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concentrate on the business of making money. He studied her approvingly then as they settled themselves in the carriage for the two mile journey back to Tryst. There was an overall word for her and it eluded him for the moment, as a familiar place-name would sometimes escape him when he was working out a waggon route in his belfry overlooking the Thames. Staunch , was it? Stalwart? Intransigent, Tempered, Resolute? He ran it down as they left the last of the cottages behind— “Indomitable.” She met every new circumstance indomitably, and it had been this rather than her looks and figure that had singled her out from the very beginning of their association. Ordinarily, he had very little patience with the kind of woman they had been breeding over here while he was campaigning across the seas in youth and early manhood. But Henrietta was singular, had always been singular.
    He thought, as the carriage ran under the edge of the silent woods and over the hump of Twyforde Bridge, “She always thought of herself as lucky, but I’m luckier. Suppose I’d latched on to a pretty little girl like Stella, instead of to the offshoot of a man with vigour and enterprise in his bones, like that rascally old father of hers? Odds on I should be a widower by now, what with all these children. Suppose I had left her to dry out in the sun on that moor the night the little devil ran away from home in a thunderstorm? Where would I have chanced on a woman capable of showing the fortitude and resource she demonstrated thirteen years ago, when I lost my leg, and she found herself saddled with a leaderless business, a sprawling great house, a young family, and a fourth child in her belly? I’ll stake every penny I possess that there isn’t another Henrietta between the Channel and the Pentland Firth, and be damned if I don’t tell her so before we douse the lamp tonight.”
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    He did, in so many words. In his own deliberately possessive way, the way he invariably went about the business of promoting their moments of intimacy. And she, for her part, made no more than a token show of being shocked. After sharing his bed for twenty years she could read his intentions like nursery print.
    Through the half-open door of his dressing room she could hear the steady rasp of his razor as he sheared his strong, bluish bristles, and she wondered, smiling at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror, if he was aware that she always recognised an after-supper shave as a preliminary to tossing her about on that great four-poster they had inherited from the Elizabethan occupiers of the house. She went on combing her hair, rehearsing a formal protest that she knew would not have the least effect on him, but in a way she misjudged him. He was much gentler than usual, at least in his initial approach.
    He came stumping out of his room and moved across protesting floorboards to stand behind her, and the ungainliness of the movement told her he had already loosened the master strap of the harness that held his artificial leg to the knotted, bluish stump she had insisted on inspecting the first night he was restored to her after that long, dismal interval that followed the Staplehurst railway crash. The wound had no power to shock and dismay her then, and in the thirteen years that had passed since his discharge from the Swiss convalescent hospital she had come to equate the mutilation with the glory that had attached itself to him at the time. She never saw him as a cripple, or thought of him as even marginally handicapped. The leg was just a specifically fashioned boot he lugged around, not out of necessity, but on account of a caprice that matched all his other caprices, singlemindedness, sustained personal initiative, iron nerve, and a surprising tenderness at moments like this.
    He took the brush from her hand and rested half his weight on her shoulder, studying their faces in the mirror, and they remained a moment like this, cheeks touching, and the scent