SHE GAVE THE LOST TRAVELER HER LAST COIN FOR THE FERRY—UNAWARE HE WAS THE DUKE RETURNING HOME

The rain had been falling since dawn, and by the time the sky turned the color of wet slate, the small village of Harabbridge smelled of mud, woodsm smoke, and the sour breath of the river. Maran Ashkam stood at the edge of the wooden pier, with her hood pulled low, her boots sinking a little into the soft planks, and she counted the coins in her pocket for the third time.

 There were only three. two small copper pieces and one silver coin that had once belonged to her mother. The silver coin had a bent edge where a nail had been driven through it long ago, and the mark had never gone away. Maron rubbed her thumb across the bent edge the way another woman might rub a rosary. It steadied her. The ferry was late.

 It was always late, but today the lateness felt heavier because the wind was sharp and her cloak was thin. She had walked 6 milesi from the little cottage she rented at the edge of the moore, and she had come to Harabbridge for one reason, to bring back medicine for old Mrs. P, who had taken ill in the night. Marin was not a nurse, and she was not a doctor.

 She was a young woman with quick hands and a soft voice, and she had promised the old woman she would not let her die alone in a damp bed. So she had walked, and she had bought the little brown bottle from the apothecary, and now she stood on the pier, waiting for the ferry that would carry her across the river Harrow to the Moore Road home.

The smell of the river was strong here. It was the smell of cold water and rotting reeds, and faintly of the tar the ferryman used to seal the wood of his boat. Somewhere behind her, a horse snorted and shook its harness, and the coins in her pocket clinkedked together like small bells.

 She listened to the sound and pressed her hand flat against her side to quiet them. Three coins. That was all she had until the end of the week, when Mr. Bramfield the Miller would pay her for the mending she had done for his wife. three coins, and one of them was her mother’s silver, and she had already made up her mind that she would not spend the silver, unless there was no other choice.

 The bent edge under her thumb was a promise she had made to a woman 10 years in the grave. She was still counting when she heard the footsteps behind her. They were heavy, but uneven, as if the man who made them was trying not to limp, and mostly failing. She turned her head only a little. A traveler stood at the end of the pier with a cloak dark from the rain, and a satchel over one shoulder that looked much too small to hold whatever a real journey required.

 His hat was pulled low, and his face was half in shadow, but she could see that his jaw was hard, and that his mouth was pressed into a thin line, the way a mouth is pressed when the man behind it does not want to say what he is thinking. Water ran down the wide brim of his hat and dripped onto the shoulder of his coat in a steady, patient rhythm.

Is this the ferry to Ashkam Moore? He asked. His voice was low. It had the tired sound of a man who had asked too many questions already that day. It is, Marin said. She did not look at him again after that. She had learned long ago that a young woman traveling alone did well not to hold the gaze of strange men on empty peers.

He did not seem to notice, or if he noticed, he did not mind. He came a few steps closer and stood beside her, keeping a careful distance, and for a moment there were only two shapes in wet cloaks, watching the gray river slide past the peer posts. The wind pushed a smell of woodsm smoke down from the village behind them, and further off a dog was barking in a high, complaining way, and further off still the church bell at Harabbridge began to toll the hour.

 1 2 3 4 and Marin felt the coins in her pocket shift again as she moved her weight from one foot to the other. “Have you been waiting long?” the traveler asked. “Long enough,” she said. “Not too long,” he nodded once. The kind of nod a man gives when he has run out of easy questions and has not yet worked up to the hard ones. He was still standing there when the ferryman finally came around the bend, pulling his flat little boat through the slow brown water.

 The fairerryyman was a broad man with a red face and a fur cap that was so old the fur had gone to bald patches in three places, and he was in no mood to be pleasant. He fastened the boat to the pier with a rope, and looked up at his two passengers with the look of a man who has already decided today is not a day for kindness. 6 p each, he said.

cash, no promises. Marin felt the world tilt very slightly. Six pence. She turned her face away from the traveler so that he would not see the color leave her cheeks. She had two coppers. Two coppers made 2 p. And the silver coin. The silver coin was, if she remembered rightly, worth a shilling. A shilling was 12 p.

 Six pence out of a shilling would leave her six pence in change, which was more than enough to get her home with something to spare. It should have been an easy thing. And yet her thumb went to the bent edge again. The metal was cold under her thumb, and the cold seemed to travel up her arm and settle in her chest. Her mother had pressed that coin into her hand on the last morning of her life.

