"Ask me again," she said, "when I put off black. In October. Ask me then what I'd choose, and I'll tell you. I don't want to answer it in mourning. I want to answer it in colours."
"And if I've gone blind by October?"
"Then you won't see what colour I'm wearing," said Rosamund, "and I'll have to tell you that, too."
He laughed—out loud, startled, the first time she had heard him laugh—and the sound went out across the ice and came back off the far bank. Then he knelt on the frozen grass at her feet, and she sat down on the bank in her black skirts, and he strapped the old man's skates to her boots with his own hands, by feel, buckling each strap tight and testing it with his thumb.
He stood up and took her by both wrists.
"Bend your knees," he said. "Bend them. A Ferrand doesn't fall like a sack of meal."
"I'm a Quarrie," said Rosamund, "whatever the register says. We fall however we like."
She stepped out onto the ice. It held. He came after her, backward, in his boots, sliding, holding her wrists, and she looked past his shoulder at the long red road of the sunset and told him what she saw—black ice here, sound; grey there, keep left; the reeds by the bridge, go wide—and he towed her out across the frozen Lode, slowly, toward the middle, where neither of them had been, while the light went down over the fen and the engine at Lode End, far off and very faint, beat on in the cold like a heart.
She fell four times before dark. He picked her up four times. The court in London had not yet said what the old man had meant; the surgeon had not yet said how long; the year had ten months still to run.
On the fifth time, she did not fall.