t was always a shock to return to London, to the visibly sooty air, the grime-streaked houses, the poverty, and the sheer density of the population. But it was also the kind of shock that wore off fast. By the time the train pulled into the station Bryony had ceased to wonder how people managed to live in such collective squalor. And as the carriage drew up before her father’s house, she no longer even smelled the pervasive stench of horse droppings along the thoroughfares.

It was much more difficult to look upon her father’s face, the pale, papery skin, the thinning brows and lashes, the colorless and slack lips—especially slack on the side that had been paralyzed by the previous stroke—and realize that he was truly at death’s door. He’d had a second stroke mere hours before Bryony arrived. She conferred with his physician. Geoffrey Asquith was not expected to recover. He was not even expected to last more than a week. But he was still alive.

He had been very well cared for. Her stepmother, with years of experience looking after her fragile sons, had hired two competent nurses and directed them well. Both he and the room were clean as a whistle, and one could hardly tell that there was a bedpan in use.

“Tea?” Callista asked.

Bryony shook her head.

At twenty-five, Callista still retained the gamine face she’d had since she was a child, with the same wide eyes, same high cheekbones, same slightly pinched nose. She’d been there on the platform of the train station, waiting, a slender, sparkling young woman in a straw hat the green ribbons of which fluttered in the wind and the steam. And Bryony’s heart had throbbed painfully: Such an uncanny resemblance she bore to her dead mother, as if Toddy had stepped out of the careful preserves of Bryony’s memory.

They had not said much on the carriage ride home. They were not close. They had never been close, even though they had once been the only two children in a large, rambling house.

Bryony had tried. After Toddy’s death, she’d poured all her love into Toddy’s baby. She’d imagined them as fellow shipwrecked passengers in the same lifeboat: sisters and best friends who would make their way together to safety and a new life.

But whereas Bryony yearned for human contact, Callista shrank away from it. She did not want to be kissed or stroked or cuddled. She did not want to be sung to. And when Bryony tried to read to her, she hid under draped tables and bedsteads, her fingers stuffed into her ears.

Bryony could not get her to talk. She could not interest Callista in any of the games and recreations that she and Toddy had enjoyed so immensely. There had even been times when Callista had turned around and scurried in the opposite direction when she’d seen Bryony coming.

Eventually she’d learned to leave Callista alone. And accepted that there was no one else in the lifeboat with her, that she must row herself across the endless sea of her childhood, and that she would be alone too when she finally reached that far shore.

It almost didn’t hurt very much when, at age five, Callista took instantly to both Mrs. Asquith and Mrs. Roundtree, their new governess, grew out of her shell, and became a happy, rambunctiously sociable girl.

“Are you going to leave again soon?” asked Callista.

“I don’t have plans yet,” Bryony answered, moving away from her father’s bed.

“And Leo, is he coming back too?”

“Yes, he means to settle in Cambridge.”

Nearly a month had passed since she kissed him good-bye, a separation that was already longer than the time they’d spent together in India and growing lengthier by the day. She’d had no news from him. She inferred that he was safe, that if something had happened then she would have heard of it. But still she fretted.

And not just about his safety.

He had not wanted a future with her. He’d doubted her capacity to love. In the heat of battle, with their lives on the line, it had not mattered. Death, whatever its faults, simplified life as nothing else did. But with the likelihood of decades upon decades of time before them, would not the potent intimacy that had shielded them from past wounds eventually lose its power and strength against the sheer monotony and ordinariness of daily life, against everything else that had held them apart?

She lifted a panel of the heavy curtain and looked down into the glistening street below. In India, the rain, when it came, was heavy and decisive. She’d forgotten how dithering and miserly English rain could be—a whole day of mist and drizzle and the actual precipitation might barely cover the bottom of a bucket.

And she’d forgotten how cool it was, fires lit at the very end of August, and still she felt the damp chill rising from the floorboards.

“Bryony,” Callista called her name.

She turned around slowly.

“I’m sorry,” said Callista. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

Occasionally Bryony had nightmares, swords and darkness and Leo bleeding from a thousand cuts. She’d jerk awake, gasping, and not be able to go back to sleep for hours, her heart quaking with the knowledge of how close they’d come.

Times like that she’d get quite angry with Callista, for her reckless fabrications. Leo could have died from the Pathans’ swords or been shot and felled, like that less fortunate sepoy standing next to him.

It was always easier to blame someone else.

She walked to the far side of the bed, where Callista stood with her back against the wall. She took Callista’s hands in hers, touching her sister for the first time in years, perhaps decades.

“It’s all right,” she said.

Three common words, a common phrase, as ordinary as sparrows and moths. Yet, as the syllables left her lips, they felt like jewels, round and brilliant. And her heart was somehow more whole, more spacious.

