This one's for Kslchen, who I unwittingly caused acute distress to earlier. Mea Maxima Culpa. And for Formerly Known As J, who was good enough to polish my Latin for me. Also proof that I still remember what a normative chapter length is for screen reading. And evidence I can be prompt about updates. Sometimes. In spite of Design Shows that muck my week about. Look, I have lots of writing composition time then. Oh, and this may or may not be a testament to what happens when you grow up reading Iona and Peter Opie...

Finally, if the last Nan/Jerry chapter was the 'Have His Carcass' instalment, this is the 'Gaudy Night' one in household parlance. If you know your Sayers, you'll know why.

The calendar said it was spring. On Una's almanac calendar the spring equinox had long since been dotted red to mark its passing. Jerry had watched her do it while quizzing her on the virtues of assorted fountain-pen nibs and which would be preferable to a writer between visits to Avonlea. But they had had a long winter, and Avonlea was still blanketed in fine, downy drifts of snow. There was enough of it that the train was declassified due to weather, a circumstance that back at White Sands he had not understood, but was beginning to understand now. All that flyaway snow, and the wind rattling down the line meant that all told it was difficult to see much beyond vast expanses of white, punctured occasionally by whirls of green Jerry took for pine trees. So much for spring. Nan assured him that in the right weather the countryside was awash in variegated greens, and pinking cherry blossoms, brassy yellow daffodils flanking the rails, but he had yet to see it. And he hadn't written to say he was coming, either. Should he have done, Jerry wondered uneasily now? Ever one for fine distinctions, every past visit had been duly marked in curliqued writing on Nan's own calendar –he'd seen that too. Marked again by Milly Keith, though she had jotted the days in pencil, he recalled, finding it awkward to use a fountain pen against the wall and determined to keep ink out of her pastry.

The train came abruptly to a halt and he craned his neck in an effort to see something out the window. If he squinted he could just pick out the station. They had stopped short of it –why? At least it was blessedly quiet. He could bear that. No clanging bells or wailing bagpipes to set his teeth on edge and make him remember. Only white silence like dew, downy and deep.

After what seemed an interminable interval an apologetic conductor appeared to explain that a horse appeared to have slipped its tether and was now stood on the line until word could be sent to the station to see about having it moved. Jerry nodded sympathy and rubbed his hands against the back of his neck for warmth, before trying them on his stomach. It was freezing in the little third-class carriage and he supposed he'd be there for some time yet. All told, little Bruce was going to be thoroughly unimpressed by any recapitulation of this journey that Jerry brought back to him.

A cloud passed over the sun and sent the snow slipping uneasily into massy shadow, the pines stretched taut in the sudden gloom. Then there as a hiss, and a rattle and the little train lurched forward again. If nothing else, he would be in Avonlea this side of evening, and that was beginning to feel like no small accomplishment.

He tried the schoolhouse first, and found it empty, though the key was easily enough discernible, tucked into a jam jar behind a planter, presently vacant. An old Ingleside trick, that. Briefly Jerry considered going in and waiting. It would get him out of the cold, and the little yellow-stone affair certainly looked warmer than his present environs. He squinted through the windows and the imperfectly drawn lace netting; in the half-light he could just make out the shape of the sitting room beyond his reflection. There was the fireplace with its yellow flags and afterthought of a mantle, a pot of ivy it looked as though Nan had nursed through the winter, her favourite of the Lynde quilts draped haphazardly over the sofa-back and a book balancing precariously on the sofa-arm, it's leather bookmark slightly off-kilter, as if it had been inserted in haste. He strained his neck to make out the spine, but no luck. He spent a further five minutes entertaining himself with guesses at its title; not worn enough for Persuasion, the wrong size for any of her Lady Molly, the wrong colour for The Well-Beloved, or indeed any of her folio Hardy.

He did better with the notebook spread open on the coffee table, his gift of the slim-nibbed, gold-plated pen nestled in its spine as hand in glove. That would be one of her Lord Harrington adventures, Jerry was sure; they had positively taken wing in the years since she had graduated Redmond, no longer whimsical economies but ambitious narratives that stepped wilfully on the toes of conventional mystery. Content with this conclusion he turned from the warmth of the house and went in search of Nan.

