Anna knelt down on the other side. She did not touch Steban. She began to sing. It was the song her nurse had sung to her in the painted bed. A slow river song about a boat and a willow and a mother calling from the bank.
She had not sung it aloud in 8 years. Her voice cracked on the first line. She kept on. By the third verse, Stephen had taken his arms away from his head. By the fifth, his breathing had slowed.
By the end of it, he was leaning against her shoulder like a child and weeping and asking her in a small hoarse voice whether the ice had held. "I yes," she said in Russian. "It held. Everyone is across. You can sleep now."
Between them, she and the Duke got him back into the bed. The storm went on. She sat beside Stepan for the rest of the night with his hand in both of hers and sang whenever he stirred. The Duke sat on the other side of the bed in the dark with the watch in his hand. Once near 4:00, she looked up and found the Duke watching her across the pillow.
He did not look away. Neither did she. Neither of them spoke. The rain stopped at dawn. The fever had broken and Stepan was sleeping like a stone.
The Duke walked her out through the front hall himself because every servant in the house was asleep on their feet. It was the Duke who opened the great front door onto the washed gray street and handed her down the steps to his carriage. Her hair had come down. Her gown was crushed and stained at the knee where she had knelt on the floor. She had no bonnet and no gloves and no maid.
And it was half 5:00 in the morning. Across the street, a gentleman in a brown great coat was coming home from somewhere. Anna knew him. He took coffee at the long table by the fire every Tuesday and Friday, and he dealt in reger timber, and he had never once looked at her face. He looked at her face now.
He looked at her hair, the Duke's bare head, and the open door behind them. Then he raised his hat to the Duke with a slow, careful courtesy, and walked on. By noon, it was all over the city. By evening, it was in the West End. By the next morning, there was a print in the window of the shop at the corner of Corn Hill.