She returned to her father’s side, and sat down on the chair that had been placed by the bed. Only one lamp had been lit, but its light, the color of faded brass, caught every wrinkle and sag on Geoffrey Asquith’s face. When had he become so old?

“You have changed,” said Callista.

Bryony raised her head.

“When I was small, it was difficult for me to be around you,” Callista continued. “All your emotions were so intense—your anger like daggers, your unhappiness a poisoned well. Even your love had such sharp corners and dark alleys.

“Then there were years when I thought you were sleepwalking through life, drugged with work, the way people who take too much laudanum feel nothing. But when you became engaged to Leo, the magnitude of your happiness frightened me. It felt like an overloaded apple cart—the least bump in the road might upset the whole thing.”

Bryony almost chuckled at her description. It was quite apt, really, a cart overloaded with apples, a heart overloaded with hopes, both equally prone to overturning.

Callista smiled. “I guess what I’m really trying to say is that you used to shatter easily. But now you’ve become less brittle.”

Bryony brought her hands to rest on the edge of the bed—the sheets were French, as fine and soft as spun cloud. In a way, Leo had been right. She’d shattered too easily because she hadn’t known how to love anyone less perfect, thoughtful, and devoted than Toddy. But now, she thought, she was learning.

“I hope so,” she said.

Callista went to bed at eleven o’clock. Bryony remained by her father’s side. A quarter hour later there were footsteps in the hall. She thought it was Callista coming back, but it was her stepmother.

Mrs. Asquith was in her mid-fifties, with the kind of finely wrought features that would still be finely wrought when she reached her seventies. She touched her husband’s forehead and briefly fussed with the counterpane. They were perfect strangers, Bryony and Mrs. Asquith, even though Mrs. Asquith had been married to Geoffrey Asquith for twenty-four years.

By the time she came to live with Bryony and Callista, she had been worn down by her sons’ long years of illness and was herself in imperfect health. She had not made very many overtures to win over Bryony’s affection. Bryony, with the memory of the execrable governess that had been Mrs. Asquith’s hire very much fresh on her mind, had freely ignored Mrs. Asquith.

That distance, once established, took on its own air of immutability. Like a piece of furniture that pleased no one, yet offended no one enough to remove, it remained in place, year after year.

Mrs. Asquith straightened. She placed a thin hand against a bedpost and gazed down at her dying husband. She looked much older than Bryony remembered.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” Bryony asked.

“I’ll be fine in time,” said Mrs. Asquith. She lifted her eyes and looked at Bryony. “I don’t know whether I shall see much of you after your father—I don’t know how much I shall see of you in the future, so I thought I would speak to you now.

“I understood very well at the time your father proposed to me that he needed a mother for his children and I was prepared to assume that responsibility. But then both Paul’s and Angus’s health failed—”

She exhaled. “What I mean to say is that I did very poorly by you and your sister in those years, but especially by you. I have no defense except to say that as my sons suffered and deteriorated, it seemed to me that you and Callista were blessed with everything children could ask for: good, robust health. By the time I realized the mistake in my assumption, years had passed and—and I was never there. I’m sorry.”

“You couldn’t have been everywhere at once, ma’am. You must not blame yourself for attending to Paul and Angus when they needed you.”

“Yes, but you and Callista needed me too.”

Bryony looked down at her father’s inert figure. “We have a father, ma’am. He could have bestirred himself a little more when you had to be away.”

“Yes, he could have. He should have,” agreed Mrs. Asquith. “However, it did not occur to me to point out his failings to him, because I was so grateful that he did not take me to task for what I had failed to do.”

She paused. “There was another occasion, however, when I did point out his failing to him. That was when he debated whether to allow you to go to medical school. I was adamantly against the idea. I thought—I’m sorry—I thought you were being headstrong and needlessly rebellious and I was aghast that he even gave the idea due consideration. I believed it would ruin your chance at a suitable marriage and reduce the prestige of the Asquith name all at once.

“He agonized over it. But in the end he said to me that he had not the moral authority to forbid you to go. That since he had given you so little in life, he owed you the freedom to choose your own path.”

Mrs. Asquith bent and kissed her husband on the forehead. She did the same with Bryony.

“I thought you should know that,” said Mrs. Asquith, before she left quietly in a swirl of trailing robes and lilac powder.

Bryony thought she dreamed that someone was squeezing her hand. But as she lifted her head from the bed and blinked at the unfamiliar surroundings, her hand was again squeezed.

“Father!”

Geoffrey Asquith looked no different. His eyes remained stubbornly closed, his mouth disconcertingly slack on the side away from Bryony. She flung aside the counterpane and watched his hand.

“Can you hear me, Father? It’s Bryony.”

This time she saw it. His fingers, closing around hers.