He found her at the school. It was so obvious Jerry wondered how it hadn't been his first thought, early afternoon on a Wednesday. She was taken up with the arduous affair of ramming Latin down recalcitrant throats and so missed his appearance, which suited Jerry. He leaned against the shadowed part of the doorframe, the cold of the cloakroom negligible after the train, and gloried quietly in watching her. From the sound of it, she was having almost as much of a slog as the train had had getting to Bright River. Presently what Jerry could only suppose was a Sloane was chanting:

Latin is a dead tongue,
Dead as it can be!
First it killed the Romans,
Now it's killing me!

It was obviously a fairly routine occurrence, because all Nan said on the subject, and that mildly, was 'As you're so keen on your Latin, Anthony, would you remind the rest of us what the participle parts of a verb are?'

Anthony appeared to consider this, then ducked his head –the better to hide a grin, Jerry thought –and began,

Detention, detention, detention,
I've forgotten my Latin declension…

'Yes but Anthony, it's nouns you decline, not verbs,' still mildly. Jerry wondered Nan didn't shake him. He was only an onlooker and seriously considering it. Pye, he wondered, or Sloane? Or was there some other Avonlea family worse than either? Whatever his family name, the boy was unrepentant. He wasn't even trying to stifle his grin as he launched into a poem Jerry had all but forgotten, though he remembered well enough that Jem had been keen on it.

Amo, amas, I love a lass,
As a cedar tall and slender…

'Right,' said Nan, curtailing this recitation early, 'I'll put you down as being Against, on the subject of The Value of Latin, shall I, Anthony? Anyone want to argue For?'

Around the room sobs of laughter died in throats and eyes went wide in mixtures that ran from confusion and dismay to alarm, panic, and entertainment. It was vastly apparent this was a tried and tested technique. The room had gone much too still for real surprise. 'No one?' said Nan. 'Well, shall I argue for it in that case?'

'But Miss,' said the boy called Anthony in tones of horror, 'Miss, that's not fair! You know everything.'

'Not nearly so much as I'd like to,' said Nan. 'Shall you begin?'

It was not a long-lived debate, much to Jerry's dismay, and it ended in Anthony's imperfect recitation of participle parts of verbs. They segued from Latin grammar to English poetry to general groaning all round.

'But Miss, must we,' darted in syncopation around the classroom.

'You really must,' said Nan to the blackboard she was writing on. Her handwriting was improbably large on it, to Jerry's mind. He'd expected the dainty, curlicued script that decorated her letters, but of course no one could have read it at a distance. They were midway through The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when the bell went. At least half the room bolted at once, books half-packed or slung carelessly under arms. They jostled past Jerry in their haste for their coats, while the others fussily packed away exercise books, texts, and hunted treasures from their desk that they didn't trust to the school overnight. One or two stopped by Nan's desk for a word, and then eeled quietly away, leaving her free.

He came into the room relatively noiselessly after the mad clamour that had been the children. Nan was clapping eraser brushes out the window, their dust improbably haloing her like a patron saint of Demoralised Latin Scholars everywhere, and when she turned she dropped them in a clatter. Then she was running towards him, deftly dodging desks, her arms coming around his neck with a fierceness and surety like bindweed.

'I thought you were the inspector,' she said, laughing. Jerry felt the origin of it somewhere in her diaphragm from the closeness of her. She was spackled with the chalk dust still, and he had to turn his head away to sneeze as it tried to invade the territory of his nose.

'You don't think,' he said, looking over her shoulder towards the window, 'we hadn't better wait pleasantries until later?'

'We can give them things to talk about properly later. I'd have let them go early if I'd realized. Anthony Pye would have been thrilled.'

'He was discipuli …my cases are slipping. Unruly student, anyway?'

'That's the one. Let me think, what would he say if you asked,

Mallo I would rather be,
Mallo in an apple tree –'

'Mallo than a naughty boy,
Mallo in adversity'

Finished Jerry, and laughed, they both did. 'That I do remember.'

'So will Anthony, in secula seculorum. It's why I don't grudge him the rhymes. Often they're the best way to learn a thing, even the outlandish ones. And even the school board can't fight that logic, because I have Isaac Watts Divine and Moral Songs on my side.'

She had let him go in favour of retrieving her coat, and Jerry felt the cold of her absence where she had nestled, her head at the crook of his elbow, arms at his waist, the peculiar mix of apple blossom, chalk and wood smoke sharp still in his nose. Now she held out an arm to him and Jerry wove it through his. He let her lead the way. They wandered down a lane covered in cherry trees not quite brave enough to blossom yet, though along the ground the occasional iris had ventured forth, offering little arrows of colour along the boarder. Daffodils too, in clusters, their cups full of snow.

