AFTER THREE DAYS IN his carriage, Jack was a mass of thwarted energy and wonderings and worries. As soon as the wheels turned from the main road and rolled past the low red-brick wall that edged this side of his property, he was knocking to his driver to pull up. Then he was opening the door, bounding down, arranging to have his things brought on to the main house, and haring off to the dower house.

The Grahames had always owned a great deal of land, though it hadn’t produced well until the Wilcox money had allowed for improvements in drainage. Now, as the carriage trundled on along the graveled drive to Westerby Grange, he cut through tidy fields and passed beneath trees, fresh and spring green. Here and there, the land was still wild, and he slopped through the edge of a waterlogged fen. Thinking, wondering, with every pumping stride. Had it been worth it, leaving London and Marianne? Was his mother well? Had he done right?

A small distance separated the dower house from the main building, and Jack’s path had been the most direct. Let the carriage make its ponderous and proper way; he’d thunder through one more copse and—there! The smaller copy of the Grange was square and sturdy red brick, with a bowed front, and...and thank God, there was no black crepe swagged over the windows. If Mrs. Grahame was gravely ill, she yet survived.

He strode to the front entrance, now feeling every bit of the heavy sog of his abused boots, and caught his breath before he thumped the knocker. The butler who answered wore his usual uniform of severe black and white, his usual mien of unflappable politeness.

“Mr. Grahame, good afternoon,” said Trilby. “May I say, sir, welcome home?”

“You may, with my thanks,” Jack said, still slightly winded. “Is my mother well?”

“She is almost herself again.” The butler stood aside to welcome Jack into the little entrance hall. Trilby, a long-loved and now elderly servant, had moved from the main house to the dower with Jack’s mother upon his marriage. Jack trusted the old servant’s report more than his own mother’s account of her health, which was likely to be offhanded and vague so as not to worry him.

Perhaps he’d inherited that hide-the-troublesome-truth quality from his mother.

With Trilby’s reassurance, Jack let out a great breath. It released the tension within him, though it left him hollow and dissatisfied. If he’d known...if he hadn’t left London...

Would it have mattered? Or would he have ruined his chance with Marianne soon enough, in some similar way?

Trilby would never raise his brows or demonstrate impatience, but the way he hovered close was an unmistakable nudge. “Would you care to join Mrs. Grahame and Mrs. Redfern in the drawing room? Miss Grahame arrived perhaps ten minutes ago, and tea has just been served.”

Miss Grahame—that meant his sister Viola. Maybe it was for the best that he’d walk in on all three women at once. He could greet them all, then leave with his duty done, and they could get on with their gossip about him.

Taking the hint from Trilby, Jack entered the drawing room and faced the trio of familiar faces that turned his way. There was Marianne’s mother, Mrs. Redfern, a spare and tidy woman almost crippled by rheumatism, but still with the strong chin and bright eyes she’d bequeathed to her three daughters. Viola, Jack’s elder sister, in her usual half mourning, with wide and shrewd gray eyes and her light hair in a low knot. And in her favorite chair, surrounded by cushions, was Jack’s mother, as round and wrinkled as an apple beginning to show its age and still just as rosy. Her once-black hair was now heavily salted with white, and it curled as tightly as Jack’s would if he didn’t keep it cropped short.

True to the butler’s word, she looked well enough. She was tired, that was clear from the cushions supporting her, but her hands on her cup and saucer were steady. Her voice, when she greeted Jack, was clear.

And then began the interrogation.

“Jacob Elias, you’ve come all alone?” She craned her neck to look behind him. “No Marianne with you?”

Jacob, ugh. Elias, double ugh. “I rushed back to see how you were,” Jack explained. “Marianne still had work to do in London.”

Mrs. Redfern’s shoulders sank. “I’d wished to see her again, very much.”

She wasn’t the only one, though all three women knew that. Jack had journeyed to London on impulse, he thought, but not a one of these widows had seemed surprised by his plans. Instead, they’d all told him a more ladylike version of, It’s about damned time, and, Put a ring on her finger, and, You sapskull.

