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only kept that for Easter and Christmas.” Tom winked at his wife. “Nice in gravy, I must say.”
     
    K ezia had become more worried about this business of war. She’d bought a newspaper in the village and read every word reported on the subject. No one she met seemed to be paying much attention. Perhaps Mr. Coombes was right; perhaps they were cocooned in their round of work on the land, in the home or a wealthy someone else’s home. The Brissendens were considered somewhere in the middle of the village social order, better off than most, with Tom becoming more of a gentleman farmer than his father before him. In fact, most people didn’t quite know where to place Tom, especially following his marriage to Kezia. But they liked him—he was one of their own—and they couldn’t help but take to Kezia, whom many considered very ladylike, though not perhaps lady enough to have someone else to do her shopping. She drew attention when she rode the mare into the village on days when she wanted only a few bits and pieces, putting them in her knapsack before riding back to the farm. It was clear she was something of a novice in the saddle, though she was trying to learn. Sometimes she brought the gig, but it was generally considered that if the mare, Mrs. Joe, hadn’t known her job, Kezia Brissenden would have been in a good deal of trouble.
    By the end of July, and wed all of twenty-seven days, it seemed to Kezia as if the roots of her marriage were beginning to break through into the earth, ready to grow deeper with each year. For Tom, she knew, it was as he expected. You sow a seed and it either flourishes or it withers, and it never crossed his mind that his marriage to Kezia would ever be anything other than a good one. He saw his future clearly. The farm would be strong, and there would be no setback that he could not counter with hard work. He had never looked at the land through rose-tinted glasses, and he knew how it could break a man, how it could wound body and soul. He had a responsibility that came with providing a living for men who worked on the farm and their families—men he had known his entire life. That the farm was his at all had been down to sheer luck—and he knew better than tempt fate. In time there would be children, and their children after. Tom trusted—though he had never thought about it consciously—that he would die on this land and be buried in the churchyard, and that his son and his son after him would work the fields that generations of Brissenden men had farmed.
    But there was something beginning to scratch at the smooth veneer of Kezia’s new married life. It was not a constant annoyance, like the branch that scrapes against the windowpane night after night, but more like a small fragment of grit in the shoe, something that is felt now and again. Though Tom would have argued otherwise, had she confided in him, Kezia wondered if she was on the cusp of losing an element of herself. She had claimed two half-days alone, walking, reading, and writing in her journal, but she considered Thea’s life—and, indeed, her own before marriage—and wondered if in time she would feel that she was missing something, and whether she had bartered her character for contentment. Indeed it was in the village hall, which also served as a library of sorts, and where Kezia had stopped to read a women’s monthly or two—she was still undecided upon the question of placing a subscription with the newsagent in Brooksmarsh—that she came upon a comment that caused her to sit down and read further. Women’s books in the village library were always out of date; however, from a copy of Woman At Home , dated January 1913, she copied down a paragraph on the back of her shopping list:
    The modern girl prefers to live independently, and earns two hundred pounds a year, rather than marry a man with an income scarcely more than her own.
    The writer asked if it was surprising, then, that the latest statistics on