Everything changes when her husband arrives. They receive word from Mrs Jenkins, with whom he thought to find his wife and child, so they leave the small house and retreat back to the mansion. She hugs her husband, and sleeps in his bed, and tries to forget that since she saw him last, however chaste her actions have been, she has been slumbering in another man's bed. First on the ship, with sheets that were clean but worn, then on land, when he and Thomas slept in the drawing room, and she in John Smith's bed – with plain woolen sheets in pale blue.
Very different from her husband's bed, which has burgundy brocade and thread of gold embroidery, as befits an aristocrat.
She is afraid she smells of Smith – of salt and air and sweat. But the rose water she sprays on herself must cover it up, if it is there at all, and her husband does not comment on any change.
All the same. He is happy to see her. But perhaps he is slightly thrown by the way she tosses back her head and meets his eyes, in a way which she has not for many years.
In the other house, she would remove her hair net as soon as she stepped inside, kick off her shoes, peel away the awful stockings. But now she is a lady at all times, and her husband will insist on ensuring she remembers all that she was taught, last time, when she first fell in love with him.
She does not see her friend. They both seem to realize the impossibility of such a visit, and she feels the aching gap in her heart more brutal, now, than ever.
But she has Thomas.
And her husband is kind, and gentle, and mature (and maybe, just a little bit, like Kocoum, that man she has not thought about in years, would have been, had she married him). A handsome sturdy husband building handsome sturdy walls indeed.
He brings her bouquets of English flowers instead of seeds to feed a mess of rag tag birds, and rings and tasteful filigrees of lacy fans instead of sweetmeats. He tells her how beautiful she looks, as she sits by the mirror in the morning and fixes her hair in a mass of tumbling curls (he always has loved curls), and she smiles at the compliment and tries to put away a memory of another man, smiling as she wears his daughter's breeches, as she shakes free her hair of pins and, on the ship, in a moment of freedom, throws her shoes overboard (which had to be retrieved by a hysterically laughing Meg, as it will be impossible to walk around London barefoot).