Then he spoke to Anna slowly this time, choosing his words. He asks if this is the brother, Anna said. The elder brother, the one the captain talked about. Tell him yes, said the Duke. She told him.
Stepan's eyes filled again. He reached for the silver watch on the blanket and pressed it into Anna's hand and nodded toward the window. She rose and crossed the room and held it out. The Duke took it from her. His fingers touched hers, cold as the glass behind him.
He opened the dented case and looked at the stopped hands inside it and something passed over his face that Anna felt she should not have seen. Ask him how my brother died. Anna asked. Stepan listened to the question with his eyes closed. When he answered, he spoke to the ceiling.
Then he turned his head and spoke directly to the Duke in a language the Duke could not understand as though he could make him understand by looking at him hard enough. He says, "Not yet," Anna said. He says he carried something from the captain across half the world and he will not give it lying on his back like a sick calf. He will give it on his feet the way a soldier gives a report. He asks your grace to forgive him.
He asks you to wait until he can stand. The Duke closed the watch. The small click was very loud in the room. For a long moment she thought he would insist. She could see how badly he wanted to in the line of his jaw and the way the knuckles of his hand stood out white around the silver.
Then he inclined his head to the man in the bed as he would have done to an equal. "Tell him I have waited this long," he said. "I can wait until he stands." It was past 2:00 in the morning when the carriage set her down at the end of the lane. The Duke had come with her, though she had told him there was no need, and he walked her to the door of the coffee house, through the dripping dark without a word.
At the door, he stopped. "Will you come again tomorrow," he said. "I would not ask it if there were another way. I will speak to your aunt myself." "You need not speak to her," Anna said.
"I will come." Her aunt was waiting inside with a single candle, sitting very straight on the bench by the cold stove. She did not shout. She never shouted. 8 years, she said softly.