She stopped. Stepan was walking toward the library door. He opened it. There was the fireplace, dim in the gray light through the shutters. There was the lion on the left with a piece of its ear gone.
Behind her, the Duke made a sound. It was not loud. Anna did not turn round. Stepan went through the whole house that way. He went through it like a man walking through a dream he has dreamed a thousand times, touching door frames, naming rooms, telling the stories that went with them.
The morning room where their mother had read to them in the winters and where she had thrown every long window open on the first fine day of spring because she said a shut house forgot how to breathe. The window seat on the half landing where Kit used to hide when he was in disgrace. The long gallery where the boys had raced each other in their stockings on wet days. And Anna walked beside him and gave it all back in English. The Duke followed behind them both through his own house, hearing it described to him in his dead brother's words, carried across the snow in the mouth of a man who had never seen it.
At the end of the gallery, Stepan stopped at a closed door and did not open it. He turned to the Duke and said something short. He says this was the captain's room, Anna said. He says it is not his to go into. The Duke put his hand on the door and stood there.
Then he took his hand away again. Not yet, he said, and it was so exactly what Stepan had said in Grovener Street that Anna did not need to translate it. The old soldier nodded as though he understood. Then the Duke took the dented silver watch from his pocket where he had carried it all the way from London and put it back into Stepan's hand. "Tell him he carried it to me," he said to Anna.
"Tell him to keep it until he has made his report." The next morning, Anna opened the shutters. "Nobody told her to." She got up at 6:00 before anyone else was stirring and put on her oldest gown. Then she went from room to room along the whole south front of the house, unbarring the tall shutters and folding them back.
The sea light came pouring into rooms that had been dark for 6 years. The dust came up off the floors in bright clouds. A bird that had got in somewhere flew out through the library window in a panic of wings. By the time the household woke, every long window on the front of Lan was open, and the house was full of the sound of the sea. She did not stop there.
That day, and in the days that followed, she took the house in hand. She walked down to the village and found women who wanted work, and men to see to the roof of the east wing and the fallen garden walls. She had the damp carpets carried out onto the grass and beaten. She found the linen cupboards with the rot in them, the good china in its crates, the mice in the pantry. She dealt with all of it in her quiet, steady way, as she had once kept a crowded coffee house running on too little money and no thanks.