She folded the apron and laid it on the counter beside the tar paper and then she took her shawl from the hook by the kitchen door. Her aunt's hand closed on her wrist very hard where no one could see it. Anna did not pull away. She only turned her head and looked at her aunt. And after a moment, the hand let go.
"A man is ill and cannot say where it hurts," Anna said. "I will be back before you lock up." And she followed the Duke of Rothley out into the rain. The carriage smelled of wet wool and leather. He sat across from her with his hat on his knee, and for the first half of the drive, he did not speak.
The lamps of Cheapside went past, and then the long dark sweep of Hullbornne, and she watched the water run in threads down the glass. She was aware of being in a duke's carriage in the middle of the night with a man she did not know. She was more aware of the words coming back to her, crowding up out of some deep shut room in her mind, like birds rising out of a field when you walk through it. His name is Stepan, the Duke said at last. That much we have.
He says it and strikes his chest. He came off a ship from Riga this morning. A mate from the ship brought him to my door in a hired cart, pinned that paper to his coat, and left before my butler could ask him anything. He turned his hat slowly in his hands. My brother served with the Russian army in the last winters of the war.
He was attached to their staff as a liaison officer. He died out there. We were told it was a fever. That was all we were told. He looked up at her.
This man had my brother's watch in his coat. Anna said nothing. There was nothing a coffee house girl could say to a duke about his dead brother. And she had learned long ago that saying nothing was sometimes a kind of courtesy. But she saw his hands go still on the brim of the hat.
She saw how carefully he had spoken, every word set down as though it might break. The house was in Grovener Street, tall and pale, with every window lit. A butler took her shawl as though she were a lady. A footman carried a lamp ahead of them, not up the grand stair, but down a narrower one, toward the back of the house, to a warm, plain room beside the housekeeper's parlor. The fire had been built high.
A physician in a snuffled coat stood by the bed with his arms folded, and he looked at Anna at her pinned up sleeves and her rough hands with open doubt. The man in the bed was old. That was her first thought, and a moment later she saw that she was wrong. He was not so very old. He was worn down to the frame the way a coat is worn through at the of what had held it up.