"Again," he said. "Tell me again how it goes."
She took his hand then, without thinking, and turned it over on the table. With her finger, she traced the shape of the word on his palm, letter by letter, the way her nurse had once traced letters on hers. His hand did not move under her finger. The fire ticked in the grate. When she reached the end of the word, she became aware of what she was doing and drew her hand back, and the Duke said the word correctly, very quietly, for the first time.
They reached Northumberland on the seventh day. The road climbed, and the trees fell away. The land became wide, bare, and golden-brown, with gray stone walls running over it like lines of writing. The wind smelled different. Anna put down the carriage window and breathed it in: it smelled of salt, of something green and sharp, and of distance. She had not smelled air like that since she was a girl on the deck of the ship that brought her out of Russia, and it made her throat ache in a way she could not have explained.
The Duke had grown quieter with every mile. By that last afternoon, he had not spoken for hours. He sat with his arms folded and his eyes on the window. She saw a muscle move in his jaw each time the carriage turned a corner, as though he were bracing himself against something that might come into view.
It was Stepan who saw it first.
They came over the top of a long rise, with the sea suddenly spread out below them, silver and gray to the edge of the world, and a river winding down through the fields to meet it. On a green shoulder of land above the river mouth stood a long, low house of pale stone with a row of tall windows along its face. Every window was shuttered; the house looked blind.
Up on the box beside the coachman, Stepan stood straight up in the wind, holding the rail, and shouted in Russian at the top of his lungs.
"What does he say?" the Duke asked. His voice was strange.
"He says, 'The long windows,'" said Anna. "He says, 'Captain, look! The long windows!'"
Larktarn had been shut up for six years, and it showed. The drive was grown over with grass. The garden walls had fallen in two places, and the great bank of rhododendrons along the south terrace had spread wild and tall until it hid the lower windows altogether. Two slates had come off the roof of the east wing, and nobody had put them back.