Anna never learned what he said. When the door opened, her aunt's face was red, stiff, and oddly pleased. A great man had been courteous to her, and she did not quite know what to do with it. She said that her niece might go for the afternoons, provided the kitchen did not suffer for it.
So Anna went. She went every afternoon for ten days of that April, and the days began to take a shape she had not known she was hungry for. In the mornings, she ground the coffee, scalded the pots, and served the merchants—and none of them quite looked at her, though now they did so on purpose. In the afternoons, she sat on a hard chair beside a bed in Grosvenor Street and spoke the language of her childhood until her mouth remembered every corner of it.
Stepan mended slowly. The pain under his ribs faded. He began to keep down broth, and then bread, and then—to the cook's great pride—a whole dish of stewed chicken. And as he mended, he talked.
He did not talk about the death. He had drawn a line around that, and he walked carefully along the edge of it and never crossed it. But he talked about everything else. He talked about the captain, which was what the whole Russian regiment had called the Duke's brother because they could not manage his English name. He said the captain had arrived in their camp in a beautiful blue coat that was ruined within a week. He said the captain rode badly and sang worse, and he sang all the time. He said the captain had given his own blanket to a boy with frostbitten feet and then spent the night beside Stepan's fire pretending he was not cold.
Anna gave it all back in English, every word. And the Duke listened. He always stood by the window to listen, never in a chair, and he never interrupted. Sometimes he asked a question at the end—a short, plain question—and she carried it across. Once, when Stepan described the captain trying to teach a whole company of Russian infantry to sing an English hunting song, the Duke turned his face to the glass very suddenly and stayed turned for some time. Anna went on translating in the same quiet voice, as if nothing had happened. She did not look at the window; she thought that was what she would have wanted if it had been her.
She learned other things, too, without being told them. She learned that the captain had called his brother "Laurie," because Stepan had heard him say it so often. And from a letter on the hall table, she worked out that the Duke's name was Lawrence.
She learned that the captain's name had been Kit. She learned that the Duke had not been north to his own house in the country in six years—since the spring his brother went to the war. The butler let that slip and then looked as though he wished he had not.
And she learned, from a line the Duke spoke only once in the hall while he was helping her on with her shawl, that the brothers had parted badly.
"He wrote to our mother's cousin," the Duke said, as though he were speaking about the weather. "He wrote to our old nurse. He wrote to my steward about his horses. He never wrote to me." He settled the shawl on her shoulders and stepped back. "I had told him not to. I suppose he was an obedient brother in the end."
Anna turned to look at him, but he had already gone to open the door.
On the tenth day, there was a storm. It came up the river in the late afternoon—a black spring squall that tore the blossom off the trees in the squares, sent the water sheeting across the cobbles, and brought Stepan's fever back with it.