Her eyes filled with inexplicable tears. “I’m back. I came back from India.”

He squeezed again, so she kept on talking. “It was quite an adventure. Mr. Marsden traveled a thousand miles to find me, so that I could come home to see you. Yes, that Mr. Marsden, the one who used to be your son-in-law. I would have arrived sooner, but Mr. Marsden suffered a malarial attack. And then we found ourselves in the middle of an actual war on the Indian frontier. But we are safe and I’m here now.”

She raised his hand and held in tight. “Mr. Marsden is a staunch defender of yours, even though you once boxed him senseless over me—or perhaps because you once boxed him senseless over me. He likes your books. And he says that you love me.”

Her father squeezed her hand hard. It was the strongest squeeze yet. She interlaced their fingers and rested the back of his hand against her cheek.

“I don’t suppose”—she was suddenly choking a little. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever thanked you for letting me go to medical school. Or for marrying Toddy—she was wonderful.”

She touched her other hand to his bearded jaw. “Do you remember the summer when I was six? You came with Toddy and me on our walks a few times. One time we went to the village. And you bought me a box of toffee. Another time we picked wild strawberries together and had them with fresh cream at home.”

He squeezed her hand again, but it was a weaker squeeze.

“I don’t think you cared for wild strawberries,” she raised her voice, as if trying to make herself heard to someone who was moving further and further away. “But Toddy kept giving you looks, so you ate them anyway, because I picked them and I loved them.”

The squeeze, when it came, was even more anemic. He was fading away. Something fierce gripped her heart. “I love you.”

To that, Geoffrey Asquith gave one final squeeze.

She sat for a long time, his hand held in her lap. But he did not exhibit any more signs of consciousness.

At dawn, when she woke up again, he had already passed away.

The house plunged into mourning. All the window blinds were pulled down—they would remain down until Geoffrey Asquith’s body departed the house on the day of his funeral. Black crape was draped over the front door. Mourning clothes arrived by the boxful, in crape for Mrs. Asquith, in paramatta silk for Bryony and Callista.

As grieving family members were not expected to worry about funeral arrangements, her father’s closest friends took care of them. Friends and acquaintances respected the privacy of the bereaved by not visiting, but Mrs. Asquith’s relations did call on her to offer their condolences.

In their black dresses, Bryony and Callista worked in the study, sorting their father’s papers. They were knee-deep in old invitations, cards, correspondences—her father had never thrown away anything addressed to him, it would seem. There were also boxes of manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and scraps of paper with various hastily scribbled fragments of thoughts on everything from Donne’s wit to Johnson’s hygiene.

“I wonder if they’ve gone yet,” said Callista, looking up from where she sat on the carpet.

“Who?”

“Mrs. Bourne and Mrs. Lawrence.” Mrs. Bourne and Mrs. Lawrence were Mrs. Asquith’s sisters. “Mrs. Lawrence grates on Stepmama. I don’t think she can take very much of Mrs. Lawrence just now.”

“I’ll go take a look and issue a medical opinion that she must have more rest.”

“Would you?”

“Of course.”

But before Bryony reached the entry hall, she heard footsteps descending the staircase and women’s voices. And then her own name.

“… never understood what Leo Marsden saw in Bryony Asquith. He could have had anyone. I tell you I wasn’t the least bit surprised that he wanted the annulment.”

“Oh, come, Letty, you don’t know why they decided on an annulment. Marriages are like shoes; only those on the inside know.”

“Well, everyone knew Leo Marsden was miserable married to her. What kind of happily married man would give dinner parties by himself and then go out and gamble all night?”

“Shhh, Letty. The servants.”

They left. Bryony placed a hand over her heart. It throbbed in agitation. In her three years abroad she’d forgotten what it was like to be in London again, surrounded by so many reminders of her unhappy marriage.

“Bryony,” said Callista behind her. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing. Mrs. Bourne and Mrs. Lawrence just left.”

“Good. Can’t stand Mrs. Lawrence. Always babbling about things she knows nothing about. Stupid cow.”

What did it say about Leo and herself that even a know-nothing woman like Mrs. Lawrence knew that Leo had been miserable married to her?

“Well, don’t stand there, come with me,” Callista walked backward toward the study, beckoning at Bryony with her hands. “Come and see what I’ve found.”

What Callista had found was an eight-inch-by-ten-inch photograph of a group of picnickers, laid flat on the surface of the desk. Bryony gasped. It was the picnic of her sixth birthday. There she was, seated at the front and center of the group in her new frock, which in the photograph was an indistinct light medium brown, but which in real life had been a lovely shade of apple green. There was Will, looking as if he’d never heard of such a thing as running about in the nude—the photograph had been taken before the entire party piled into two charabancs for the chosen picnic site two miles away, and therefore, before his memorable incident. And there was Toddy, standing in the back row, looking so impossibly young that it broke Bryony’s heart to realize that by the time the picture was taken, she had only one more year to live.

