She had left him sleeping quietly at six. At midnight, she was woken in the attic of the coffeehouse by stones against the window. A footman in the Duke's livery stood below in the running dark with a lantern, soaked to the skin. He called up that the Russian was out of his head and would let nobody near him. He was calling for "Anuta." Did anyone know who Anuta was?
Anuta was the name her nurse had called her. She had told Stepan on the third day because he had asked what her mother called her, and she had not wanted to say that she did not remember her mother's voice at all.
Her aunt's door was shut. Anna did not knock on it. That was her own choice, and she knew it was a choice while she made it. She dressed in the dark, pinned her hair up anyhow, and went down the stairs in her stockings with her boots in her hand so that the old boards would not creak. Then she ran with the footman through the rain to the carriage.
Stepan was not in the bed when she came in. He was on the floor in the corner of the room in his shirt, with his back to the wall and his arms across his head, shouting at the storm in Russian. He was shouting at the river to hold. He was shouting that the ice would not hold and that nobody should step on it, and that the captain must come back—come back, come back.
The Duke was on his knees on the floor an arm's length away, in his shirtsleeves, with his hair in his eyes, saying the man's name over and over in a low, even voice. He had clearly been there since the storm began.
Anna knelt down on the other side. She did not touch Stepan; she began to sing. It was the song her nurse had sung to her in the painted bed—a slow river song about a boat and a willow and a mother calling from the bank. She had not sung it aloud in eight years. Her voice cracked on the first line. She kept on.
By the third verse, Stepan had taken his arms away from his head. By the fifth, his breathing had slowed. By the end of it, he was leaning against her shoulder like a child and weeping, and asking her in a small, hoarse voice whether the ice had held.
"Yes," she said in Russian. "It held. Everyone is across. You can sleep now."
Between them, she and the Duke got him back into the bed. The storm went on. She sat beside Stepan for the rest of the night with his hand in both of hers, and sang whenever he stirred. The Duke sat on the other side of the bed in the dark with the watch in his hand. Once, near four o'clock, she looked up and found the Duke watching her across the pillow. He did not look away. Neither did she. Neither of them spoke.
The rain stopped at dawn. The fever had broken, and Stepan was sleeping like a stone. The Duke walked her out through the front hall himself, because every servant in the house was asleep on their feet. It was the Duke who opened the great front door onto the washed-gray street and handed her down the steps to his carriage.
Her hair had come down. Her gown was crushed and stained at the knee where she had knelt on the floor. She had no bonnet, no gloves, and no maid. And it was half-past five in the morning.