 Her mother had not said, “Keep this.” Her mother had said, “This is the last thing I own that is only mine, and I want it to belong to you.” Marin had been 11 years old. She had understood then, and she had understood every day since, that the coin was not really a coin. It was a small silver piece of her mother that she carried in her pocket wherever she went. She turned back to the ferryman.

She began to open her mouth to ask if he would take the two coppers now, and let her pay the rest when Mr. Bramfield paid her on Friday. She had done this before, once two years ago, with an old fairerryyman who had known her father. This fairyman did not know her father. She could see it in the flat, tired way he was looking at her, the way one looks at a bundle of laundry one does not want to carry.

 Before she could speak, the traveler stepped forward. He had reached into his coat, and now he stood there patting the inside of it, and then the outside of it, and then the inside again, and slowly his face changed. He had been tired before. Now he was something else. Not angry, not exactly frightened. He was a man who had just discovered in one small motion that he was not the man he had been an hour ago.

My purse, he said, and then stopped because saying it again would not bring it back. Marin watched him. He was too still. A man who had truly never lost a purse before would have shouted or cursed or begun to search the boards of the pier. This man simply stood with his hand inside his coat and stared at nothing in particular.

 and she understood that whatever he was feeling was not about the purse itself, but about something the purse was standing for. She saw the muscle at the corner of his jaw move once. She saw his fingers close inside his coat into a slow fist, and then his hand came out empty, and he lowered it, and he looked at the ferryman with a face that had been made calm on purpose.

 I appear to have been robbed, the traveler said. Somewhere between the last coaching in and this pier. Then I appear to have no room in my boat for you, the ferryman said. He did not smile when he said it. It was not a joke. It was a fact he was reporting the way another man might report the weather. I can pay you tomorrow, the traveler said.

 Twice the fair. Three times. I give you my word. Words don’t row the boat, sir. The traveler’s shoulders shifted only a little. He was not the sort of man who begged. Marin could see that as clearly as she could see the river. He would stand here in the rain for the rest of the day before he would beg a ferryman for passage.

 She could see him already deciding to turn around to walk back to the village to find some other way, some longer way, some way that would cost him something he could not name. And she thought of Mrs. pool alone on the moore in a damp bed and the little brown bottle of medicine in her own pocket that she had promised to bring home before nightfall.

 And she thought of her mother’s silver coin. And she thought of the road home and how long the road was and how many miles were between here and there. She did a quick small piece of arithmetic in her head. 6 p for her passage. 6 p for his. 12 p. Exactly a shilling. Exactly her silver coin. Nothing left over. Nothing at all.

 Her thumb moved once more across the bent edge. She stood very still on the pier while the rain fell on her hood, and the church bell finished tolling, and the ferryman spat into the river, and the traveler prepared to turn around and walk away. She stood there for what felt to her like a long time, though later she would think it could not have been more than the space of two breaths, and in that time she made a choice that she did not.

 Even in the making of it, entirely understand. She reached into her pocket, she drew out the silver coin. She held it flat on her palm, and the bent edge caught the gray light and shone dully, and she looked at it for one more heartbeat. Then she stepped forward. Two passages, she said to the fairyman. She placed the silver coin in his broad wet palm.

 For both of us, to Ashkcom Moore. The fairerryyman turned the coin over. He bit down on it once with a yellow tooth and grunted, and then he pocketed it without ceremony and jerked his head toward the boat. Get in then, and mind the middle plank. It’s rotten. Marin stepped down into the boat. She did not look at the traveler as she did so.

 She was afraid that if she looked at him, she would begin to feel foolish. And if she began to feel foolish, she would begin to feel sorry for herself, and she had no room in her life for that. She took her seat on the little wooden bench at the front of the boat and pressed her hands flat against her knees, and stared at the far bank of the river, which was still hidden in the mist.

 The traveler climbed in more slowly. She heard him settle onto the bench opposite her. She felt the boat rock beneath his weight. And then still the ferryman shoved off from the pier, and the water made a soft slapping sound against the wood, and the smell of the river rose all around them, wet and green and cold, and beneath it the faint sour smell of the tar, and beneath that the woods smoke from the village drifting out over the water.

 For a long moment neither of them spoke. Maron looked at the mist. The traveler looked at her, though she did not turn her head to see it. She could feel his gaze the way one feels a hand held near a candle, not touching, but warm. “You paid my fair,” he said at last. His voice was very quiet. It did not carry to the fairerryyman.

 “I paid our fair,” Marouin said. “It came out the same.” “With your last coin.” She did turn her head then, only a little, so that she could see him from the side of her eye. “How would you know that?” “You counted them,” he said. “Three times.” While I was walking up the pier, I saw your hand move in your pocket. He paused.

