He did not look up. He said, "Come in, if you like."
She came in, sat down on the other end of the bed, and waited.
"This room was across the gallery from the library," he said after a while. "That is where we quarreled. He came to tell me he had bought a commission and was going out to the war. I had been the Duke for less than a year; our father had died the spring before. Kit was all I had left, and I did not know how to say that. So I said a great many other things. I said he was a fool who wanted to play at soldiers. I said that if he went, he need not trouble to write, because I would not read it."
He turned the letter over in his hands.
"He said, 'Then I won't, Laurie.' Very quietly. He was the only person who ever called me that. And he went out of that door and down those stairs. I did not follow him, and I never saw him again."
Anna did not answer. She had understood long ago that there were things you could only say to a silence.
"This is the letter from the general's staff," he said. "It came in the winter. It is in French. It says he died of a fever of the lungs in a peasant's house somewhere I cannot pronounce, and that he was a credit to his country. It is four lines long." His voice did not change, but his hands did. "I have read it every night for a year and a half, trying to find out whether he forgave me. It does not say."
And then the Duke of Rothley bent forward and put his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook without any sound at all.
Anna moved along the narrow bed until she was next to him. She did not speak. She put her arm around his shoulders, and after a moment he turned and put his head against her shoulder, the way Stepan had done on the floor in Grosvenor Street, and she held him there. She held him until the candle burned down to a stub. The sea went on outside the dark window; the house breathed around them.
When at last he lifted his head, she took his hand in both of hers and kept it, and he let her.