The carrier yowled all the way down the high street, a thin, sustained complaint that bounced off the chemist's awning and sent a toddler in pink wellington boots spinning toward her mother with wide eyes. June shifted the wicker basket to her other hip, the weight of it pulling at muscles she had forgotten she possessed, and tried to look as though the screeching was coming from somewhere else entirely. A woman with a string bag of carrots paused to glare. June nodded, cheeks warm, and kept walking. The basket rattled against her thigh with each step, a metronome of disgrace.
"Mr. Whiskers, please," she murmured through the carrier's wire door, and was ignored with magnificent contempt.
The veterinary clinic sat at the bend where the lane curved toward the churchyard, a low stone building with a green door and a brass bell that had not been polished since the last century. A handwritten sign in the window, slanted at an angle that suggested either artistic intent or a recent squall, read: OPEN 9 TO 5. PLEASE KNOCK. MR. FITZWILLIAM IS ON HOLIDAY. June had seen the sign a dozen times on her walks past, had always admired the penmanship, and had not until this moment registered its full meaning. The green door opened before her knuckles found the wood.
"You're the bookshop girl," said a young woman in a pale blue tunic, a stethoscope swinging from her neck like a question. "With the cat."
"With the cat," June agreed.
"I'm Priya. Come in before he terrifies the budgerigar in the waiting room. Again."
The waiting room smelled of antiseptic and the faintly burnt sugar of the biscuits kept in a tin on the reception desk. A corkboard on the far wall displayed photographs of recovered animals, each one captioned in a careful italic hand that June recognized from the heritage museum's newsletter. A tortoiseshell cat with three legs. A Labrador with a habit of eating socks. A bearded dragon named, improbably, Lord Byron. June lowered Mr. Whiskers onto the plastic seat beside her, and he began immediately to growl.
"He's a tabby," Priya observed, studying the carrier with the polite detachment of someone who had seen everything. "Orange?"
"Ginger. Strictly speaking."
"He's very loud for a ginger."
"He has a lot to say about the car."
Priya smiled, a small, professional thing. "Mr. Fitzwilliam is just finishing with a terrier. Five minutes. Can I get you tea?"
"I'm fine, thank you."
"It's not really a question." Priya was already moving toward a kettle in the back. "Milk? Sugar? The sugar bowl is the one shaped like a fox."
"Both, then. In the tea. Not the fox."
The fox-shaped sugar bowl, when Priya set it beside June's cup, contained a neat assortment of white and brown lumps and a single ant that was exploring the rim with determination. June decided not to mention it. Mr. Whiskers, sensing weakness, renewed his commentary.
The inner door opened, and a small boy emerged clutching a paper bag of pills and a sticker of a smiling spaniel. Behind him, a tall man in a white coat was writing something in a ledger, his head bowed, his pen moving in the unhurried loops of someone who had been taught penmanship by someone who had been taught penmanship. He did not look up.
"Sit him on the table, please," he said, and his voice was the voice of the heritage museum's newsletter, smooth and unhurried, each word placed like a vase on a mantelpiece. "And tell me when it started."
June stood, the wicker basket bumping her knee, and Mr. Whiskers yowled a greeting that could have curdled milk. The man in the white coat looked up then, finally, and June saw the face that belonged to the handwriting. Sharp cheekbones. Pale eyes the color of weak tea. A mouth that seemed designed to deliver either quotations from the seventeenth century or extremely bad news. He was, she estimated, about her own age, and he appeared to be in the early stages of a condition that might be called aristocratic fatigue.
"Good morning," June said, because someone had to.
He did not respond. He was staring at Mr. Whiskers with an expression of clinical detachment that might, in other circumstances, have been applied to a suspicious invoice.
"Is he yours?" Henry Fitzwilliam asked, and his gaze did not shift to June's face.
"He is the bookshop cat. I'm looking after him. I am June Hartley, from Hartley Books on the square. I rang this morning."
