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These Refflexions draw after them others that are too melancholy.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” The landau provided by Lord Ranulph Dere of Perryfield rolled away from the great house with a crunch of gravel, carrying off to Oxford the happy bridal couple of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Egerton, as well as Mrs. Egerton’s sister and brother-in-law the Gerard Weatherills.

No sooner was the vehicle down the drive, however, than a depression of spirits swamped the bride’s nearest relations.

Or, at least, the two eldest remaining. The bride’s mother Mrs. Gordon Barstow pressed the handkerchief she had been fluttering to her lips to hide her efforts at fighting back a sob, while her daughter-in-law Sarah sighed, “I wonder how long it will be before we see her again.”

“I lay odds at less than a fortnight,” said the third Barstow daughter, seventeen-year-old Frances, with irksome cheer.

“After all, the Egertons might walk from their new home in St. Lawrence to Oxford in an hour, and riding would be even quicker. It’s not as if they were setting out in search of the Northwest Passage. ”

“But we are not in Oxford,” spoke up Maria, the fourth sister.

She was nearly twelve but looked younger because she was so diminutive.

“It is a half-hour walk from our house to Della’s, so if Jane already walked for an hour to reach Della at Keele’s School, coming all the way on to Iffley would require an hour and a half altogether, and then she would still need to return. ”

“You need only say the word, and I will send a carriage wherever and whenever you like,” their kindly benefactor Lord Dere reminded them. “You might see Mrs. Egerton every day of the week, if you cared to.”

“Why, uncle, that would be very inconvenient for you, never being able to call your vehicles or your time your own,” his niece by marriage Mrs. Markham Dere protested, her brows rising up her alabaster forehead.

“Not to mention, the servants would resent the unpredictability of such an arrangement. I think it better if the Barstows and the Egertons visit at set times, scheduled with appropriate notice. Once a month, perhaps. Or twice, if need be. But I’m sure Mrs. Egerton will be so busy setting up her new household that she might prefer to be left alone at present. ”

“Mama,” called the youngest son Gordon, from where he and his friend Peter Dere had been leaping back and forth over the hedge, “if Jane is gone, what if I were to have a bigger room? You said yourself I have grown.”

“Do say yes, Mrs. Barstow,” Peter urged in his piping voice, “because Gordy sleeps in a cupboard.” Though the boy laughed as he said this, and though he was Mrs. Markham Dere’s son and heir to the Dere baronetcy, there was only good-natured raillery in the declaration.

“At least Gordy has his own space,” countered Maria. “So lucky to be a boy! The rest of us, being girls, must be crammed together: Frances and me in the green bedroom, and Sarah and Jane and little Bash in the room leading to the cupboard.”

“I never asked for special treatment,” her brother protested. “And Bash and I could probably share now. Though he isn’t breeched yet, he isn’t a girl, at least, and he sleeps to beat us all hollow. But I doubt you could fit both of us in my cupboard, so it’d better be a bigger room.”

“You aren’t suggesting we put Sarah in the cupboard, just because Jane is gone!” cried Frances, aghast. “And her a married woman—or used to be married!”

“Why not Maria, then?”

“But Gordy, I’d be scared by myself,” his sister reproached him.

“How could you be, you ninny, with Bash and me just on the other side of the door?”

“Children,” murmured Mrs. Barstow, raising her hands to silence their bickering.

“How unseemly this is, with Jane barely gone from us.” But at least their squabbles made her forget her lowness, and she almost twinkled at the baron.

“You must pardon them, sir. One would think they were raised by wolves.”

The silver-haired peer made her a bow. “No one acquainted with you, my dear cousin, could possibly think such a thing. I, for one, like to see lively and opinionated young people.”

Putting light fingertips to her brow, the mistress of Perryfield grimaced at this nonsense, so typical of these burdensome Barstows, the family of poor relations Lord Dere had taken under his wing.

But at least Mrs. Dere was soon relieved of their presence for the day, for Mrs. Barstow refused the baron’s invitation to return inside, and in minutes the Dere coach rolled up to carry the whole brood away.

“Sarah, my dear,” said her mother-in-law in her soft voice, shortly before they reached the cottage, “I hope you will not take it amiss if I do offer you the cupboard bedroom—Mrs. Dere’s erstwhile dressing room, that is.

