She dined with him as she had said she would. The first evening they sat at opposite ends of a table thirty feet long and said nothing, and the second evening she came down and calmly directed the footman to set her place beside his, and after that they talked.
She asked him about the estate, and he told her: the drainage in the low fields, the dispute over the mill, the school his mother had wanted and never built. And she listened with that same whole attention she had given his proposal, and she had opinions, sharp and sensible ones. Within a fortnight, he found that he was saving things up through the long gray days to tell her at dinner, the way a man saves a fire to come home to.
She sat with him as she had said she would. When the bad nights came, the ones where the fear sat on his chest, he would find her in the library before dawn with a branch of candles and a book, having heard him moving, and she would not fuss or pity him. She would simply pour him something warm and read aloud in her low, even voice until the dark grew bearable, and he would sit in his mother's chair by the fire among the old leather books and listen to her, and the 3:00 terror would loosen its grip and let him breathe.
They read his list, as she had promised. She found it among his papers—a single sheet in his own cramped hand, the books he had most regretted he would not finish—and she did not remark on what it was, only carried the first of them to the fire one evening and began.
They read the regretted books one by one through the deep of the winter, and she had been right that she would not spare him. She argued with the authors and with him both, fiercely and with relish, and he found himself arguing back, roused out of his gray stillness into something that felt almost like temper, almost like appetite. He understood dimly that she did it on purpose, that she was provoking him into living the way one provokes a banked fire into flame, and he let her because it was easier to breathe when she did.
He began, too, to talk to her of the estate as though it had a future. He had not done so in months. There had seemed no use in it when he would not be there to see any harvest brought in.
But she asked, and she kept asking. One gray afternoon she had the steward bring the ledgers to the library and spread them on the great table, and went through the whole of it with the Duke at her side: the rents and the repairs and the long quarrel over the mill. She had a head for figures that surprised him and a directness that did not.
By the end of it, they had settled the mill dispute that had defeated him for three years, and she had drawn up plans for his mother's school on the back of an old letter, and the Duke of Wintersea had spent four hours forgetting entirely that he was meant to be dying.
He noticed it that night, lying awake. He had passed a whole afternoon and not once thought of the end. She would not let him give up anything: not his books, not his school, not his land, not the small daily business of being a man with a tomorrow.