"Yes." He made a note in the ledger. "I took the call. How old is he?"
"Fourteen, I think. Possibly older. He came with the shop."
"His symptoms?"
"He won't eat. He's been hiding behind the radiator in the stockroom, and he usually likes to be on the counter when the post comes. Yesterday he sat on Dottie Marsh's hat and refused to move. Dottie was furious. Dottie is a friend. The hat survived."
The man in the white coat was now studying Mr. Whiskers through the wire door of the carrier with the focus of a man who had been told there was a problem with the water table. Priya, returning with a second cup of tea for herself, caught June's eye and gave a minute, sympathetic shrug.
"Right," he said, and unlatched the carrier.
Mr. Whiskers emerged not like a cat at all, but like a very small, very disapproving gentleman who has been asked to leave a club that he has founded. He sat on the steel table, tail curled around his paws, and surveyed the room. His eyes came to rest on Henry Fitzwilliam with an expression of measured, personal offense.
"Good afternoon, sir," Henry Fitzwilliam said to the cat, and his voice softened in a way it had not softened for June. "May I examine you? I shall be as quick as I can manage without being incompetent."
Mr. Whiskers blinked once, slowly, which June chose to interpret as consent.
The examination that followed was thorough to the point of theatrical. Henry Fitzwilliam listened to the ginger chest with a stethoscope warmed, June noticed, against his own palm. He checked the ears, the teeth, the pads of the feet, the temperature beneath the tail, the color of the gums. He asked Mr. Whiskers to turn over, and Mr. Whiskers, after a pause that suggested he was considering the request on its merits, turned over. He palpated the abdomen with a touch so delicate that June, watching, felt her own stomach clench in sympathy.
"He has lost weight," Henry Fitzwilliam said, and still he did not look at June. "Half a kilo, perhaps more, since the last visit. Priya, when was the last visit?"
"August," Priya said. "Booster. He was fine. He bit Mr. Fitzwilliam."
"Twice," Henry Fitzwilliam said, to the cat. "Once on the wrist, once on the thumb. I have not forgotten. I never forget. It is one of my few reliable qualities."
"He's been off his food," June offered.
"For how long?"
"Three days. Maybe four. I thought it was the heat, but then yesterday he did not come when I opened the sardines, and he has never missed an opened sardine. He was sitting on Dottie's hat, but I am told that is not unprecedented."
"Dottie Marsh." Henry Fitzwilliam wrote the name in the ledger. "Herself."
"You know her?"
"Everyone knows Dottie Marsh. She has opinions about the church clock. She has been kind enough to share them. Twice. With diagrams."
"She is my mother's oldest friend."
Henry Fitzwilliam's pen stopped. For the first time, he looked directly at June, and the pale eyes had a quality of startled attention, as though she had said something in a foreign language that he had not expected to understand.
"Annette Hartley," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Thank you."
"She came in here once. Some years ago. With a budgerigar."
"Bertie."
"Bertie." He nodded, once. "He was a difficult patient. Very self-important. Bit me, as I recall. There is a pattern here that I am choosing not to examine."
Mr. Whiskers, on the table, yawned with the expansive boredom of a creature who has been discussed too long and not scratched sufficiently. Henry Fitzwilliam reached out, almost without looking, and the backs of his fingers found the place behind the ginger ear that June herself had discovered on a wet Tuesday in November. The cat tilted his head. A small, motor-like vibration began in his chest.
"He has a temperature," Henry Fitzwilliam said. "Not high. Elevated. And his gums are a little pale. I'd like to do some bloods, if I can persuade him. Priya, the small needle, please. The polite one."
Priya brought the needle. Mr. Whiskers permitted the procedure with a long-suffering sigh, his eyes fixed on the window, where a thrush was hopping along the sill. When it was over, Henry Fitzwilliam pressed a cotton ball to the pinprick and held it there, and his hand, June saw, was very steady.
