Mary asked.
The Duke came himself, since he had laughed before witnesses, and now must speak before them, too. He came without the top hat cocked back, and without the men behind him. He stood in the doorway of the cottage, and did not step inside.
"Miss Reed," he said, "I am told the orchard cannot do without your yard."
Mary said, "It cannot, sir."
He was quiet a moment. "Then name your terms."
She named them plainly: the cottage to be hers by lease of 99 years at a shilling; the yard to be hers outright; the yearly sum that had been paid to the man before her to be paid again; and the roof of the cottage to be mended before Michaelmas; and a thatcher's needle and fresh straw to be sent down within the fortnight.
The Duke listened without speaking. When she was done, he inclined his head, not deeply, but enough that the parish would see it when the parish heard of it, and he said, "You shall have them." Then he said quieter, "I did not know what I gave away."
Mary said, "No, sir, you did not."
He touched the brim of his hat and went out into the lane, and the cat watched him go from the top of the wall.
By midsummer, the orchard was recovering itself. The hives at the crooked half-circle stood cleaned and set square upon their pegged stones. Straw hats freshly bound. Brass plates rubbed bright. The bee and the pear and the letter M plain again in the sun. Mary walked the rows morning and evening with the smoke bellows on its strap over her shoulder, and the small dark leather journal in her apron pocket, and a pencil behind her ear. The cat kept to the wall and watched her from a stone.
In the village, the old woman in gray passed her at the churchyard gate one afternoon, nodded once, and said, "The parish will eat this winter." Mary nodded back and understood at last what had been said to her at the beginning.
On a still evening in late August, when the light lay long and gold along the orchard grass, and the last bees were coming in low and heavy to the boards, Mary sat on the flat stone at the foot of hive number seven with her hands loose in her lap.
Ann Pettifer's boy had come down the lane earlier with a jar of gooseberries from his mother and had stayed an hour watching the bees before running home. The wheelwright had mended the gate without asking. Mr. Waverly had sent word that the covenant was entered in the estate book in a fresh hand. The Duke had not come again and would not need to.
The thatch above the cottage sat trim and pale against the darkening sky. Inside, the brass-cornered book lay open on the table where Mary had left it, her father's small, careful hand faintly visible in the lamp glow through the window.
She thought of her father then, and of the man who had died in the autumn, and of the old Duke who had signed a covenant she had never met him to thank. She thought of the wager and of the laugh and of the year of ledger entries where the sickness had come and the note said As feared.
She laid her hand on the timber of hive number seven and felt the living hum through the wood, and she said quietly to no one and to all of them, "A thing kept is a thing that keeps you."
The cat came across the grass and pressed against her ankle, and the light held a long moment on the pear trees beyond the wall, and then the day let itself down softly into evening.