On the fourth afternoon, she came round the corner of the terrace and found him hacking at the wild rhododendrons with a billhook, in his shirtsleeves, with leaves in his hair, so that the lower windows could see out again.
"You need not do that yourself," she said.
"No," he agreed, and went on doing it.
Stepan grew stronger every day in that northern air. The color came back into his face. He ate enormous breakfasts. He took the caretaker's old spade, went into the walled kitchen garden, and dug it over from end to end, singing. In the evenings, he sat on the terrace steps in the last of the light, smoking a short clay pipe and looking at the sea.
Sometimes Anna sat with him and they talked of Russia. He told her about his wife, Masha, in their village on a bend of the great river, and how she made the best cabbage pies in the district, and how he had not seen her in four years. He asked Anna about her nurse. She told him that her nurse had stayed behind in St. Petersburg when the English merchants had to leave, and had died there two winters later; she told him that she had never had a letter, never had a chance to say goodbye, and had never stood by her grave.
"Then you and the master are the same," Stepan said, puffing his pipe. "Both of you carrying a goodbye you never said. It is heavy. I know; I have carried one, too."
She did not ask him what he meant; she thought she knew.
It was nine days after they came to Larktarn that she found the door at the end of the gallery standing open. It was late—past eleven—and the house was dark except for a line of candlelight falling across the floorboards. She almost walked past. Then she stopped, went back, and looked in.
It was a young man's room, left exactly as it was. There was a narrow bed with a faded blue coverlet, a shelf of battered books, and a pair of riding boots standing under the window. There was a fishing rod in the corner with its line in a tangle. There was a sketch pinned to the wall of a horse that looked more like a dog.
And the Duke of Rothley was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed with a letter in his hands, in the light of a single candle.