"We'll know more tomorrow," he said. "In the meantime, try him with something warm and strong-smelling. Warm pilchards, perhaps. The smellier the better. If he won't eat by morning, bring him back and we'll talk about options. I would rather not speculate now, in front of him. He is the sort of cat who would take it personally."
"You're sure he's a cat?" June said, and the laugh that came out surprised her, a small, breathless sound, and Henry Fitzwilliam's mouth, for the first time, moved in a direction that was not strictly clinical.
"He is a cat," he said. "I am sure of very little in this profession, but of that I am sure. Priya, would you mind very much fetching Mrs. Hartley's bill? And while you're up, perhaps the file on the terrier, which I appear to have left in the cupboard with the cat food. And the cat food is in the cupboard with the terrier file. I am not, as you may have gathered, in a position to reorganize anyone this morning."
Priya, who had been edging toward the door with the careful cheerfulness of a woman leaving a room in which a bomb had been defused, said, "I will fetch all of those things, Mr. Fitzwilliam. I will also fetch you a cup of tea, which you will drink, because your color is wrong and you have not eaten since Tuesday."
"That is an invasion of my privacy."
"You are a terrible liar, sir. Everyone in the village knows you have not eaten since Tuesday. Mrs. Pemberton rang to ask if you were poorly. Mrs. Pemberton is ninety-three and has a son in Bermuda. She does not ring people to ask if they are poorly without good reason."
The silence that followed was the particular kind of silence that exists only in small rooms between people who have only just met and have already, against their better judgment, become involved. June looked at Mr. Whiskers. Mr. Whiskers looked at June. Mr. Whiskers looked at Henry Fitzwilliam. Mr. Whiskers yawned again, this time with the air of a man who has heard enough and would like the meeting adjourned.
"I'll try the pilchards," June said, gathering the cat into the wicker basket with the practiced care of someone who has done this before and suspects she will do it again. "And the tea. I'll bring the carrier back tomorrow. Thank you, Mr. Fitzwilliam."
He nodded, once, eyes already on the ledger, and June was almost at the door when his voice reached her, unhurried, from the other side of the room.
"Mrs. Hartley."
"Yes?"
"I am sorry about the carrier. I should have offered to help with the door. The door is heavy. I was otherwise engaged with the cat."
"I managed."
"I'm sure you did. You seem the sort."
She did not know what sort, and he did not say, and Priya, returning with a tray bearing two cups and a plate of digestive biscuits, gave Henry Fitzwilliam an elbow to the ribs that made him wince, very slightly, and did not improve his color. June, in the doorway, with Mr. Whiskers humming against her hip, felt a small, unexpected thing happen in her chest. It was not a feeling she could name. It was a feeling that, if she had been a different sort of woman, she might have called curiosity.
The walk back to the bookshop took seven minutes, a fact June knew because she had counted them, once, on a day when counting things had been easier than thinking about them. Mr. Whiskers rode the wicker basket like a small furry admiral reviewing his fleet, one orange ear cocked toward the sound of the High Street waking up: a delivery van reversing, the post office shutters rolling up with a complaint of old metal, the distant percussion of Dottie Marsh's heels on the pavement as she made her morning circuit of the shops she considered, rightly or wrongly, to be under her protection.
Dottie spotted her first. Of course she did.
"Well," Dottie said, arriving at June's elbow with the inevitability of weather. "You have the cat. And you have a face. And the cat has pilchards, which I can smell from here, so that part of the morning has gone well. What about the rest of it?"
"Good morning, Dottie."
"It is. I'm asking about the other part."
June shifted the basket. Mr. Whiskers, sensing an audience, sat up and arranged his whiskers into something approaching a public expression.
"He's very clever," June said, which was true and also not an answer.
"I didn't ask if he was clever, June Hartley. I asked about the rest of it."
"His name is Henry Fitzwilliam."
