"Thank you," he said. And then he said it again in Russian, carefully, with every sound in the right place.
The next morning on the terrace, Stepan came to them both with his cap in his hands and spoke to Anna at length, very formally, standing straight. She listened with her heart beginning to go slow and hard, the way it had in the coffeehouse.
"He says he is strong now," she told the Duke. "He says he can stand as long as he needs to. He asks if you will hear his report on Sunday evening in the library, after supper. He asks that I be there to give it to you. He says he is sorry that it must be through a woman's mouth, but he thinks the captain would not mind, because the captain always said that women told the truth better than officers."
The Duke looked at the old soldier. Then he said in slow, careful Russian, "Yes. Sunday. Thank you, brother."
Stepan's face went through several things at once. He did not smile. He bowed his head very low, put his cap back on, and walked away down the terrace steps toward the sea without looking back.
On Sunday, it rained. It came in off the sea in the afternoon, soft at first and then harder, driving against the long windows in gray sheets. By evening, the river below the house had begun to talk to itself in a low, brown voice.
After supper, the caretaker built up the library fire. The Duke stood beside it. Anna sat in a chair near the carved lion with the broken ear, with her hands folded in her lap, and she found that they were cold, though the fire was hot on her face.
Stepan came in at eight. He had put on his own coat for it—the old green soldier's coat he had crossed Europe in, brushed and mended, with its brass buttons polished until they shone. He came to the middle of the carpet and stopped, and drew himself up, and fixed his eyes on a point above the Duke's head, as he had been drilled to do before an officer.
For a moment, he did not speak. Anna watched his beard move as he swallowed. Then he began, and she gave it to the Duke sentence by sentence, in the same plain order he gave it to her.
"He says this is his report on the death of the captain. He says it was the second winter, when the French were going back and the Russians were following them west. He says they came in the night to a wide river, and the bridges were gone, and the ice was new. The general wanted the guns across before morning. So they tested the ice with poles, and it held, and they began to go over in the dark, a few at a time, leading the horses."