Then he turned his chair a little toward the fire and said, without looking at her, "I would like you to teach me some of his language." Anna was so surprised that for a moment she could not answer. Russian is very hard, she said at last. Even the letters are different. I do not want to make speeches in it.
I want to say a few things to that man in his own tongue before he goes home. I want to thank him for bringing my brother's watch across half the world. He did look at her. Then it seems to me a poor return that he should have to hear it through somebody else. So they began.
Every evening at every inn up the long road north after supper they sat at the corner of whatever table the parlor had. She wrote words for him on the backs of old letters. First in the Russian letters and then in English letters beneath so that he could sound them out. Thank you, brother. Home.
Forgive me. Good night. The Duke was a terrible pupil. He was far too proud to say a word wrongly, and so he would not say it at all until he was certain. Then he would say it with such grim determination that Anna had to bite the inside of her cheek.
On the fourth evening, when he tried to say, "Brother," and said something that meant a kind of cabbage soup, she laughed out loud before she could help it. He looked up. She stopped at once and put her hand over her mouth because she had never in her life laughed at a gentleman, let alone a duke. But he did not look angry. He looked at her as though she had done something astonishing.
The corner of his mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. It was the almost. Again, he said, "Tell me again how it goes." She took his hand, then without thinking, and turned it over on the table.
With her finger, she traced the shape of the word on his palm, letter by letter, the way her nurse had once traced letters on hers. His hand did not move under her finger. The fire ticked in the great. When she reached the end of the word, she became aware of what she was doing and drew her hand back, and the Duke said the word correctly, very quietly for the first time. They reached Northland on the seventh day.
The road climbed, and the trees fell away. The land became wide, bare, and golden brown, with greystone walls running over it like lines of writing. The wind smelled different. Anna put down the carriage window and breathed at him. It smelled of salt and of something green and sharp and of distance.