They stood there together on the edge of the land in the rain, and she felt the breath go in and out of him in great, slow shudders, until at last it steadied.
But when they came back into the house, soaked and silent near midnight, Stepan's door was shut and his candle was out, and they did not knock. That was the mistake. Anna thought of it afterward many times.
In the morning, Stepan was gone.
His bed had not been slept in. His green coat was gone from the door, along with his bundle and his clay pipe. On the library table, in the gray dawn light, lay the captain's silver watch, set neatly on top of a sheet of paper. On the paper he had drawn, with a burnt stick from the fire, a small, rough picture of a ship.
"The coast road," said the caretaker, white-faced in the hall. "He'll be making for Newcastle and the ships. He asked me the way of it on Friday by signs, pointing south, and saying 'Newcastle,' and drawing a ship in the dust with his finger. I thought nothing of it, Your Grace. But the river's up past the stepping stones at the ford. There's been nobody across there since the rain began. It's the only way south without going round by the bridge, and he wouldn't know that. Nobody would have told him."
The Duke was already out the door.
They took the gig because it was quickest. The Duke drove, Anna sat beside him and held on, and the caretaker's son ran behind with a coil of rope over his shoulder because the Duke had shouted for it.
The rain had stopped. The whole valley was running with water. The lane down to the ford was a stream, and they could hear the river long before they saw it: a deep, continuous roar, like something enormous breathing.
The ford was gone. Where the stepping stones had been, the brown water went over in a great, smooth hump, with branches and whole clumps of grass turning in it. And halfway across, where a willow had come down in the night and caught on the stones, a man in a green coat was clinging to the fallen trunk with both arms, up to his chest in the flood.
Anna screamed his name. She did not know she had done it until she heard it.