"You split wood without being asked twice. You've never once raised your voice to my father, who is not always easy to bear with. You thanked me the first week for every single thing I did for you, which most men stopped doing by the third day." She did not look up from the net. Whoever you were before the sea took your name off you, I find I have no complaint about who you are now. Asking after the rest would only shame you for not having the answer.
And I can't see the profit in that for either of us. He thought about that sentence for the whole of the summer that followed, turning it over the way he had once, he suspected, turned over ledgers and correspondence, and the particular arithmetic of a life he could no longer remember living. Nobody had ever declined to press him for an advantage before. He did not know how he knew this, only that he knew it, the way a hand remembers a habit the mind has lost. Tams and Gail had had for nine weeks every reason to ask him who he was and what he was worth, and had asked instead whether the wind would back around by Thursday.
The memory returned in April, not as a gift, but as a flood, all at once on an ordinary gray morning, while he was hauling a boat above the tideline, and it arrived with a name that felt, after nine weeks of Bartsy, almost obscene in its weight. Julian Aldis Furers, eighth Duke of Caramir. He remembered the packet to Calala and why he had been aboard it to end in person and with what grace he could manage an engagement to a woman he had never wanted and had been maneuvered into by two dying fathers and a decade of habit. He remembered his cousin Selwin next in the intale smiling at him across a dinner table the week before he sailed. And he understood with the particular sickness of a man watching a door close from the wrong side of it, that a cousin who stood to inherit everything had had nine weeks in which to declare him dead, and had used every one of them with unusual efficiency.
The morning already worn, the estate already partly sold, the succession already halfway settled in chancery. He left for London within the week. He told Tamson only that his memory had returned, that his name was Julian, that he had somewhere he must go and something he must undo. And he did not manage in the scramble of a hired cart and a departing tide to say the rest of what he meant to say that nine weeks in her father's cottage had taught him more about the sort of man he wished to be than 30 years as a duke ever had and that he did not know yet how to hold both of those men in one chest at once. He rode away from Bartsy with the thing unsaid and told himself there would be time for it once the rest was settled.
There was not, or not the kind he had imagined. Reclaiming a dukedom from a cousin who had already sold two farms, forged the appearance of due mourning, and enlisted half the family solicitors in his version of events took 6 months, and was fought entirely in the airless rooms of chancery, in a language of rits and depositions, that had nothing whatever to do with tides or nets, or the color of a beach at first light. There were nights he sat until past midnight over depositions concerning his own death, signed and witnessed, and entirely in order, except for the inconvenient fact of his continuing to breathe, and thought, with something close to longing, of a cottage where the only arithmetic that mattered was how many hours remained before the tide turned. Selwin contested every inch of it, produced witnesses to a drowning none of them had seen, and only abandoned the field when the law made plain that a living duke could not be argued back into his grave, no matter how convenient his absence had been. He wanted the law, once informed that the dead man was inconveniently alive, moved with surprising speed, once it began to move at all.