“Why on earth are you here without her?” Jack’s mother asked. “I was only sending you news. I didn’t ask you to return home. Why didn’t you just write?”

“What does my daughter look like now?” asked Mrs. Redfern. “Is she well? Did she send you with a letter for me?”

“What did you do to ruin things with Marianne?” Viola demanded.

Jack rolled his eyes. “Can’t I have tea and cakes before you sling all these questions at me?”

“Fine,” said his mother. “But you have to sit on the jackal.”

Strange though it sounded, this statement made perfect sense to Jack. His mother, flush with funds and independence all at once, had completely redecorated the dower house in Egyptian style a few years before. Her chair, striped in a bright gold and blue silk, nestled in a corner of the small drawing room. Near at hand was a scroll-back settee of startling crimson on which perched the other two women. Which meant the only other place to sit was on the larger-than-life seated jackal of black-painted wood.

Not for the first time, Jack sat on the back of his near-namesake and patted its pricked ears. “Two sugars, please, Mother,” he said. “I’m tired out from the trip. And in answer to your questions—as you see, Marianne’s not with me. Mrs. Redfern, she’s well and strong and beautiful, and she cooks like a dream, and I’m a villain for not getting a letter from her.

“And I didn’t write for news, Mother, because...I wanted to see for myself that you were all right.” He’d come to see how his mother did, just as he’d gone to London to see Marianne. He didn’t want to write to people when he could see them for himself.

He just wished he hadn’t had to leave one person behind to see the others.

She handed over his tea with a smile. “It’s a good thing you cared enough to come. I had a few bad days of it and complained unendingly.”

“You weren’t that bad,” allowed Mrs. Redfern. “But there are many reasons to be grateful you’ve recovered.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Viola said. “What have you done wrong?”

“Why must I have done anything wrong?” He gulped tea, taking strength from its heat and sweetness. “How do you know we’re not betrothed and I’m not deliriously happy?”

All three women looked at him in pointed silence.

After a moment, he relented. Balancing his cup beside him on the jackal’s back, he said, “She thinks I don’t trust her. So she’s done with me.”

All three women looked at him in accusing silence.

Viola was the first to break it. Sighing heavily, she stood, which meant Jack did also. “Walk me back to the Grange,” she said. “You can explain everything on the way.”

“I want to know all the gossip!” cried their mother.

“We’ll get it later,” soothed Mrs. Redfern. “Either Viola will tell us, or I’ll write to Marianne and hear her side.”

“Or you could leave it be.” Jack retrieved his cup, drained his tea, then set cup and saucer on the tea tray. “And trust that I did my best and don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

All three women looked at him in surprised silence. Then, as if cued by a conductor, they all hooted with laughter. Jack recalled the feeling of being flipped and pummeled during one of Miss Carpenter’s lessons.

“Come on, we’ll walk back before you make a fool of yourself.” Viola took Jack’s arm. Bidding the older women farewell, they left the little house and stepped out into the blueing evening light.

Days were long in May, for which he was grateful. He’d arrived in daylight, able to blunder across his own land, able to orient himself to the familiar space of it. As if he’d never gone to London, given his heart anew, chopped cabbage, tried to set a new course for his life. Bought strawberries and honeycomb. Hunted for a bit of the past he’d thought he’d lost.

Their footsteps crunched on the neat gravel path. Jack bent to pluck a weed that interrupted the smooth, pale surface.

When he straightened, Viola looked at him quizzically. “It’s my responsibility,” he said. It was all his responsibility. Just as the Donor Dinner—that was today, wasn’t it?—was Marianne’s and Mrs. Brodie’s.

They were where they belonged.

“Sorry I got Mother and Mrs. Redfern laughing at you,” Viola said when Jack took her arm again. Their pace was slow, as if neither of them wanted to arrive at their destination. “I thought they’d ask you fewer questions if they took your arrival lightly. Neither of them’s been well, you know.”