Dottie's eyebrows performed a small, well-rehearsed journey toward her hairline. "Fitzwilliam," she repeated, as if tasting the word. "Sounds like a man who has a great many letters after his name and no idea how to boil an egg."
"He's the new curator. At the heritage museum."
"He's the new curator, and you are in possession of his cat, and you are making a face I have not seen on you since before your mother died, and I am not going to stand here on the pavement like a lamppost while you pretend none of this is interesting. Tea. Tearoom. Ten minutes."
"I have to open the shop."
"Then open it in ten minutes. Mr. Whiskers can supervise."
Mr. Whiskers, in the basket, chose this moment to produce a sound that was somewhere between a purr and a pronouncement. Dottie received it as confirmation.
"Ten minutes," Dottie repeated, and clicked away toward the tearoom, her cardigan the particular shade of lavender that no one under seventy would have chosen and that Dottie wore like a flag.
June watched her go. Then she looked down at the cat.
"Don't look at me like that," she said. "I'm not making a face."
Mr. Whiskers continued to look at her like that.
Inside the bookshop, the morning light fell through the front window in long pale bars, catching the dust above the poetry shelves, the spines of her mother's favorite novels, the small brass bell above the door that had rung for every customer since 1987. June set the basket on the counter, lifted Mr. Whiskers out, and watched him drop to the floor with the uncomplaining dignity of a man who has been inconvenienced and has decided to allow it.
She opened a tin of pilchards. She set it beside his water bowl. She boiled the kettle for her own tea, because Henry Fitzwilliam's offer, accepted out of politeness, had somehow turned into a small domestic debt she would have to settle with a returned carrier and a teapot and whatever else one brought to a curate's cottage as a thank-you for emergency cat-sitting.
It was while she was measuring tea into the pot that she realized she had not thought about her mother for nearly an hour.
The realization arrived without ceremony. There was no tightening in her throat, no sudden weight behind her sternum. There was simply the absence of the thing that had been there every morning for the past fourteen months, the dull, low-grade ache that had become so constant she had stopped noticing it the way one stops noticing the sound of a refrigerator. It had not gone. She could feel it if she reached for it, the way one can feel a bruise by pressing. But for the first time in a long time, she had been somewhere else, in her own head, doing something that was not the slow private work of grief.
She poured the water. She set out two cups, because Dottie was coming, and Dottie never arrived anywhere without expecting to be watered and fed like any other elderly relation. Then she unlocked the front door, flipped the sign to OPEN, and stood for a moment in the quiet of her own small kingdom, breathing in the smell of paper and wood polish and the faint, fishy dignity of Mr. Whiskers, who had finished his pilchards and was now washing his face behind the counter with one orange paw extended.
"Ten minutes," she told him. "Then I have to work."
Mr. Whiskers did not acknowledge this. He had, June suspected, his own schedule.
Dottie, when she arrived, was five minutes late and had opinions.
"He's too thin," she said, of the cat, before she had even sat down.
"He's not."
"He is. Look at his shoulders. He needs a good home and a decent cooked lunch once a week. You could give him that."
"He has a good home. He has pilchards."
"Pilchards are sustenance, June. They are not love."
June poured the tea. Dottie accepted her cup with the regal impatience of a woman who considered waiting for liquids a personal failing.
"Now," Dottie said. "The curator."
"Mr. Fitzwilliam."
"I know his name. I have eyes. I also have ears, and the post office is a font of information, as it has been since 1841, and the word on the street is that he is recently out of London, recently out of a marriage, and recently in receipt of a grant from some academic body to write a book about the village's Victorian past."
"I didn't ask about his marriage."
"You didn't have to. I'm telling you for free. Also, his landlady says he is polite to a fault and that he has not once, in three weeks, left a towel on the bathroom floor. This is, in my experience, either a sign of great virtue or a sign of a man who has been hurt very badly and is being too careful about things. You can take your pick."
June wrapped her hands around her cup. The tea was too hot. She held it anyway.
