Anna looked at her aunt and truly saw her, perhaps for the first time. She saw the good black silk, which had been turned at the seams. She saw the careful darn at the wrist of the glove. She saw that the hands, folded so tightly together, were holding each other still.
"I will pay it," Anna said. "Out of the money that is mine, every quarter, until it is done. I would have done it without being asked. He was my father, and it was a real wrong, and you have carried it a long time." She kept her voice gentle. "But I will say this once, Aunt, and then never again: for eight years, you called the woman who raised me a peasant, as if the word were dirt. She was the kindest person I have ever known. You will not speak of her that way to me again. Not in your house, and not in mine."
Her aunt's face changed. It did not soften, exactly; it seemed to fall a little, the way a wall falls when the thing holding it up has been taken away.
"He wrote such hopeful letters," she said, almost to herself. "Every winter. Next year, Millie. Next year it will all come right."
Then she straightened her cap, opened the door, and went out, and she did not say goodbye. Anna stood alone in the little parlor with her hands pressed flat against the skirt of her dove-colored gown, and did not cry, and was surprised to find how much she wanted to.
They left for the north four days later. The Duke's traveling carriage went ahead with the luggage, his valet, and the maid he had found for Anna—a cheerful Yorkshire girl who talked all day. The Duke rode in the second carriage with his wife.
Stepan was meant to ride inside with them, and did so for exactly one stage, sitting bolt upright on the edge of the seat with his hat on his knees as though he were in church. At the first change of horses, he climbed up beside the coachman without asking anybody, and there he stayed all the way up the Great North Road, in sun and wind and a good deal of rain, singing.
"What is he singing?" the Duke asked on the second morning. They were somewhere north of Stamford, and the country had begun to open out into long, green fields under a wide sky.
Anna listened. "It is a soldier's song about a girl who waits by a well. She waits so long that the well dries up, and she goes on waiting anyway. The soldier comes home and finds her there, and he fills the well again with his tears." She smiled a little. "The Russians are not a cheerful people in their songs."
"My brother used to sing," the Duke said, looking out of the window. "Very badly. He knew all the words of everything and none of the tunes."