"I saw you watching."
"You held the codicil the way my father held his spectacles when he'd lost them." She was quiet a moment. "I thought you'd tell me. You asked me for the truth always, particularly when it was unpleasant. I thought perhaps it was a bargain that went both ways."
"And you married me anyway."
"I married the fen," said Rosamund, and for the first time since he had known her, which was four days, she smiled. It changed her face entirely. It was gone almost before he had seen it.
Below them the river slid by, brown and full and quiet, carrying its wreckage toward the sea.
"My father died in a breach," she said. "March of 'seventeen, at Whitmere, three miles from here. He'd built this engine. It was finished, but the boiler hadn't been fired yet—they were waiting on a part from Birmingham. The river came over at Whitmere in the night and he went out with the others to try to close it. The bank went under them. They found him in May, in a dyke at Ramsey." She said it plainly, as she had told him the figures in the vestry. "Afterward I couldn't go near water. I couldn't walk the Lode bank. I'd been born on it, and I couldn't. The Duke—he'd taken me on by then, to keep the engine accounts, because there was no one else who understood them—he found out, I don't know how. And he walked me along the bank. Every morning for a month. Half a mile the first day, at his pace, which was slow. A mile the next week. He never said why. He talked about Latin verbs." Her voice wavered and recovered. "At the end of the month I walked out to Lode End alone and watched them fire the boiler for the first time. He was waiting in the carriage at the drove end. He didn't come down. He said it was my engine and he wasn't going to stand about in the mud pretending he understood it."
Ivo looked at the engine house below them, its chimney smoking quietly into the morning, the beam still going up and down behind the long windows, steady as a pulse.
"He did that for me," he said slowly. "The skating. When I was small. He wouldn't let go of my wrists until I could stand."
They sat and drank the cold tea.
X.
The sixth Duke of Ellerholt was buried on the Tuesday, in the family vault under the chancel of St Guthlac's, by torchlight, as the Ferrands had been buried for two hundred years.