"I went over to fetch Mr. Whiskers," she said, carefully. "He was perfectly civil. He made me tea."
"He made you tea."
"In a pot. With a strainer."
Dottie's face underwent a transformation so rapid it was almost meteorological. "A pot," she said, "and a strainer."
"Yes."
"With a proper spout."
"I didn't examine the spout, Dottie."
"I would have examined the spout," Dottie said darkly, and drank her tea, and said nothing further on the subject, which was, in the long language of Dottie Marsh, the equivalent of a full paragraph.
After Dottie left, with a final meaningful look at Mr. Whiskers and a parting instruction to feed him something with a bone in it, June did the only thing she could think of to settle the strange, unnamed agitation in her chest. She went to the shelf behind the counter, the one her mother had called the Difficult Shelf, and she pulled down the box.
It was a shoebox, brown, the lid slightly warped, labeled in her mother's handwriting: MISC. DO NOT THROW OUT.
June had not opened it since the funeral. She had put it on the shelf, behind the poetry section, where no customer would ever look, and she had left it there, and she had not spoken of it, and she had not, until this morning, when the light came in wrong and the cat was washing his face and the curator had a strainer with a proper spout, felt the smallest impulse to open it now.
She opened it now.
Inside were letters. Not love letters, or not the kind June had been half dreading. They were letters between her mother and a friend, written over the course of a single year, 1972, when her mother had been nineteen and had spent a summer working at the heritage museum, which had then been a museum and a teahouse and, according to the letters, a rather poorly run outpost of local government staffed by a man named Mr. Penrose who had a habit of locking himself in the cellar and falling asleep.
The friend's name was Henry. Not Henry Fitzwilliam. A different Henry, a Henry from Oxford, a Henry who wrote in a careful, slanted hand about the difficulties of the period and the new curator's incompetence and the way the light came through the west windows in the late afternoon. A Henry who had clearly been in love with her mother, though the love was of the kind that knows it will not be returned, and who wrote about it with such dignity and restraint that June, reading in the quiet of the bookshop, felt her eyes sting in a way they had not stung in months.
The last letter in the box was from her mother to the friend. It was short. It was kind. It declined what the friend had finally, in the eleventh hour, found the courage to offer. And at the bottom, in her mother's hand, was a postscript.
I am not the right girl for you, Henry. But there is a girl, somewhere, who will be. You will know her by the way she argues with booksellers about first editions.
June set the letter down.
She did not know how long she sat there. The shop bell rang twice, for two customers she served without remembering a single word of the transactions. Mr. Whiskers, emerging from behind the counter, jumped onto her lap and put his face against her wrist, and she let him, and the purr was the only sound in the room, and it was enough.
At half past eleven, she took the carrier from its hook. She put the teapot and the cups and a small jar of her mother's blackberry jam into a wicker basket, because a returned carrier demanded a returned basket, and because the day was warm and the walk to the curator's cottage was a walk she had not taken in years, and because she had, without quite deciding to, decided to take it now.
The cottage was at the end of a lane behind the church, low and stone-walled, with a small front garden that had not yet recovered from the previous tenant's neglect. The curtains in the downstairs window were drawn. The door, when she knocked, was answered not by Henry Fitzwilliam but by Priya, who was wearing an apron and had a wooden spoon in one hand and the expression of a woman who had been hoping very hard for a distraction.
"Mrs. Hartley," Priya said. "You have brought the carrier."
"I have."
"And tea."
"And a small jar of jam. As a thank-you."
"For the cat."
"For the cat, yes. And for not minding the door."
Priya's face softened in a way that June found, against all expectation, moving. "He is upstairs," she said, "pretending to work on his book. He has been pretending to work on his book for three hours. He has produced, in that time, one paragraph and one cup of cold tea. You would be doing me a considerable favor if you would come in and be a person for him to talk to, because I have a lamb to attend to and the lamb, I am afraid, takes precedence."
