual, and not, as she had first thought, evasive.
"There's one thing," he said.
"Yes?"
"The chair. In the parlour. The one she sat in. I know you know which one."
Eleanor knew. "Yes."
"Don't move it."
"I won't."
"Not for a while. Not until. Just. Leave it where it is."
"I will leave it where it is," Eleanor said. "I promise you that. For as long as you need it."
He nodded. He did not thank her, and she did not require thanks, because she understood that what she had promised was not a favour. It was a recognition. He had cared for the woman in the chair, and the chair was the shape of that care, and she was not going to take the shape away from him.
"Thursday," he said. "I'll come Thursday. If that's not too soon."
"Thursday is not too soon," Eleanor said. "Thursday is fine. Come in the morning, if you can. Before the light goes."
"I can do that."
He stepped into the hall. She heard him take his coat from the hook, and the small sound of the fabric against itself, and then the heavier sound of the front door, which he opened carefully, and closed behind him with a care that suggested he was thinking of the draughts.
She went to the window. Through the glass, rain-streaked and imperfect, she watched him cross the courtyard. His shoulders were hunched against the weather, and his hands were in his pockets, and his head was down. He did not look back. He reached the gate, and opened it, and went through, and pulled it shut behind him, and then he was gone, and the courtyard was empty except for the rain, and the sound of the sea, which was louder now, or perhaps she was simply listening for it.
The cat appeared at her elbow. He had come from nowhere, as cats do, and he wound himself once around her ankle, and then sat, and looked up at her with an expression of absolute, regal expectation.
"You're hungry," Eleanor said.
The cat's expression did not change.
"You're always hungry. I have been told this. I am expected to provide fish."
She went to the larder. She opened the door, and looked at the shelves, which were fuller than she had expected, and smelt of dust, and cold stone, and faintly of the lavender that Mrs. Penhaligon had, apparently, kept among her stores. There was a tin of something at the back, behind a jar of rice and a box of matches. She reached for it, and found that it was labelled, in a neat hand, in fountain pen, FOR THE CAT (TUNA, NOT SALMON, HE IS PARTICULAR).
Eleanor laughed. The sound surprised her. It came out of her in a small, private way, and she covered her mouth, though there was no one to hear her but the cat, who did not care.
"Particular," she said. "Yes. I'm getting that impression."
She opened the tin. The smell of tuna filled the larder, and the cat, who had followed her, and was sitting now at her feet with an intensity that bordered on devotional, gave a single, deep, demanding meow that confirmed everything that had been said about him, and several things that had not.
She put the tuna on a plate. She could not find the cat's dish. She suspected there was one, somewhere, put away in a cupboard she had not yet opened, in a corner of the house she had not yet explored. She would ask Theodore, on Thursday, or she would find it herself, in time. She set the plate on the floor, and the cat descended upon it with an enthusiasm that bordered on indecency, and Eleanor stood in the larder, and listened to him eat, and felt, for the first time since she had arrived, that the house was not entirely strange to her.
She went back to the kitchen. She washed the plates, and the mugs, and the tin opener, and she dried them, and she put them away, and she did it all slowly, because she had nothing else to do, and because the doing of small things was, she had found, a way of being in a place without demanding anything of it.
The light was going. The rain had not stopped, but it had softened, and the sound of it on the windows was gentler now, and the wind had dropped, and the house had settled into its evening, which was the hour when old houses, she was learning, began to speak.
Not in words. In creaks, and sighs, and the small adjustments of timber cooling, and the distant complaint of a pipe somewhere down the hall that she would have to ask Theodore about. She stood at the kitchen window, and watched the courtyard darken, and the line of the sea, which was just visible above the wall, go from grey to silver to black, and she thought about the chair in the parlour, and the woman who had sat in it, and the man who had cared for her, and the cat who had outlived her, and who was, at this moment, washing his face in the corner with an air of profound self-congratulation.
She thought about London. She thought about the museum, and the archive, and the colleagues who had sent her flowers, and the card she had not yet answered. She thought about the flat she had not yet put on the market, and the boxes she had not yet packed, and the fact that she had, in the space of forty-eight hours, become the owner of a house she had never seen, in a town she had never visited, on the edge of a sea she had not yet walked beside.
She thought about her husband. The thought of him did not break her. It had not broken her for some time. It sat in her, now, like a stone at the bottom of a clear pool. She could see it. She could look away from it. She could, on a good day, forget it was there.
On the dresser, beside the clock that did not work, there was a small framed photograph. She had not noticed it before. It showed a woman, and a man, and a child, on a beach, somewhere sunny. The woman was laughing. The man had his arm around her. The child was mid-stride, blurred, caught in the act of running towards the water. The frame was silver, and tarnished at the edges.
Eleanor looked at it for a long time. She did not know who they were. She did not know if they were family, or friends, or neighbours, or strangers who had once visited, and been photographed, and placed upon the dresser for reasons she could not guess. She would ask Theodore. On Thursday. She would ask, and he would tell her, or he would not, and either way, the photograph would remain, and the people in it would remain, and the house would go on holding them, as it held everything, with the patience of a thing that had outlasted everyone who had ever lived in it.
She turned out the kitchen light. The Rayburn clicked, and settled, and the house went quiet. The cat had finished his dinner, and had disappeared again, into whatever part of the house cats disappear to when they have eaten, and are satisfied, and wish to be alone.
Eleanor climbed the stairs. She passed the landing, and the door to the room she had slept in, and went on, to the end of the hall, where there was a window that looked out over the back of the property, towards the cliffs, and the sea, and the dark line of the headland beyond. She stood at the window for a while. The glass was cold against her forehead. The sea was loud, and the wind had picked up again, and the rain was back, and the world outside was wet, and dark, and very large.
She thought: this is it. This is what I have. A house I do not know, in a town I do not know, on the edge of a sea I have not yet walked beside. A cat who is particular. A caretaker who is patient. A chair in a parlour that I am not allowed to move. A tin of tuna, labelled in fountain pen. A clock that does not work. A photograph of people I have never met.
She thought: it is not what I expected. It is not what I would have chosen. It is, however, what I have.
She went to bed. She did not sleep for a while, but she lay in the dark, and listened to the house, and the sea, and the rain, and the wind, and the small sounds of a place that was not yet hers, but that was, perhaps, beginning to be willing to have her.
She slept, in the end. She slept deeply, and without dreaming, and when she woke, it was to a morning that was grey, and still, and smelled of salt, and the cat was sitting on the end of the bed, watching her with an expression of faint, judicial disapproval, as if she had failed some test she had not known she was taking.
"Good morning," Eleanor said.
The cat blinked. Slowly. Once.
"I'm getting up," she said. "I'm going down. There will be fish."
The cat stood, stretched, and jumped down from the bed with the air of a magistrate granting an audience, and Eleanor laughed again, and this time she did not cover her mouth, and the house, around her, did not seem to mind.