 The last time you took only the silver, there was nothing else. She felt her face grow warm despite the rain. She had not thought anyone was watching. She had felt so alone on the pier that it had not occurred to her that a stranger could see her at all. She looked away again back at the mist. It was a shilling, she said. It bought two fairs.

 That is what a shilling is for. That was not a shilling, he said. That was something else. She did not answer. There was nothing to answer with. He had seen too much for a stranger, and she did not know how to feel about it yet. So she chose to feel nothing about it for now and to file the feeling away for later, the way she had learned to file so many other feelings away.

 The fairerryyman pulled them out into the current. The mist closed around the boat, thick and wet, and for a while there was no world beyond the small wooden shape of the vessel and the three of them inside it. Somewhere above them a curu called, its cry drawn out and lonely. The sound made Marin’s chest tighten in a way she had not expected. She swallowed.

 She kept her hands flat on her knees. “May I know your name?” the traveler asked. “Marin,” she said. “Marin Ashkcomi.” “Ashkcombe?” he said slowly, as if the word had a weight to it that she did not know it had. Like the Moore, “My family gave the Moore its name,” she said, “a long time ago before we had nothing to give it.

 He was quiet for a moment. She could not see his face clearly under the brim of his hat, but she could see that he had gone very still. “And you?” she asked because she did not want to sit in the silence with him. “You have not told me your name.” “Calum,” he said after a small pause that she noticed and chose not to remark on. “Calum will do.

” “Calum will do,” she repeated. It was not quite a question. She smiled a little, though she made sure he did not see it because she did not want him to think she was mocking him. You will be paid back, he said. Every penny and more. I promise you that. There is no need, Marin said. It was a shilling. It was a ferry ride. It is done.

 There is every need, he said, and something in his voice made her look at him fully for the first time. His face was harder than she had thought it would be. not cruel, just made of something that did not bend easily. He had eyes the color of storm water, and there was rain caught in his dark lashes, and his mouth had that same thin, careful line she had seen on the pier. He was not a young man.

 He was not old either. He was somewhere in the middle, where a man has begun to know what the world costs, but has not yet made peace with the bill. He looked at her the way a man looks at a page in a book he has been searching for. She lowered her eyes first. She was not shy. She simply did not wish to be looked at like that by a man whose name might not be Callum.

 You are not from Harrow, she said. It was the safest thing she could think of to say. No. Where are you going? Home, he said. There was a small silence. I have been away a long time. How long? He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “9 years. 10 in the spring.” She thought about that. 10 years was a long time to be away from anything.

 She wondered what he had gone away from. And she wondered what he was coming back to. And she wondered whether the two were the same thing or two different things. And then she stopped wondering because it was not her business. The mist began to thin. The far bank came into view. A low green line dotted with the small dark shapes of gor bushes and the paler shape of the ferryman’s shed.

 Somewhere beyond it hidden by the rise of the land was the moore road and beyond that the little cottage where Mrs. Pool lay coughing into a pillow. Marin felt the little brown bottle press against her hip through the fabric of her cloak and she was glad she had bought it. She was glad she had not at the last kept her silver. There, she said quietly.

 The Moore road is just beyond that shed. You are going home too? Callum asked. Yes, not far. Alone? I have walked it many times. He looked at her again longer this time. She felt it though she did not look back. I would walk with you, he said, if you would allow it. It is not safe for a woman alone on a more road at dusk.

 It is not dusk yet. It will be by the time we are halfway. She considered this. She considered the man opposite her, whose name was probably not Callum, who had lost his purse and been rescued by a stranger, and who spoke of home in a voice that sounded like a wound that had never closed properly.

 She considered her cottage and the medicine in her pocket, and the six mi of wet moore between here and there. You may walk with me as far as the crossroads, she said. After that, my road goes one way and yours goes another. Fair, he said. The fairyman brought the boat against the far bank with a soft scrape of wood on gravel.

 He did not offer his hand to help either of them climb out. Marin was used to this. She lifted her skirts a little and stepped onto the muddy bank, and the ferryman had already begun to pull the boat back out into the current before Callum had even set his second foot on the ground. The rain had softened to a thin drizzle. It fell on their shoulders and their hoods and on the wet ferns at the side of the path, and it made a small whispering sound that was not unpleasant.

The smell of wet earth was strong here. It was the smellin associated with home. She had grown up with it. She could not walk through it without feeling her shoulders drop a little, without feeling the tightness in her chest ease. They walked without speaking for a while. Callum kept pace with her easily, though she noticed again the small uneven weight in his step, and she wondered whether he had been hurt recently or long ago. She did not ask.

