"Will you skate?" she said.
"I can't see the ice." He said it quite simply; it had become, in two months, a thing he could say to her simply. "Not well enough. Not where it's thin. Not the cracks. Not at this hour."
"I can."
He turned his head and looked at her, a little to one side, the way he looked at everything now that he no longer pretended in front of her.
"I can't skate," Rosamund said. "My father never had time to teach me and then I was afraid of water. But I can see where the ice is black and where it's grey, and where the reeds come through, and where the drain comes in under the bridge and it never freezes properly. I've walked this bank every morning for two years." She held out her hand for the skates. "So I think you had better teach me. And I'll tell you where it bears."
He did not give her the skates at once.
"Rosamund," he said. "If there had been no codicil. If he had lived, and you had been his widow, as you meant. Would you have—" He stopped. He did not know how to finish it.
She considered the question with the seriousness she gave to the engine accounts.
"I don't know," she said. "That's the truth, and you asked me always to tell you the truth. I don't know. I didn't choose you. I chose the fen, and the fen came with you in it." She was quiet. "But I've chosen you every morning since. That's true too. I didn't expect it. He'd laugh."
"He would," said Ivo. "He'd be insufferable."