“I know.” Mrs. Redfern had been in pain for years, unable to travel beyond the nearby hamlet. Certainly unable to go to London and visit her absent daughter. And his own mother—well, her health had been worn into his brain for days. “It’s all right. Just...don’t start laughing again yourself.”

“I wouldn’t.” Viola looked thinner since he’d left more than a fortnight before, but peaceful. Calm. Her smile was ready and knowing, as if she’d come to some decision Jack had yet to realize was facing him. “But I am surprised you left London without a promise from Marianne. So long, I lived in your house with the love you couldn’t have. I thought you’d want to do the same to me.”

“There’s no revenge of that where love is concerned.” His boots were dark on the gravel, each step square and careful. “I’d never have wished you a widow, Vee. I know you still miss her.”

She caught the gray lace at her throat. “Yes,” she said simply. “You might be the only one who knows how much.”

A spinster sister living with a newly married couple was ordinary enough. For that spinster to love the bride, though, and vice versa, was thought unnatural by many. In public, Viola’s grief had to be that of a sister, a friend. In private, Jack had let her cry on his shoulder as often as she’d needed to. He could never envy her loss, but he did envy her devotion. No one would shed so many tears over him. No one existed for him to weep over as if he’d lost his heart.

Maybe that was not such a bad thing. Some part of Jack had always longed for Marianne, his missing piece. Briefly made whole again, he’d been cleaved anew. He would need far more than a few days to forget that time at her side.

Was it better to forget? Or to be changed?

“I have been thinking,” Viola said, “that I should like to move households.”

Ah. So this was the decision behind that beatific smile. “Surely not to live with Mother?”

Viola’s expression of horror was eloquent. “Indeed not. I love visiting her, but living with her would make me only a daughter again. I’ve altered too much for that.”

Jack nodded, accepting. “What have you in mind?”

“A cottage, maybe. Not like a tenant. I don’t know how to do anything useful. But a cottage of my own, where I won’t be surrounded by...so much.”

After two years, she was ready to break from the constant reminders of loss in the house she and Helena had shared. He could understand that. He could smile, even, at her assertion that she didn’t know how to do anything useful. It reminded him of Marianne—and since those reminders were all too few here, he didn’t want to escape them. Yet.

“You know how to make a home,” Jack told his sister. “Nothing could be more useful for a woman who wants her own cottage. You find a place you like, and I’ll buy it and deed it to you. Helena would like that, don’t you think?”

“She would like to see us happy. And on an evening like this, how could we not be?” Viola lifted her face to the sky, breathing in deeply.

To Jack, the air smelled clean and cool. The sky was big and open, poked gently by treetops. There were the croplands, their earth rich and smooth and well tended. The wolds, high and rolling and treed, and the fens to balance, grassy and waterlogged and teeming with buntings and crickets and butterflies. The sun began to yawn gold and pink across the deepening blue above.

It was nothing like London.

He’d gone to find the man he used to be. He’d gone to feel something, to be absolved. And he had placed all that responsibility on Marianne’s shoulders, though he swore he wanted nothing from her.

He’d always wanted something from her. He had always wanted her to love him. When he tried to make himself into the sort of man he’d always wanted to be, it was because that was the sort of man he’d grown up admiring. Just as she’d been swaddled in silks and taught to paint and sew and flirt, his examples had been men who mended fences—literally and figuratively. Men who rode and learned and were accomplished at everything from Latin to getting a muddy field to produce. And never, in all those years, had anything made him as happy as learning to cook had made Marianne.

When she went away, she’d learned who she wanted to be. Never yet had Jack sorted out so much. He’d come all the way from Lincolnshire to London hoping she’d solve his problems. Hoping she’d make it all right that he’d spent the years away from her by leaping, now, into his arms.

