Hollie came back into the parlour, stifling a shiver as the hail rattled the windows in their casements again, and moved a comfortable cat from his fireside seat.
"Spark out," he said, with satisfaction. "What on earth did you slip him, Het?"
"Posset, no more," she said, and did not look up from her mending, but jammed a needle through the seam of the shirt she was darning, with some venom. "And a little syrup of hyssop, for his poor chest. I do not like the sound of his breathing, at all." She gave another meaningful sniff, and dragged the thread tight through the linen with a little jerk.
She did not look up, but she radiated irritation like a banked fire. "Have I upset you, lass?" he said, sufficiently concerned by her coolness not to be applying himself to the tricky matter of how best to mend a stirrup leather that had worn right through at the buckle-hole.
Het looked up then. She was frowning a little bit, but her eyes were teary-bright. "You? No, husband. Not you."
"You're cross with Russell?" he hazarded, and she shook her head.
"Surely not, husband, I am overjoyed that he has been ten years without a word, leaving the pair of us believing him to be dead and buried in his service in Scotland, and then he arrives unannounced in the middle of winter. Half-dead with a fever, and frightening the wits out of our girls, and it wanting less than a week to Christmas and where has he been for the last years, that he has forgotten us till now?"
"Cross," Hollie said, nodding, having hit the nail squarely on the head. "I knew you were."
She gave him one simmering glare, and then her face softened. "Oh, I do love you, Holofernes. I -" she gave a deep sigh, and smoothed the rumpled shirt in her lap - "not for one day have I regretted the day we wed."
"Truly?"
She nodded, and gave him a wobbly smile. "Truly."
"Even given the mending I put you to?"
"Even given the amount of mending you put me to, dear. By which admission I am guessing you have something as yet undisclosed, in need of attention?"
"The usual," he confessed, "the pocket on my good coat is come away. A little. Me and Thomazine were overlooking Marston's colt in the top field after church, and I happened to put one too many apples in the pocket - gentling the colt, you understand- "
"Perhaps, dear love, you ought to pay more mind to gentling your daughter," she said mildly, and he hunched his shoulders and wriggled. "Thomazine is a fair way to becoming a hoyden, and you have fallen into the habit of treating her as if she were one of your old troop, dear." Het looked over the top of her glasses again, with that dear three-cornered smile illuminating her whole face. Her face was a little rounder, after seventeen years of marriage - a little better upholstered in the beam and the bosom, after three living girls and a boy in the churchyard at Colchester - but she still had the same smile. "Though she is a dear child, and a delight. I hope, though, I hope that Thankful will not be too shocked at how wild she is grown, since he last saw her. They were always close, they two, weren't they?"
"If he's shocked by my girl, he's not the man I thought him," Hollie said, and the corner of Het's mouth curled up.
"No, dear. That's what I was saying. I should hardly recognise him as the same young man we knew. Then."
And then she fell silent, and he knew, as he always knew, that she was thinking of their own boy, who would have been Nathaniel Elijah had he lived so long, instead of baptised child-of-God. He'd have been almost twelve, now. And would he have been tall and lean and bright, like amber-haired Thomazine, or solid and russet and freckled, like little Nell, or slender and dark and fair-skinned like Joyeux.
There was always a place at White Notley for him, though, for that shadow-boy who would never play amongst the apple-trees or fish in the brook, in life. And so it was that when Luce Pettitt's three coltish blond boys who played in the orchard, and fished in the brook, the shade of Nathaniel Elijah splashed and climbed with them.
- Luce's eldest had also been caught trying to get Hollie's stud horse to jump a four-foot hedge, as well, and had had his backside warmed nicely for him. But that was boys for you, and no doubt Nathaniel would have been every bit as bad. Had he lived.
It was quiet enough in that room that you could almost hear the stars ringing overhead like bells in the iron-cold air. One of the girls coughed, upstairs. A fox barked - he had an eye to them, as well, come lambing time, and the eldritch yell of a fornicating vixen still stood all the hairs up on the back of his neck.
She set down her mending, and came and sat next to him on the settle and tucked her arm though his. “Would you consider Thankful to be wholly reduced to poverty, dear?” she said carefully, and burrowed her head against his shoulder.
(Seventeen years of marriage, and she still seemed to be as blind to the shortcomings of his bedtime toilette as ever she had been. Which was comforting.)
He leaned his cheek against the top of her head, and thanked God for her forgiveness. Unlooked-for. Perhaps he had worried for nothing. Outside was the black window glass and the rattling dark, and he considered the lad’s circumstances critically, glad that if nothing else they had the boy here on such a night. “Aye, pretty much.”
A long pause. “Dear.”
Decent boots, but Russell had always been picky about his boots – Hollie had taught him that, even if little else had stuck. That was a career soldier thing, that you bought the best boots you could because if your feet were warm and dry you’d get by, even if you were sleeping in a ditch.
It was plain he was mending his own linen. Hollie had seen him safely tucked up in bed in nothing but his shirt, and it had had worn patches in the elbows you could read your Bible through, and the darns were as lumpy as walnuts. Het would have shamed to use that shirt for floor-cloths, and yet there was Russell wearing it – and nothing else, presently – like it was his most precious possession. Not married, then. Cheap, skimpy, poorly stitched, plain shirts, and precious few of those in his saddlebags. A sword that had to be as old as Thomazine - sentiment, or necessity? You couldn’t tell, with that lad - and a knock-kneed, spavined, hobbling hired horse.
“Dear,” Het said carefully, “I would agree, he is in want. But he is not ill-kept, you know. He is not dirty, and his nails are perfectly clean.”
- trust Henrietta to notice that, he thought wryly.
She took a deep breath. It wasn’t forgiveness, then. She wasn’t letting Hollie off the hook, she’d just seen something in him that gave her pause for thought. She sighed, and wriggled. (Evidently the thing was worse than he thought. Larceny? Bigamy?) “I think he is not what we think, and it troubles me. Dear,” she said again, “do you think he is still involved in –“
“Poking his neb into politics,” Hollie said firmly. “I doubt it, lass. I reckon all that time with Cromwell broke him of his habit of meddling, once and for all.“
“Yes,” Het said forlornly. “I had hoped so, too. What if he did not?”