Page 59 of Ten Rules for Loving the Wrong Rake

They washed their dishes and walked out into the September sun, hand in hand. The apple trees were heavy with fruit. At the far edge, where the ground dipped towards the boundary ditch, a flat pale stone marked a grave that no one visited.

Kit knelt with one knee on the ground, his hand on the pale stone, his head bowed. She stood beneath the nearest tree and waited, her cane sinking into the soft ground, the wind moving through the branches above her. He stayed for a while. Then he straightened and turned and smiled.

"This is him?" she asked.

"It is."

She crossed the grass to him. Stood beside him and looked down at the stone and the grass that had rooted over the grave, thick and green, indistinguishable from the rest of the orchard floor.

“Did you know his name?”

“Not his real name. He was known as Tubby for tubman.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No.”

She took his hand. The blister had healed into a pale ridge of new skin between his thumb and forefinger. She traced it with her thumb.

"The captain's men came through last night," Kit said. "Two of them. Brought cargo through before dawn." He tore his bread.

She liked the captain. She had met him twice now, and both times he had treated her with a respect he seemed to reserve for women who had thrown caustic powder in a villain's face. He called her Mrs Crewe. She called him Captain. They understood each other.

Mrs Crewe. She was still getting used to it. The signing at the village church had been three weeks ago. The magistrate as witness. No guests. No flowers. No music. Kit had worn a clean shirt, and she had worn the dress she arrived in and the whole thing had taken eleven minutes. He had signed the register in a hand that shook: Raphael Crewe. She had signed beneath it, and the vicar had pronounced them and that was that.

They had walked home. He had carried her over the threshold because she had told him not to and she had hit his shoulder and called him a blackguard. He had set her down in the kitchen and kissed her and held her tight and said nothing.

She looked at him with the sun setting behind him. A warmth arrived without permission. It did that now, at the least convenient moments. While arguing about brandy. While watching him eat. While listening to him dismiss a merchant. Sometimes she wondered if it all had been a dream. An assassin who could not kill her. A woman who married him, spreading raspberry preserve on her toast, alive and housed and content.

The world made no sense. She had stopped expecting it to.

"We have each other now," she said.

He brought their hands up and kissed her knuckles.

"You’re my family," he said. "You and this broken house and the bloody tunnel."

"And the marmalade."

"The marmalade."

They stood there until the light failed. Then they walked back to the kitchen, where the fire was lit and the bread was rising and the boy had set the table for three.

Some rules a woman must write herself.