But the winning consumed him so completely that October arrived before he had drawn a breath long enough to write the letter he owed her. And by then he had begun to suspect that no letter would say it as well as riding back and saying it himself. Tamson read of his restoration in a newspaper a fortnight old, passed hand to hand around the village until it reached her father's cottage. Three lines in a column about chancery business. She would ordinarily never have troubled to read.
The Duke of Carol restored to his estates and titles, his cousin's claims set aside. She read it once, standing at the same window where she had mended nets through a whole spring of not asking him questions, and understood with a clarity that did not require tears, that the man who had split her father's wood was never coming back to Bartsy, that a duke restored to six counties, and a seat in the Lords had no earthly reason to remember a cottage where he had once answered to John. She was not surprised. She had known, she told herself from the morning his memory returned and his shoulders changed shape under the news of who he was, that whatever had lived in that cottage for 9 weeks belonged to the cottage and not to him. She did not cry where her father could see her, and she went back to the nets, because the nets did not care what a woman had hoped for, and mending them was a thing her hands already knew how to do.
He came back in October alone on a hired horse without an escort or a solicitor or any of the trappings that had accompanied every other journey he had made since London reclaimed him. He came down to the shingle at Bartsy in the gray early light of an ordinary morning, and found her exactly where he had somehow known he would find her, mending the same nets, in the same worn shawl, her hands moving with the same unhurried economy, as though six months and a dukedom and a chancery suit had happened to some other pair of men entirely. She looked up before he had said a word, and her face did the same thing it had done the first night. No gasp, no flutter, only a level assessing look, as if she were deciding once again whether to let something matter. You've come a long way to watch me mend nets, your grace, she said.
I've come to bring you something first, he said, and to ask you something after, and I find I would rather do the giving before the asking, so that you know the one is not the price of the other. He drew out the deed he had carried the whole way from London, and set it on the upturned boat beside her. The Carol estate has owned the Bartsy foreshore for a hundred years, and done nothing with it, but let the rents run to seed. It is the village's now outright, in whatever answer you give me. I did not want you deciding anything while wondering whether refusing me would cost your father his moorings.