The Duke woke in a fisherman's cottage with no name. The girl who nursed him never asked for one. The last thing he knew in any way that could be called knowing was the sound the packet made when it came apart. After that there was only cold and the particular gray nothing of a February sea that does not care what a man was called before it took him. He came back to himself by degrees, on a bed that was not a bed so much as a settle pulled near a fire, under a blanket that smelled of tar and salt fish, with a weight of pain across his skull so total that he did not for a long moment think to wonder who he was.
When he did think to wonder, the wondering found nothing. No name answered it. No house, no face, no year. There was only the fire and the low ceiling, and a girl kneeling at his side with a basin of water gone pink at the edges, watching him with an attention so complete it embarrassed him before he had said a single word. She had found him.
She told him later at first light, when the tide had pulled back far enough to show what it had left on the shingle, 11 men who would not stand again, and one who had somehow a pulse still moving under a gash at his temple. Her father had wanted to leave the business to the parish and the magistrate, as was proper with wreck victims, and their unclaimed effects. Tamson had said only that a man breathing on her beach was her business until he stopped breathing propriety or no, and had made her father help her carry him the halfmile to the cottage rather than argue the point further. "There you are," she said now, as though he had merely stepped out and returned. "You've been most of two days deciding whether to stay." "Where?" His voice came out as a stranger's rasp.
"Where is this?" "Bartsy. My father's cottage." She wrung the cloth and laid it cool along his brow. The packet went down off the point in the gale Tuesday night. 11 didn't come up the beach at all. You did, and not much else besides my name.
He said it as a question because it was the only shape he had for the panic underneath it. I cannot. I don't know my own name. She did not flinch or gasp or reach for smelling salts, which was the first thing about her that lodged itself in him, and never afterward worked loose. She only nodded once as though he had told her the tide was out, and said, "Then we shan't trouble you for it tonight.