He will need you for whatever he still has to say. I cannot hear it without you. She looked at him. He was offering her a roof and a name and a place to stand. He was also offering, though he did not seem to know it, the first thing in 8 years that anyone had wanted her for that was truly hers, not her hands, not her silence, the language she had carried like a locked box through every day of her English life.
I will give you my answer tonight, she said. He bowed and went. She heard his step go down the stairs, and her aunt's voice rise to meet him, bright and trembling. And Anna sat down again on the bed, and put her hand flat on her nurse's faded blue kerchief, and thought about it with the same care she gave to a hard sentence. She thought about the laughter coming up through the floor.
She thought about the look on the Duke's face when he opened the dented watch. She thought about Stepan's hand closing on hers and her own voice cracking on the river song, and how it had not stopped her. At 9 that evening, she walked to Groner Street by herself, in her better gown, with her head up and her bonnet on. The butler let her in without a flicker. The Duke came down to the hall and she told him her answer standing in front of him before she could lose her nerve.
"Yes," she said, on two conditions. The first is that no one in your house or mine will ever again ask me to stop speaking Russian. The second is that when Stepan is well enough to travel, he goes wherever he wishes to go. I have asked him already. He wishes to see Lakan.
The Duke went very still. Why? Because it was all the captain talked about, Anna said. All that winter, the house with the long windows over the sea. Stepan says your brother described every room of it by the fire.
So many times that Stepan could walk through it in the dark. He says he promised the captain he would see it with his own eyes. She held his gaze. He does not know that you have not been there in 6 years. I did not tell him.
For a long time the Duke said nothing. The clock in the hall ticked. Somewhere below them a door opened and closed in the kitchens. Then we will go to Lark Tarn, said the Duke of Rothley. All three of us.
They were married 8 days later by special license in the long drawing room at Grovener Street. On a gray morning with the curtains half-drawn against the street, there were very few people present. The Duke's man of business stood as a witness, looking as though he had swallowed a fishbone. Aunt Mildred sat in a guilt chair in her best black silk with her hands folded tight in her lap. And at the back of the room by the door stood Steppon in a borrowed brown coat that was too broad for him.