At some point Nan turned and Jerry found himself in a mixed wood, the kind where blue spruce knocked shoulders with oak and birch with cedar, their roots twisted round each other like sheets on a boat. The snow was less there, whether from the shelter of the trees or the fact that they were on a well-trammelled path was hard to say. But the air was full of the smoky smell of cedar and the green smell of flowering grass when Jerry said, 'You do admirably with your Pyes and Sloanes, considering.'

'I can negotiate Pyes and Sloanes.'

'Yes, but you shouldn't have to,' said Jerry. Nan laughed, and darting up on her toes kissed his nose where it was red with cold.

'The world doesn't work like that,' she said lightly.

'Well it should.'

'You wouldn't enjoy it if it did. Neither of us would. Too much sweetness rapidly cloys and all that.'

'I don't know, I expect we'd find things enough to do,' said Jerry.

'So do I. That's not what I mean.'

'It's not quite what I meant either,' said Jerry, and smiled. 'I mean, that too, of course. But I was thinking more –well, what would you do, if you could do anything in the world?'

'I'd give you the end of a red piece of thread,' said Nan, here eyes flashing the Blythe gleam, devilish, and merry –and absolutely bewitching by the wintery sunlight –all at once. Jerry shook his head, only partially to clear it. 'You always were better at Greek, angel. Translate that for me?'

'As if I have to,' said Nan. For a moment her right hand emerged from its glove, ink-dappled fingers flashing in the sun-dappling before staging a tactical retreat to shell-stitched wool. 'I'd write, of course,' she said, and Jerry couldn't help but be awed by the conviction of her, the way she seemed to fill and shimmer with it there in the woods, the smell of the snow sharp, and the scent of well-crushed needles like incense on the air. 'Not my economies, you know, but full-blooded narratives about real people, who do real things…and I suppose the murders would be part of it, they've got to be a sort of habit with Lord Harrington, et al, but they wouldn't be the point. They'd be good, Jerry, and beloved of people…but in the meantime, I can make do with Sloanes and Pyes, and Latin lesson plans. Look, I can bear slings and arrows from the world with you beside me. It was when you weren't it was awful.'

Abruptly Nan sat down among the melting snowdrifts, tugging Jerry with her. Nearer the ground the earthy smell of mouldering leaves, needles, and wet earth was thicker than ever, and musky in a way that made him think of the cathedrals and churches he had sometimes wandered into on leave days during the war, so much so that the old prayer came unbidden into his head, Oh God, keep her safe, keep them all safe. He turned to look at her, the picture she made with the muddied snow either side of her and her feet tucked under her knees for warmth, her skirt wrapped even tighter around her knees to the same end. There was a tree at her back, but of course there was. Apple, thought Jerry, looking up at the crown. But too early for blossoms –or too cold? He wove an arm around Nan's shoulder and drew her head onto his chest. She smelled of apple blossom, of chalk and now of the woodsiness of their surroundings, the hair that had escaped her cadogan knot going lightly static against the wool of his coat. She was pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, and looked radiant.

Without warning she said, 'It wasn't just the school, you know.'

'Hm?' said Jerry, tilting his head so that he looked down at her.

'You asked…back in Kingsport… if it was only the school that made me say I couldn't come back. It wasn't only the school.'

'I know, angel.'

'No, I don't know that you do. I told Faith. I ought to have said to you. It was where I was when the war was on. When you were wounded, twice, Jerry, and you went back. I think of Kingsport, and I think of Swallowgate, how safe and happy and loved we all were…but I think of the hours sewing too. Of spinning until my fingers were raw and bleeding, all so you wouldn't die of pneumonia –between bloody injuries as it turned out. And I think of the war, and the way we ran for the door –how hungry for news Faith and Mara and I were, how void and empty Swallowgate felt without Faith in it. Jerry, I loved it, and I wouldn't trade those years for anything, or the people in them, but I couldn't –I can't go back.'

'Of course not,' he said, smoothing the static of her hair. 'Never mind, darling.'

The snow seeped generously around them as they settled, dappling coats, clinging to gloves, even finding its way onto the brim of Nan's hat. Gently Jerry brushed it off, mindful of the precariously poised arrangement of flowers. They were real this visit, not the felt would-be marigolds of January. Where had she found them?

'Now,' he said, resettling her hat in place, 'let me see if I can do better than Mr. Pye for Latin conjugations.'

