"You will have to learn the difference between brother and cabbage soup," said Anna, and felt him laugh.
Stepan sailed for home at the end of August from the quay at Newcastle on a timber ship bound for Riga. They drove down to see him off. He had a new coat, new boots, and a trunk full of presents for Masha that the caretaker's wife had packed three times over. In his breast pocket, he carried the captain's silver watch, mended and ticking; the Duke had put it into his hand on the quay, closed his fingers over it, and would not take it back.
Before he went up the gangplank, the Duke took a folded paper from his own pocket and pinned it carefully to the front of the old soldier's coat. He had written it himself the night before at the library table, with Anna beside him to correct the letters. He had gotten every one of them right. It was in Russian on the top half, and in English underneath.
Anna read it over his shoulder as he pinned it:
This man is going home to his wife. He is our brother. Be kind to him.
Stepan stood looking down at the paper on his chest. Then he embraced the Duke hard, in the Russian fashion, and kissed him on both cheeks, and the Duke let him. He embraced Anna and called her Anuta, and told her to eat more. And then he went up onto the ship and stood at the rail in the wind.
As the ship drew away from the quay, he began to sing loudly and very badly the English hunting song that the captain had once tried to teach to a whole company of Russian infantry. He knew all the words and none of the tune.
They stood on the quay until the ship was small. The Duke's arm was around his wife. His other hand rested very lightly at her waist, where there was not yet anything for anyone to see. Nobody but the two of them and a physician in Morpeth knew that she was with child, and that there would be a cradle at Larktarn in the spring.
Every quarter, Anna sent money south to her aunt until the old debt was paid, and then for a while after it. Her aunt never wrote to thank her, but she never sent it back, and the year after, a small parcel came to Larktarn with no letter in it. Inside was a lace collar, carefully made in the old-fashioned pattern of a woman who had once been a girl with hopeful letters of her own.
And at Larktarn, on every fine morning after that, the long windows stood open to the sea. The Duchess saw to it herself. She walked the length of the south front before breakfast, folding back the shutters one by one. The light came pouring into every room, and the house was full of the sound of the water and of a language spoken softly by a husband to a wife that nobody else in that part of England could understand.