I mean it as a compliment, you see. To offer you a little privacy, after these past few years.

You have been so very, very good to us, sharing not only a bedchamber, but indeed a bed, with first Adela and then Jane.

And that was not all you have shared. I do not know what we would have done without your widow’s pension. ”

“Oh, madam,” breathed Sarah, feeling her throat tighten, “the obligation goes entirely the other way! You know little Bash and I have no family remaining but you Barstows, and I only wish I had more to give, when you have shared with us a home and the warmth of your companionship and—and everything. And I will of course sleep wherever you like.”

“Don’t be polite,” scolded Frances. “This is your chance to sleep wherever you would like, and if I could be rid of Maria I would leap at it, for she kicks fearfully in her sleep.”

“And you steal the covers,” retorted her younger sister.

Again Mrs. Barstow raised her hands to hush them.

“I have good news, children, but I did not want to say anything before Mrs. Dere because it would only annoy her. But Lord Dere has anticipated us. Before you even thought to quarrel about how we would arrange ourselves with Jane gone, the baron thought of it, and he has given us a little money for—”

“Money!” whooped Maria and Gordy, causing the coach to bounce and little Bash to kick his legs in excitement.

“—A little money,” she repeated, too glad to reprove them, “for furniture and what not, because he said a house with three grown people and three young people was altogether different from a house with four grown people and three young people.”

“He said that?” marveled Frances. “It is like mind-reading. He ought to tell fortunes!”

Sarah smiled at this. “I think it more likely that he seizes on all possible occasions to be generous.”

Ruefully Mrs. Barstow chuckled. “I agree with Sarah. I suppose he thought this the most plausible excuse for a gift. But what would you say if we replaced the beds? The rooms are not large, but I daresay two narrow beds could be squeezed in the place of the one larger bed in both the green room and the one attached to the cupboard.”

Which is how, not three days onward and for the first time since her girlhood, Sarah Barstow found herself sole occupant of all she surveyed, a realm composed entirely of the tiny chamber which had once served as Mrs. Markham Dere’s dressing room.

The limited space barely held a narrow bed, dressing table, chest of drawers, and washstand, and Sarah might have sat upon the coverlet and reached any other piece of furniture by simply rotating in place.

But small as her new quarters were, they were hers alone.

Even her little son Bash had delighted to leave her, removing across the passage to share the green bedroom with his nine-year-old uncle Gordon.

Dim light filtered through the casement, falling in a beam across the dressing table, and Sarah moved like an automaton to pull open the second drawer and draw out the packet of letters it contained.

It was something she could have done in her sleep, having made the motion so frequently in the past two years.

The letters were soft now with overhandling, the creases in the paper in danger of tearing, and the ribbon binding them fraying at the ends.

And not only could her hands seek the packet unerringly, but she knew as well the letters’ contents nearly by heart.

Sarah, my dearest, I write with my mind and heart full of you. We saw a rare sunset, the rosy, lambent sky recalling the rush of blood beneath your skin when you blush, and the warmth of the declining sun caressing me as your hands and lips once did…

My heart’s own, do you remember our first walk together, after we were engaged?

There was so much to say, but who could take the time to say it when my leave was so short?

Every moment not spent with my arms about you was a moment wasted.

I told myself there would be time for words when we were apart, when I had no ardent, vibrant creature to hold, her glowing eyes raised to mine and her lips waiting for my kiss…

Yes, indeed, Sarah had read passages such as these so many times she required no aid to recollect them, but still she gently unfolded the letters because she loved to see the words written in his spiky hand and to run her finger over the lines, if she could no longer run her finger over the writer himself.

Though the news of his death had fallen heavily upon her, and though at the outset she almost believed she could have lain down in her grief and never risen again, mercifully she had her infant son to bind her to the living world.

Her son and her husband’s family, with whom she had come to live when Sebastian was assigned to the HMS Penelope , his last posting.

And when Sebastian’s death proved only the first in a series of blows to those she loved, there had been neither time nor breath to wallow in despair.

Sarah picked up her burdens, therefore, and marched on.

The passing months became a year.

The one year became two.