An elderly couple kept the place—a caretaker and his wife who lived in two rooms behind the kitchen and had done what they could. They came out onto the steps in their Sunday clothes, and the old woman burst into tears at the sight of the Duke.
The Duke stood at the foot of his own front steps and did not move. Anna saw him stop. She saw him look up at the blind, shuttered face of the house, and she saw his hands close at his sides. She understood that he could not go in. It was not a matter of will; he had simply come to the end of how far he could go, like a horse at a fence it has fallen at before.
It was Stepan who went in first.
He climbed down from the box and walked straight past the weeping housekeeper, up the steps, and through the open door into the dim cold as though he had lived there all his life. He stood in the middle of the stone floor, turning slowly, and began to speak.
Anna followed him in. After a moment, she heard the Duke's step behind her.
"He says the stairs go up on the left and turn twice," Anna said very quietly as Stepan talked. "He says there is a door under the stairs to a little room where the boys kept their fishing rods, and it sticks in wet weather. He says the room on the right is the library, with a fireplace and a carved lion on each side. The left-hand lion has a chipped ear because the captain threw a cricket ball at his brother and missed."
She stopped. Stepan was walking toward the library door. He opened it. There was the fireplace, dim in the gray light through the shutters; there was the lion on the left, with a piece of its ear gone.
Behind her, the Duke made a sound. It was not loud. Anna did not turn round.
Stepan went through the whole house that way. He went through it like a man walking through a dream he has dreamed a thousand times: touching doorframes, naming rooms, telling the stories that went with them. The morning room, where their mother had read to them in the winters, and where she had thrown every long window open on the first fine day of spring because she said a shut house forgot how to breathe. The window seat on the half-landing, where Kit used to hide when he was in disgrace. The long gallery, where the boys had raced each other in their stockings on wet days.
And Anna walked beside him and gave it all back in English. The Duke followed behind them both through his own house, hearing it described to him in his dead brother's words, carried across the snow in the mouth of a man who had never seen it.