June hesitated on the doorstep. The threshold felt, suddenly, like a decision. Behind her, the lane was quiet. In front of her, Priya stood with the wooden spoon and the look of a woman who understood exactly what she was doing and was not in the least sorry about it.
"I can come back," June said.
"He would be very disappointed."
"He doesn't know me."
Priya tilted her head. "He knows you were the girl from senior year who set the gym on fire. I believe he has been thinking about it since you left."
The lane, the cottage, the morning, the cat, the letter, the jam, the day, all of it, seemed to pause, just for a moment, on a hinge. June felt the hinge turn.
She stepped inside.
She stepped inside.
The cottage was, June decided after four steps into the hallway, the most improbable thing she had ever been inside, and she had once been inside the basement of a bookshop that contained seventeen first editions and a family of bats.
The hallway was narrow, the ceiling low, the walls painted a color June could only describe as determined cheerfulness, a yellow somewhere between butter and caution. A wooden coat-stand stood at attention by the door, bearing a respectable tweed jacket, a less respectable fleece, and a hat that looked as though it had once aspired to be a bonnet and had lost faith. The floor was flagstone, cool even through the thin soles of her summer shoes, and gave slightly underfoot, as though the cottage had been breathing for two hundred years and was not about to stop on her account.
But the books.
The books were everywhere.
They climbed the walls in a series of shelves that appeared to have been built by someone who had a great deal of book and very little respect for the conventional idea of a hallway. They spilled onto a narrow bench. They colonized a window seat. They formed, June noted with a feeling she could only describe as professional kinship, a secondary stack on the floor that had been organized with the care of a man who had been meaning to sort it for some time and had not yet quite committed to the project.
"The study is through there," Priya said, gesturing with the wooden spoon toward a door at the end of the hall, which was ajar, and through which a thin wedge of late morning light fell across the floorboards. "I would offer to announce you, but he would hear the cats first and come out to investigate the disturbance, and then we would all be in the kitchen, which is not where the lamb wants us."
"I understand."
"You have jam."
"I have jam."
"Right." Priya looked at the jar as though considering its strategic value. "Take the jam. Take the cat. Take yourself. I will see you on the other side of the lamb."
She turned, wooden spoon aloft, and was gone, and the cottage resettled itself around June in the particular hush that old buildings make when they have decided, provisionally, to let you in.
June stood for a moment in the hallway with the carrier in one hand and the jam in the other and Mr. Whiskers, who had begun a low and unhurried purr somewhere in the region of her left hip, vibrating gently against her leg through the fabric of her skirt. She took a breath. The air smelled faintly of beeswax and of something warm and faintly herby from the kitchen, and under that, of paper, old and cool, the smell she had grown up with and never quite managed to stop loving.
She walked down the hall and pushed the study door open with her shoulder.
The room beyond was small, and full, and lit in a way that made June stop on the threshold and consider it for a moment as a piece of architecture rather than a place where a man was trying to work. The window was wide, and the glass was old, the kind that threw light unevenly across a room in a series of soft bright patches, and the dust in those patches moved slowly, as though the room had its own time signature. A desk stood beneath the window, deep in a particular kind of paper archaeology. A leather chair had been pulled close to the desk. A second chair, a wooden one with a cushion tied to it, had been placed at an angle near the door, as though for a visitor, and June had the uncomfortable suspicion that Priya had placed it there this morning.
Henry Fitzwilliam was standing by the window, not at the desk, and he was holding a book open in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, and he had the expression of a man who had been in the middle of thinking about something and had not yet quite finished the thought.
He turned when the door moved.
"Mrs. Hartley," he said.
"Mr. Fitzwilliam."
He set the book down, very carefully, on a small pile of other books that appeared to have been designated for the purpose, and he set the tea down on the windowsill, and he came forward a step, and then he stopped, because Mr. Whiskers had begun, with the air of a man claiming a constituency, to purr in earnest.
