The caretaker's wife, who had been frightened of her at first, began bringing her tea at 11 without being asked. The Duke let her do it. He did not interfere, but she began to find him in the places where she was working, as though by accident. He would appear in a doorway and stand there with his hands behind his back, watching her direct the women with the carpets. He would come down to the garden where the men were mending the wall and take off his coat without a word and lift stones.
On the fourth afternoon she came round the corner of the terrace and found him hacking at the wild roodendrrons with a bill hook in his shirt sleeves with leaves in his hair so that the lower windows could see out again. You need not do that yourself, she said. No, he agreed and went on doing it. Stepan grew stronger every day in that northern air. The color came back into his face.
He ate enormous breakfasts. He took the caretaker's old spade and went into the walled kitchen garden and dug it over from end to end singing. In the evenings he sat on the terrace steps in the last of the light, smoking a short clay pipe and looking at the sea. Sometimes Anna sat with him and they talked of Russia. He told her about his wife Masha in their village on a bend of the great river and how she made the best cabbage pies in the district and how he had not seen her in 4 years.
He asked Anna about her nurse. She told him that her nurse had stayed behind in St. Petersburg when the English merchants had to leave and had died there two winters later. She told him that she had never had a letter and never had a chance to say goodbye and never stood by her grave. "Then you and the master are the same," Stepan said, puffing his pipe. "Both of you carrying a goodbye.
You never said it is heavy. I know. I have carried one too. She did not ask him what he meant. She thought she knew.
It was 9 days after they came to Lark Tarn that she found the door at the end of the gallery standing open. It was late 11 and the house was dark except for a line of candle light falling across the floorboards. She almost walked past. Then she stopped and went back and looked in. It was a young man's room.
It had been left exactly as it was. There was a narrow bed with a faded blue coverlet and a shelf of battered books and a pair of riding boots standing under the window. There was a fishing rod in the corner with its line in a tangle. There was a sketch pinned to the wall of a horse that looked more like a dog. And the Duke of Rothley was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed with a letter in his hands in the light of a single candle.
He did not look up. He said, "Come in if you like." She came in and sat down on the other end of the bed and waited. "This room was across the gallery from the library," he said. After a while, that is where we quarreled.