He did not offer. “May I ask you something?” he said at last after they had passed the ferryman’s shed and started up the lowrise toward the moore. “You may. Why did you do it?” She did not answer at once. She was thinking about how to answer. She was thinking about the bent silver edge and her mother’s face and the smell of the river and the way the traveler’s hand had closed into a slow fist inside his coat.

She was thinking about many things at once, and the truth was made of all of them, and she was not sure she could put it into words that a stranger would understand. “You needed the ferry,” she said at last. “I had the coin.” “It seemed simple. That is not an answer. It is the answer I have.

 He was quiet for several steps. The path narrowed and he fell in behind her and she could hear the sound of his boots against the wet stones. You had one coin left, he said. I have known men who would not give one coin to their brother. You are not my brother, which is my point, he said. And there was very faintly the ghost of something like a laugh in his voice, though not a happy one.

 I was a stranger. I still am a stranger. Yet you gave me the last thing in your pocket. It was not the last thing in my pocket. Ah, he said the medicine. Then she stopped walking. She turned around to look at him. How do you know about the medicine? He looked at her steadily. Rain ran down his face in thin lines. His eyes in the gray light were even more the color of storm water than they had been in the boat.

 You touched your hip three times while we were crossing, he said. Once when the ferryman was speaking. Once when you sat down. Once when you looked at the far bank. It is not a purse or you would carry it in your other pocket where you carried the coins. It is not a knife or you would not touch it so gently.

 It is glass and it is small and it is precious and you are afraid of dropping it. So medicine. Marin stood very still on the path. The drizzle fell on her hood. Somewhere out on the moore a lapwing called high and sudden. She looked at the man in front of her, whose name was probably not Callum, and she felt for the first time since she had stood on the pier counting her coins that she might be in the presence of someone she should be careful of.

 Not because he was dangerous, because he saw too much. “Who are you?” she asked quietly. A traveler, he said, whose purse was stolen, whose fair was paid by a kind woman, who is trying to walk her home safely because it is the least he can do. That is not an answer. It is the answer I have, he said.

 And this time she heard the small warmth in his voice, and she understood he was giving her back her own words on purpose, and she almost smiled and did not quite. She turned and began walking again. He fell in behind her. Neither of them spoke for a long time after that. The path climbed and then flattened, and the moore spread out before them in every direction, brown and gold, and gray under the low sky, dotted with dark clumps of heather, and the paler patches of bog cotton.

 The wind was stronger here. It smelled of Pete and cold stone, and faintly of sheep. Marin pulled her hood tighter. They came to the crossroads just as the light was beginning to fail. The sign there had lost its paint years ago, but Marin knew every rut in every road that led away from it. To the north lay her cottage and the little farm belonging to Mrs.

Pool. To the east lay a road that eventually met the great highway to the coast. To the west lay the estate of Ravencross, which had stood empty for nearly 10 years, its gates chained, its windows shuttered, its long avenue of lime trees choked with weeds. She stopped at the sign. She turned to Callum.

 This is where our roads part, she said. He looked at the sign. He looked at the road to the west. He looked at her. May I walk you to your door? He asked. No, she said gently but plainly. I said the crossroads. I meant the crossroads. He nodded slowly. He accepted her word without argument, and she liked him a little more for that, though she would not have said so.

 Then may I know where your door is? He asked. So I may find you again to repay you. There is no need to repay me. There is every need. You have said that already. I will say it again if I must. She almost smiled again. She held the smile back. The cottage at the edge of the moore, she said. Half a mile past the standing stone.

 You cannot miss it if you look for it. But please do not look for it, sir. I do not need repaying. That, he said, will be for me to decide. She did not answer that. She turned to the north and began to walk. She did not look back until she had gone perhaps 20 paces. And when she did look back, he was still standing at the crossroads watching her, his hand raised in a small, quiet salute.

 She lifted her own hand in return, though she was not sure why she did it. Then she turned again and walked on. The road to the west did not, as it happened, lead only to Ravencross. But Ravencross was where it ended, and Ravencross was where Callum, whose name was not Callum, was going. He stood at the crossroads for a while after Marin had disappeared over the rise.

 He watched the place where she had been, and he thought about the shilling in the ferryman’s pocket, and he thought about the small brown bottle that she had touched three times, and he thought about the bent edge of a silver coin that she had held on her palm, as if it was something that could break. He thought about all of these things at once.

 Then he turned to the west and he walked the long weedy road down toward the chained gates of the house that had in the eye of the law and in the eye of every soul in the county belonged to him for 9 years and would belong to him for the rest of his days. His name was Alistister Rowan Ferncliffe, the seventh Duke of Ravencross, and he had come home.