“It’s your mother,” she said softly.

“Yes, I know,” Callista said wistfully. “I always recognize her, like looking at myself in costume.”

Bryony fingered the edge of the photograph.

“This was one of the best days of my life.”

Callista smiled. “I can imagine. And, look, there’s Leo.” She pointed at the picture.

She saw him the same moment as Callista pointed him out, the chubby child to her right. He wore a dark-colored dress, the occasion of her sixth birthday being long before he was breeched—given his first outfit with trousers.

“My goodness, he was so small.”

“He should have been. He was two,” said Callista, smiling fondly. “And already he couldn’t stop looking at you.”

Bryony wouldn’t have described it that way. But in the photograph, Leo’s face was turned curiously toward her, as if she were more interesting than the camera, more absorbing than anyone else around him.

It was a dizzying sensation, to see the two people she loved the most together in one frame. And there she was, basking in happiness, basking in life.

“May I have this?”

“Of course,” said Callista. “The moment I saw it, I knew it belonged to you.”

The dark waters of the English Channel parted reluctantly before the bow of the ferry. The sea was choppy, fog-shrouded, and England, on a good day visible from Calais, seemed to be receding, rather than getting closer.

He’d been on the road forever.

Two days after Bryony left for Nowshera, Imran and the coolies arrived in Chakdarra. They’d been staying at a village three marches away, waiting for the fighting to subside.

Getting everything and everyone to Nowshera proved tricky. Travel had become impossible between Malakand and Nowshera. At several points along the dusty fifty miles, traffic degenerated into complete logjams with mules, pony carts, camels, and men unable to move two steps one way or another, broiling under a relentless sun.

Nowshera was in chaos, with regiments arriving from the south, regiments departing to the north, and all the pack animals and armaments that came and went with the regiments. Leo divested himself of everything he’d acquired for the trip. To each of the coolies and the ayah he gave a mule. All the horses he’d bought along the way he divided among Imran, Hamid, and Saif Khan, except the valiant mare that had carried him and Bryony safely to Chakdarra: She was going to spend the rest of her carefree days in an English pasture.

It was a fight to get out of Nowshera with Udyana—he’d named the mare after the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Swat—and Bryony’s things. He called in all the connections he had and shamelessly exploited his status as a hero of Chakdarra. The bamboozling paid off in the end. He got his way, boarded the train exhausted, and slept all the way to Bombay.

P&O steamers departed Bombay every Friday during the southwest monsoon. One had left three days before he arrived. But he was lucky: Austrian Lloyd’s had an unscheduled extra steamer that departed the next day for Trieste. From Trieste he was again on the train, crossing the Alps from Italy into France, to Paris, where Matthew met him, and then on to Calais and the Channel crossing that would finally take him back to England.

To the rest of his life.

Sometimes he missed the war. Not the fear, not the exhaustion, and most certainly not the killing, but the almost blinding clarity of things. In that crucible, everything between him and Bryony had been distilled to the very essence: Only love had mattered, nothing else.

But as Chakdarra receded into the past, old fears and doubts crept back. Once the exhilaration of their reunion wore off, once the newness of their lovemaking was no longer so new, how would she see him? No matter how careful he was, invariably someday he would do something to make her angry. What then? Would all the old unhappiness rush to the fore? Would she remember that he had once betrayed her and regret that she’d ever given him a second chance?

Or would she protect herself from the beginning by keeping a certain distance from him, so that their closeness would always fall short of true communion, always denying him that final forgiveness so that he could never hurt her again?

And he, was he strong enough to persist in the face of this lack of trust? It had been this very fear that had led him to reject her overture in the dak bungalow, unwilling to let the emotions of a moment dictate the rest of his life, afraid to be either an abject lackey at her side, or worse, a bitter mate resentful over being forever condemned for one mistake.

He looked down into the photograph in his hand, their wedding photograph. He used to think that she looked wooden. But no, she looked haunted, her eyes as bleak as the rains of January. How could anyone come back from that? How could she ever truly love him again?

He returned the photograph to his pocket at the sound of Matthew’s footsteps.

“The fog is lifting,” said Matthew. “We should see Dover soon.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder on the bow. The fog dissipated, the sun shone, and even the opaque, unromantic waters of the English Channel glinted in the morning light.

When the white cliffs of Dover came into view, Leo did not have an epiphany; he made a choice.

Trust ran both ways. How could he ask her to trust him when he hardly trusted her? He would trust her, in her love, in her strength, in her decency and fortitude.

And when the time came, he would find the strength in himself.