But neither of them was the same as they’d been eight years before, when she might have leaped—but he wouldn’t have been able to catch her. They were, deep down, the same people, but they knew better now. She wouldn’t leap unless she knew she could land on her own, and he...here he stood with his arms empty.

It was what he’d earned. The reaping of the lonely life he’d sown, where he’d become a bounty to the people around him, but neglected to feed his own heart.

“Right,” Jack agreed into the silence. “Right. I can be happy here.” What was the alternative? Never feeling joy at all?

Viola looked at him sharply. “No. I’m sorry I said that. You don’t have to be happy this evening. It’s not a requirement, and there’s no schedule you must follow.”

But that didn’t comfort. If he didn’t have a schedule, how could he know he’d ever reach his goal?

Whatever the devil it was.

“Are you coming in?” Viola asked. They had reached the front door of the Grange, the old brick manor house.

“Not yet,” Jack told his sister. “I’ll be in by dark.”

She nodded, then climbed the steps and entered the house.

It was the only home Jack had ever known, and it wasn’t nearly the home it ought to have been. Not because of any flaw in the house, which had stood and abided generations of Grahames, but because of the people who had raised him.

Had Jack’s father had any regrets? He had no more regretted a life without passionate love than he would have regretted the temperature of the North Sea. It hadn’t been within his power. And Jack couldn’t blame him for that any more than he’d have blamed the sea for being cold.

He split from the graveled path before the house, taking a less-worn but ever familiar track onto lands that had once belonged to Marianne’s father. Now they were his.

Beehives and all.

The hives were cultivated in sawed-off logs mounted upright, a shortened forest abuzz at this hour with bees returning for the night. On top of some were little house-shaped structures, a newer sort of hive hinged and cunningly divided so the nest would form up the middle and the honey and combs be constructed along the sides.

The bees were dedicated and predictable. This was what made them survive.

He’d been dedicated and predictable too, to Marianne. He’d reacted to protect himself, to hoard the little drops of honey, because he thought he’d never get more.

The things he’d done with the past eight years were good. Though he didn’t give a damn about Latin and would happily forget it, he liked the fitness of his body, the quick understanding of the problems his land developed. He liked being able to understand when people were talking about him in another language, as if it were a secret code. He wouldn’t end these things.

But they weren’t enough—not for others, but for him. And if he wasn’t enough for himself, how could he ever be enough for Marianne?

He hadn’t really become the sort of man he wanted to be, the sort who trusted he could have what he wanted. The things money couldn’t buy.

The things one had to deserve, to earn. The things one couldn’t win with a bribe of a treat, or a week and a half of hard work and deep pleasures.

The things one received by being present, by being real, by being devoted and honest and true.

Marianne was right: He’d tried to buy his way out of the trouble he’d foreseen. And in doing so, he’d earned himself a problem entirely new.

He watched the bees find their hives. Homing in, knowing their place. But if their hive was upset, they’d build a new comb. Store more honey. They wouldn’t give up; if they did, they wouldn’t live.

There were worse examples. Even if his figurative hive lacked a queen.

So he thought about where he’d been most content. Not happy, brilliant and flashing, but content. Surviving and living and growing. Doing good.

And the answer was: with his hands in the dirt, making it easier for something to grow. With someone to talk to all the while at his side about anything from life’s deepest questions to whether that cloud looked like a naked breast.

Ah, well. His lover and best friend lived in London now. She’d chosen London over him, cooking over home, the academy girls over her mother. That was her choice, and it angered him not to be chosen, but he had to forgive it. Without needing her to apologize for it, because she’d the right to make it.

But maybe he could bring a little of London to Lincolnshire. There had to be more women like her, like Viola, who wanted to learn more than they had. Daughters of impoverished merchants and tradespeople, too fine for service but unlikely to wed. Women who wanted to stand on their own.

One might even call them exceptional young ladies.

He wouldn’t stop hoping for the return of the queen, but he couldn’t force her to love him. To choose him. So he planned something else.

And he told the bees, in that old tradition, and asked for their blessing and their joy.