It was the first time she had used his name. He turned and looked at her. She saw him hear it.
"Say that again."
"I beg your pardon, my lord—"
"No. Not that. The name."
She swallowed. "Adrian."
He closed his eyes. A muscle moved in his cheek.
"Nobody has said it in that voice for nineteen years," he said, very low. "I had forgotten that it could be said like that."
She did not trust herself to answer. After a moment, very gently, without opening his eyes, he turned his maimed hand palm-up on the seat between them, and she laid her own in it, and they rode the rest of the way to Dorset in silence.
Lyme Regis lay in the mouth of a steep green valley, tumbling down to the sea, a place of crooked grey stairs and stone walls and small bright houses stacked on the hillside like toys. The wind came off the water smelling of salt and weed. Gulls wheeled over the long stone arm of the Cobb. It was a bright blowing afternoon, the first of June, with the clouds racing and the whole bay full of light.
Cobb Lane was a very narrow lane indeed, a mere crack between two high walls, paved with cobbles worn into hollows by two hundred years of feet. At the top of it, at the end of a flight of crooked steps, stood a small white house with a blue door and a window box full of nasturtiums.
The carriage could go no further. They got down at the foot of the lane, and stood together in the wind.
"I cannot do it," said Adrian.
"You can."
"I do not know what I shall say."
"I do not think," Clara said, "that you will have to say anything at all." She took her hand from his arm. "I shall wait here."