'Well that's no great effort,' said Nan with a smile, but Jerry was hardly listening. 'First present, that's amo, isn't it? I love?' As if in answer he kissed the brim of the hat, a sleek brown cloche trimmed in red ribbon, a spray of brassy daffodils spilling over its brim. 'Then it would be amavi –'

'You've missed the infinitive,' said Nan, but without rancour.

'Hush, you're spoiling my fun. I never said anything about participle parts. Amavi –that's I loved,' with a flourish he removed the cloche and kissed her nose. 'Then we skip the imperfect because it suggests incompletion and is therefore irrelevant. That leaves amabo –'

'I will love,' said Nan for him. 'Two can play at that you know. You'll understand better about the slings and arrows if I do. Let me see, maneo; I wait Or remain, expect, endure…you can take your pick. Manevi; I waited, because it is finished now, you understand, manebo –'

'No need for that one,' said Jerry, pressing a finger lightly to her lips. 'Not relevant, remember? I'm here now –no more waiting.'

'Really?' Nan tilted her head up the better to look at him, eyes lambent with cold and expectation. Perhaps it hadn't been strictly true, Jerry thought, what he'd said, about the waiting, but not matter, he'd set that right.

'Really. Partly why I came down.'

'And here I thought you were making good on a promise to see Avonlea in spring –or trying to.'

'That too,' said Jerry. 'I don't have to come by way of Ingleside to do that though.'

He might have jolted her with a stray piece of electricity, to judge from the way Nan came suddenly to attention, her back flush with the apple tree they were shaded by in a way that couldn't possibly be comfortable. All she said though was, 'Oh? How is Mums? And the others, too.'

'I didn't manage to talk with them,' said Jerry.

'No?'

'No,' said Jerry. 'I –' But there was no good way to say it. He was six inches deep in slurried snow and damp leaves at least, with no graceful way of extricating himself, certainly not in a way that wouldn't send her plummeting into the stuff, and made kneeling awkward at best. Taking her hands was out of the question; his own hands were mittened against cold, as were hers, and from the way they fell limp across her knees, Jerry suspected she had balled her hands into fists for warmth deep in the middle of them. No, he wouldn't make her uncurl her fingers and risk freezing, even for this. Somewhere overhead a cardinal burst into nervous chatter, its song stark against the cocoon of their silence. It was at least as thick and downy as the snow, although the snow for all its sins didn't feel like molasses the way the silence did.

In the end there was nothing for it but to shed his own mittens and scrabble in his coat pockets. In the shelter of the Haunted Wood, thick with ghosts and memories, the trees half in blossom and the ground blanketed in snow, the cold was less severe than on the open road, certainly than the train carriage had been. He wouldn't have known it from the chill of his mother's ring when his fingers came up against it, still icy from having absorbed so much of the weather. Such a little thing, Jerry thought, folding it into Nan's mittened hand. It winked there, a slender band of old-world gold and garnet against the shell stitch of her aunt's knitting, and though Jerry knew –had often pictured through the long years of the war –how well it would suit her, he found in the event that words were elusive. Overhead the cardinal finished its chorale and took flight, showering them in gems of melted snow. Nan hardly seemed to register them, though they settled on her hair and forehead like seed pearls. She sat as though transfixed, but for her eyes darting between him and the full-blooded gleam of the garnet Jerry would have supposed she had been. He ought to say something. How he had wanted to do the thing properly –or as close as could be managed – to give her the ceremony and occasion Susan was determined to have.

Instead of which, he bowed his head in submission, touched a chilled finger to the rich amber of the garnet, and said, 'Placetne, magistra?'

'Placet.'

*Officially I don't think 'Mallo' is an honest-to-goodness Latin-inspired rhyme. The Opies don't list it. The only record of it's existence is in Benjamin Britten's opera. I am 90% certain that it was invented for Turn of the Screw. The thing is, Britten set it to such a convincing melody that it sounds like an honest-to-goodness rhyme. So for the purposes of this universe, 'Mallo' really is a rhyme. And yes, that mattered enough I had to mention it.

** And in case you didn't fall in love with Lord Peter growing up (or didn't read Latin for seven years, or maybe just forgot declensions and conjugations), here's a note on the Latin at the end. It means approximately 'Does it please you, mistress?' But the important bit is the -ne. It implies an expected affirmative. Jerry knows exactly what Nan's going to say when she answers, or he thinks he does.