"Oh," Henry said, with a different inflection entirely. "Oh, hello."
"He has come for a visit," June said.
"I see that he has."
"I was not certain whether to bring him. Priya said he had been ill."
"He has been." Henry's hand, June noticed, was already halfway to the carrier door, and then he stopped, and looked at June, and waited, with the particular courtesy of a man who was very used to waiting and had decided a long time ago to be patient about it.
"You may let him out," June said. "He has, I am told, opinions about it."
Henry opened the carrier.
Mr. Whiskers emerged with the unhurried dignity of a senior member of the bar arriving at a counsel he had not strictly required, considered the room, considered the chair with the cushion, considered Henry, and then proceeded to make his inspection.
He went first to the desk, where he paused and appeared to read, briefly, the topmost page of a manuscript, with the expression of a man who had read it before and remained unconvinced. He then went to the window, where he sat for a moment in a patch of light and looked out at the lane as though assessing its potential. He then went, with a small and considered turn, to Henry's ankle, and there he sat, and there he began, with great deliberation, to wash his face.
"He approves," June said.
"He is very good at the impression of approval," Henry said. "I have found it best not to examine it too closely."
He looked up, then, and he met her eyes, and the room did something June could not quite account for, which was to grow smaller, and warmer, and more particular.
"Please," he said, and gestured toward the chair with the cushion. "Sit down. I am told there is jam."
"I brought a small jar."
"As a bribe?"
"As a thank-you."
"For the cat."
"For the cat, and for not minding the door, and for telling me about Vera."
He considered this. He pulled out the wooden chair for her, with the particular care of a man who was not entirely sure she would take it and was prepared, if she did not, to put it back. She sat. He did not. He stood for a moment by the window, in his shirtsleeves, with the cuffs turned back once and the collar open at the throat, and he had the look, June thought, of a man who had been working very hard at something and was not certain whether the work was the right work.
"Mr. Whiskers," he said, "is washing his face. I have been told this is a sign of confidence. I would like to believe him."
"It is a sign," June said, "that he has decided the room is his."
"That would be consistent with the general pattern."
He moved, then, to a small table by the door where a kettle sat on a tray with two cups, and he picked up the kettle, and he paused, and he looked over his shoulder at her.
"I have made tea," he said. "I made it some time ago, and it is not cold yet, but it is on its way. I can make more."
"I would not say no to tea."
"I would not say no to company."
He poured. He brought her a cup. The cup was one of a pair, the other of which he kept for himself, and June noticed, because she was June, and she noticed cups, that the pair was old, and good, and slightly mismatched at the handle, as though one of them had been replaced at some point and the replacement had not quite committed to the resemblance.
"Thank you," she said.
He sat. Not at the desk, in his leather chair, but on a low stool by the bookcase, and the position put him a little below her line of sight, which June suspected was deliberate, and which she appreciated, and which she did not, at first, know how to answer.
He did not begin with the letter. He began, instead, with the room.
"I have been here," he said, "since February. Priya found the cottage through a colleague at the museum. I was in need of a place that was not London and not my mother's, and this was available, and I took it, and I have been, since then, attempting to write a book about a small village in Somerset in the year 1887, and to curate a small museum that is, I am told, by the people who fund it, a regional asset, and to live in a house that appears to have been built in the reign of a monarch I have not yet identified."
"And how is the book going?"
"It is going," he said, "at the speed of a man who has been interrupted by a great deal of life and not enough of it. I have one hundred and twelve pages. I have, according to Priya, a great deal more to say. I have, according to my editor, a deadline. I have, according to myself, a chapter on the effect of the railway on the village's perception of itself, and I have been working on it for three weeks, and I have produced one paragraph, and that paragraph is, I am afraid, not very good."
"I am not a historian."
"You were an editor."
"I was a junior editor."
"You edited."
"I edited, yes."
