"How long until the chicken is ready?" he asked softly.
Beatrice smiled, a real, warm expression that reached her eyes. "Ten minutes," she said. "Set the table."
January came down on Yorkshire like a hammer. The moors froze solid. The wind howled through the cracked masonry of Harrow Gate, and the snow piled high against the lower windows, but inside, the house was breathing. It was a shallow, ragged breath, perhaps, but it was life.
Beatrice and Arthur lived entirely in the kitchen and the west wing, sealing off the rest of the massive, drafty manor to conserve heat. Their days settled into a brutal, rhythmic cadence of survival: they woke in the dark, they broke the ice in the washbasins, they hauled wood, they boiled water, they kept the fires burning.
Arthur changed. The gaunt, hollow-eyed ghost who had haunted the corridors weeks ago slowly faded. In his place stood a man forged by necessity: he chopped wood until his shoulders broadened and his calluses grew thick; when the meat ran low, he took an old, rusted fowling piece from the armory and spent hours in the freezing woods, coming back with rabbits and pheasants; he stopped drinking entirely.
The withdrawal had been a quiet, violent agony, played out in the dark of his study. Beatrice had left him alone during it, leaving only a pitcher of clean water and a damp cloth by his door. When he finally emerged, pale and shaking, neither of them spoke of it; they just went back to work.
One evening in late February, the wind was screaming against the glass. The kitchen was suffocatingly warm, smelling of wood smoke and the faint sweet scent of the dried apples Beatrice was simmering on the stove. Arthur was sitting at the heavy wooden table, hunched over a piece of harness leather he was trying to mend with a thick needle, his brow furrowed in concentration. Beatrice was sitting across from him, mending a tear in the sleeve of his only good wool coat.
The silence between them had become a physical thing. It wasn't empty; it was dense, heavy with the weight of things unsaid. They moved around each other in the small space with an unspoken choreography: they knew exactly how the other took their tea; they knew the sound of each other's footsteps on the stairs.
"You're pulling the thread too tight," Beatrice said softly, not looking up from her stitching. "The leather will bunch."
Arthur stopped. He looked at the mangled seam in his hands, then up at her. The firelight caught the stray strands of brown hair escaping from her bun. She looked exhausted. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her hands were permanently red from the lye soap. Yet to him, she had become the center of gravity in a world that had spent two years spinning out of control.
"I lack your precision," he murmured, setting the leather down. He leaned back, stretching his stiff shoulders. "I went to Oak Haven today."
Beatrice's needle paused. She looked up. "To the butcher?"
"To the baker. His roof collapsed under the snow last week." Arthur ran a hand over his face. "I helped him clear the timber. I told him I would send a cart of slate from the old quarry on the estate to patch it in the spring. I told him the estate would cover the cost."