She had not smelled air like that since she was a girl on the deck of the ship that brought her out of Russia, and it made her throat ache in a way she could not have explained. The Duke had grown quieter with every mile. By that last afternoon, he had not spoken for hours. He sat with his arms folded and his eyes on the window. She saw a muscle move in his jaw each time the carriage turned a corner.
As though he were bracing himself against something that might come into view. It was Stepan who saw it first. They came over the top of a long rise with the sea suddenly spread out below them, silver and gray to the edge of the world, and a river winding down through the fields to meet it. On a green shoulder of land above the river mouth stood a long low house of pale stone with a row of tall windows along its face. Every window was shuttered.
The house looked blind and up on the box beside the coachman. Stepan stood straight up in the wind holding the rail and shouted in Russian at the top of his lungs. What does he say? The Duke asked. His voice was strange.
He says, "The long windows," said Anna. He says, "Captain, look. The long windows." Larkarn had been shut up for six years, and it showed. The drive was grown over with grass.
The garden walls had fallen in two places, and the great bank of Rodendrrons along the south terrace had spread wild and tall until it hid the lower windows altogether. Two slates had come off the roof of the east wing. And nobody had put them back. An elderly couple kept the place, a caretaker and his wife, who lived in two rooms behind the kitchen, and had done what they could. They came out onto the steps in their Sunday clothes, and the old woman burst into tears at the sight of the Duke, and the Duke stood at the foot of his own front steps and did not move.
Anna saw him stop. She saw him look up at the blind, shuttered face of the house, and she saw his hands close at his sides. She understood that he could not go in. It was not a matter of will. He had simply come to the end of how far he could go, like a horse at a fence it has fallen at before.
It was Steppon who went in first. He climbed down from the box and walked straight past the weeping housekeeper, up the steps and through the open door into the dim cold as though he had lived there all his life. He stood in the middle of the stone floor, turning slowly and began to speak. Anna followed him in. After a moment, she heard the Duke's step behind her.
He says the stairs go up on the left and turn twice. Anna said very quietly as Stepan talked. He says there is a door under the stairs to a little room where the boys kept their fishing rods and it sticks in wet weather. He says the room on the right is the library with a fireplace and a carved lion on each side. The left-hand lion has a chipped ear because the captain threw a cricket ball at his brother and missed.