She did not look at the window. She thought that was what she would have wanted if it had been her. She learned other things too without being told them. She learned that the captain had called his brother Lorie because Steppen had heard him say it so often. And from a letter on the hall table, she worked out that the Duke's name was Lawrence.
She learned that the captain's name had been Kit. She learned that the Duke had not been north to his own house in the country in six years since the spring his brother went to the war. The butler let that slip and then looked as though he wished he had not. And she learned from a line the Duke spoke only once in the hall while he was helping her on with her shawl that the brothers had parted badly. "He wrote to our mother's cousin," the Duke said, as though he were speaking about the weather.
"He wrote to our old nurse. He wrote to my steward about his horses. He never wrote to me. He settled the shawl on her shoulders and stepped back. I had told him not to.
I suppose he was an obedient brother in the end. Anna turned to look at him, but he had already gone to open the door. On the 10th day, there was a storm. It came up the river in the late afternoon, a black spring squall that tore the blossom off the trees in the squares, and sent the water sheeting across the cobbles, and it brought Stepan's fever back with it. She had left him sleeping quietly at 6.
At midnight, she was woken in the attic of the coffee house by stones against the window. A footman in the Duke's livery stood below in the running dark with a lantern soaked to the skin. He called up that the Russian was out of his head and would let nobody near him. He was calling for Anuta. Did anyone know who Anuta was?
Anuta was the name her nurse had called her. She had told Stanso on the third day because he had asked what her mother called her and she had not wanted to say that she did not remember her mother's voice at all. Her aunt's door was shut. Anna did not knock on it. That was her own choice, and she knew it was a choice while she made it.
She dressed in the dark, pinned her hair up anyhow, and went down the stairs in her stockings with her boots in her hand so that the old boards would not creek. Then she ran with the footman through the rain to the carriage. Stepan was not in the bed when she came in. He was on the floor in the corner of the room in his shirt with his back to the wall and his arms across his head. And he was shouting at the storm in Russian.
He was shouting at the river to hold. He was shouting that the ice would not hold and that nobody should step on it. And that the captain must come back, come back, come back. The Duke was on his knees on the floor an arms length away in his shirt sleeves with his hair in his eyes, saying the man's name over and over in a low, even voice. He had clearly been there since the storm began.