"I could have. I did." He turned his head then, and in the light from the kitchen door, she saw his face, and she had never seen a man's face look like that: it was not anger anymore; it was something much older and much more tired. "I saw you in the hall. I came in from the steps and I saw her hand on your arm, and I saw your face, and I knew something was wrong. I didn't know what. So I went up."
Isabel did not move.
"I went up the back stair at four in the morning," he said. "I found your door, and I stood outside it, and I did not knock because I thought, if anybody sees the Duke standing at a companion's door in the middle of the night, she is ruined. Whatever the truth of it, I thought I was protecting you. I thought I would speak to you in the morning, properly, in daylight, with the door open and a maid in the room." He stopped. "In the morning, you were gone. I have thought about that door every day for a year, Isabel. Every single day. If I had knocked..."
She never told him—not that night, nor in all the years afterwards—that she had been standing on the other side of that door in her bare feet with her hand on the latch. It was the one thing she kept. It seemed to her that he had carried enough, and that some things are kinder left unsaid.
She only reached out in the dark and took his hand, the one with the sting on the wrist, and held it in both of hers in her lap. He let out a breath that shook.
His name was Oswin. She had never once said it aloud, and she kept it back even now.
They sat together on the bench above the valley with their hands joined until the fire in the kitchen had burned down to red. Old Kezia, who had not gone to sleep at all, stood a long while just inside the dark doorway where neither of them could see her. She looked at the two of them sitting there against the stars: the young woman and the tall man bent a little toward her, the way the old lime by the church bends toward the yew. Then she went quietly back to her bed and lay in it, smiling at the ceiling, which she had not done for a very long time.
Two days later, on the Thursday, the little girl from the ford came up the track at a run again with the milk jug slopping in her hand. And this time, she did not wait to get her breath.
"There's a lady," she said, "at the inn, in a yellow carriage with four horses. She's asking for you by name, miss, and she's got a face like a lady painted on a plate."
Lady Livia had been staying with friends at Ludlow, a morning's drive away, and all Ludlow had been talking for days of the Duke who rode through asking every ostler for a church with a bell in a yew. She knew better than anybody whose story that bell came from, and she had ordered a carriage the same afternoon.