‘A marriage proposal?’ she says.
‘It is,’ he says, kissing her neck, her shoulder, her chest, ‘I fear, a little late for that and besides – ow! My hair, woman. Do you mean to separate it from my head?’
‘Perhaps.’ She gives it a further tweak. ‘You would do well to remember your marriage. From time to time.’
He raises his head from her and sighs. ‘I do. I will. I do.’ He smooths the skin of her face with his fingers. ‘Do you wish to hear my proposal or not?’
‘Not,’ she says. She has a perverse desire to thwart whatever it is he is about to say. She will not let him off so easily, will not let him think it is all as meaningless to her as it is to him.
‘Well, stop your ears if you don’t want to hear it because I’m going to speak whether I have your permission or not. Now—’
She begins to move her hands to her ears but he holds them fast, in one of his.
‘Let go,’ she hisses.
‘I shan’t.’
‘Let go, I tell you.’
‘I want you to listen.’
‘But I don’t want to.’
‘I thought,’ he says, releasing her hands and drawing her close to him, ‘that I would buy a house.’
She turns to look at him but they are enclosed in darkness, a thick, absolute, impenetrable dark. ‘A house?’
‘For you. For us.’
‘In London?’
‘No,’ he says impatiently, ‘Stratford, of course. You said you would rather stay here, with the girls.’
‘A house?’ she repeats.
‘Yes.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you money for a house?’
She hears him smile beside her, hears his lips cleaving away from his teeth. He takes her hand and kisses it between each word. ‘I have. And more besides.’
‘What?’ She pulls her hand away. ‘Is this true?’
‘It is.’
‘How can that be?’
‘You know,’ he says, flopping back on the mattress, ‘it is always a pleasure for me to be able to surprise you. An unaccustomed, rare pleasure.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘that I don’t think you have any idea what it is like to be married to someone like you.’
‘Like me?’
‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say – and what you might not – before you say it. It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’
She shrugs. ‘None of these things I can help. I never—’
‘I have money,’ he interrupts, with a whisper, his lips brushing her ear. ‘A lot of money.’
‘You have?’ She sits up in amazement. She had grasped that his business was flourishing but this is still news to her. She thinks fleetingly of the costly bracelet, which she has since covered with ashes and bone fragments, wrapped in hide, and buried by the henhouse. ‘How did you come by this money?’
‘Don’t tell my father.’
‘Your father?’ she repeats. ‘I – I won’t, of course, but—’
‘Could you leave this place?’ he asks. His hand comes to rest on her spine. ‘I want to take you and the girls out of here, to lift you all up and to plant you somewhere else. I want you away from all . . . this . . . I want you somewhere new. But could you leave here?’
Agnes considers the thought. She turns it this way and that. She pictures herself in a new house, a cottage perhaps, a room or two, somewhere on the edge of town, with her daughters. A patch of land, for a garden; a few windows looking out over it.
‘He is not here,’ she says eventually. This stills the hand on her back. She tries to keep her voice even but the anguish leaks out of the gaps between words. ‘I have looked everywhere. I have waited. I have watched. I don’t know where he is but he isn’t here.’
He pulls her back towards him, gently, carefully, as if she is something he might break, and draws the blankets over her.
‘I will see to it,’ he says.
The person he asks to broker the purchase is Bartholomew. He cannot, he writes in a letter to him, ask any of his brothers as they might bring his father into it. Will Bartholomew help him in this?
Bartholomew considers the letter. He places it on his mantelpiece and glances at it, now and then, as he eats his breakfast.