Chapter 6: Lamplight

By evening I had learned three things about my husband.

He rose before dawn and fed the horses himself.

He ate standing up in the kitchen so that the servants would not have to wait on him.

And he whittled.

I found him at the long scullery table after supper.

There was a pile of pale shavings at his elbow and a half-made wooden spoon in his big grey hand.

"Who's it for?" I asked.

"Ashby," he said. "The children."

He did not look up.

"I make one for each child born on the east bank. There are sixty-one spoons in a box in my room."

"Do they know?"

"No. They'd throw them in the river."

"Then why do it?"

"It's something to do with my hands," Garrick said, "that isn't burning anything."

I did not know what to say to that.

Bess and Nan were across the room, scrubbing pots and not pretending to scrub them.

I sat down at the table across from him.

"Teach me."

He stopped.

"You want to carve?"

"I want to do something with my hands that isn't copying a dead language."

He looked at me then, the full dark weight of his eyes, and the small movement came back to his mouth.

"All right. Hold the knife like this."

He gave me a spoon blank and a small blade and showed me how to angle my thumb.

I held it wrong, and the blade skidded, and the next second the cut opened across my left palm.

"Ow!" I said. "That is a very poor knife."

"It's a very good knife. You're holding it like a quill."

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