"Then you will know," he said, "what it is to look at a paragraph and not be able to see, for the moment, whether it is any good, and to suspect, in your heart, that it is not, and to sit with it anyway, because there is nothing else to do."
"Yes," June said. "I know what that is."
He looked at her then, and the look was not the polite look of a man making conversation. It was the look of a man recognizing, in another person, a particular kind of weariness, and June felt it land, and she was not sure whether she wanted to lean toward it or away.
"I have not," he said, "been a good correspondent."
"I did not write to you."
"No. But I have not been a good correspondent, in general, to a great many people, for a great many years, and I find that the habit persists, even when the person in question is sitting in my study with a jar of jam and a cat who is now asleep on my foot."
"Mr. Whiskers has decided," June said, "that your foot is the right foot."
"I am honored."
"You should be. He is a cat of discernment."
Henry smiled. It was not a large smile, and it was not a quick one. It was a smile that arrived, and settled, and stayed, and June found, to her considerable surprise, that she was smiling back, and that the smile was easier than she had expected.
"Tell me," he said, "about the letter."
So she did.
She told him about the morning in the shop, and Mr. Whiskers on the desk, and the envelope with the legal letterhead, and the reading of the will, and Dottie, and the others, and the part about the museum and the part about the tea towels and the part about Mr. Whiskers, who had not, in fact, been left to her, and who had, in the way of cats, simply continued.
She told him about the small boy with the book, and the exchange about the seven deaths, and the woman with the list, and the finding of the papers, and the letter addressed to him.
She did not, she noticed, tell him about the second page. She kept that, for the moment, in the small drawer at the back of her mind, and she did not examine it.
When she had finished, Henry was quiet for a long time.
Mr. Whiskers purred on his foot. The light moved, very slightly, in the window. The lane outside was quiet, and the cottage held its breath.
"Vera," Henry said, at last, "was a great reader. I do not mean she read many books. I mean she read them in the way that some people read a room, or a person, with a particular kind of attention. She would tell me, when I came down from Oxford for the holidays, what she thought of the book I had brought her, and she would be right, and I would pretend to be annoyed, and we would argue about it for the rest of the afternoon."
"You argued."
"Politely. With feeling. She did not suffer fools, and I was, in those years, a particular kind of fool, and she was kind enough to let me know."
"She sounds," June said, "like my mother."
"I have not the honor."
"You would have liked her."
"I expect I would have."
He set his cup down, and he looked at the window, and then he looked back at her, and there was a thing in his face that June recognized, because she had seen it in her own mirror, in the months after, and she did not look away from it.
"She left me," he said, "the letters."
"The letters?"
"The correspondence. Between her and a man I have been trying, for some time, to identify. A man she never, to my knowledge, mentioned by name in my hearing. A man who wrote to her, from somewhere in the north, between the years of 1962 and 1987, and who signed his letters, always, with a single initial. There are forty-three of them. I do not know who he is. She did not tell me, and I did not ask her, and I have, since her death, not known how to ask anyone else."
He paused.
"I was very fond of her," he said. "I was not, I think, a good enough nephew. I was busy. I was in London. I was writing things, and reading things, and being a kind of person she would not, I think, have approved of, and I did not come down as often as I should have, and when I did come, I did not listen as well as I ought, and now she is gone, and the letters are in a box in a museum in a village I have only recently come to live in, and I do not know, Mrs. Hartley, what to do with them."
"June," she said.
He blinked.
"June," he said, and the name, in his voice, sounded different than she had heard it in a long time, and she was not sure, yet, what to do with the difference.
"Tell me about the man," she said.
"He was, I think, a teacher. The handwriting is careful. The postmarks are all from a town in Lancashire. He writes, in the first letter, that he has read something of hers, and that he has thoughts, and that he would be grateful for her opinion. He writes, in the last letter, in 1987, that he is ill, and that he is glad to have known her, and that he is sorry for the trouble he has caused."
"That is a long correspondence."
"It is."
"Did she write back?"