 He did not go up to the great house. He went instead to the gamekeeper’s lodge at the edge of the estate, where an old man named Piers Hobbes lived alone with a lame dog and a memory that had not entirely failed him. Piers Hobbs opened the door of the lodge to a hooded stranger, took one look at the storm water eyes under the brim of the wet hat, and made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob.

 He did not ask any questions. He put the traveler in the chair beside the fire and hung his wet cloak on the peg by the door and put a kettle over the flames. And only after all of these things had been done did he sit down on the little three-legged stool opposite and say in a voice thick with feeling your grace peers, said Alistister, and his voice was tired. I do not want it known yet.

 I want to see the house first. I want to see the village. I want to see it all with my own eyes before any of them know I am back. I sir I of course sir there is a woman Alistister said after a moment he was looking into the fire. Marin Ashkum. Do you know her? Piers Hobbes’s face changed. It softened. I sir I know her.

Everyone knows her out on this moore. Old Master Ashgum’s daughter. He was the tenant of the Westfield before he died. Poor man left her nothing but the cottage and the debts. She has been mending and washing and running errands to keep herself for six years now, sir, since she came of age. She looks after old Mrs. Pool, who has no one else.

 She looks after half the Moore one way or another, though she’d not thank you for saying so. She paid my fairy fair today, Alistister said with the last coin in her pocket. Pierce Hobbes looked at him for a long moment. Then very slowly the old man smiled. It was not a wide smile. It was the kind of smile a man wears when he has been given unexpectedly a small piece of good news.

 That said peers is a very marin thing to have done. Did she know who I was? How could she, sir? You have been away since she was a girl of 13. She would not remember your face. and your father, God rest him, never let her set foot on the grounds.” He said the ashums had grown small, and there was no reason to know small people.

 Alistair was quiet at that. He looked into the fire for a long time. The flames crackled and threw a soft yellow light onto the walls of the lodge, and the smell of the Pete smoke was thick and sweet, and outside the wind moved over the moore with a long, low soundlike breathing. Peers, he said at last, “Tomorrow I want the house opened.

” Quietly, “I want fires laid in three rooms only. I do not want a great fuss. I do not want the village to know. Not yet.” “I sir and peers.” “Sir, send someone to the cottage at the edge of the moore, half a mile past the standing stone. There is an old woman there, Mrs. Pool. See that she has coal and broth and a doctor if she needs one.

 Do not tell her who sent it. Do not tell Miss Ashkam either. Tell them it is the parish. Tell them anything but the truth. Piers Hobbes looked at his master and his old eyes were wet and he did not say what he was thinking because it was not his place. He only nodded. I sir, it will be done tonight. Good, said Alistister. Good.

 He sat in the chair by the fire for a long time after that, and Pierers Hobbs moved quietly around him, laying out bread and cold mutton and a mug of ale, and neither of them spoke. Outside the rain fell on the roof of the lodge in a steady, gentle sound, and inside a man who had been away 9 years, and would be 10 in the spring, sat with his hands open on his knees, and stared at a fire he had not seen since he was a boy.

 He thought about the bent edge of a silver coin. He thought about a woman who had said, “It seemed simple.” He thought about the way she had looked at him at the crossroads, plain and steady, and told him not to come to her door. He was already going to come to her door. He simply had not decided yet how. Marin reached the cottage just as the last of the light was leaving the sky.

 She was cold to the bone, and her hood was heavy with water, and the little brown bottle in her pocket had grown warm from the heat of her hip. She pushed open the door of Mrs. Pool’s cottage and the smell of the sick room came out to meet her. Campor and tallow and unwashed linen and the faint sour smell of illness and she went in without hesitating because these smells did not frighten her.

 She had grown up with worse. Mrs. Pool was a small woman under a great heap of blankets. Her face was very pale, and her hair, which had once been red, was now the color of wet ashes. Her eyes opened when Marin came in and her cracked lips moved into a shape that was very nearly a smile. “You went, Mrs.” Pool whispered.

 “You mad girl. You went in the rain.” “I said I would,” Marin said. She knelt beside the bed and took the little brown bottle out of her pocket and set it on the small table by the candle. “Now be quiet, and let me get this into you before you talk yourself into another fit. I have no money to pay you, love.

 Then it is a good thing I did not ask for any. She measured out the medicine with a careful hand. She held the old woman’s head up while she drank it. She wiped Mrs. Pool’s mouth with the corner of a clean cloth, and she settled her back against the pillow. And she put more Pete on the fire, and she made a thin broth on the hearth from the last of the leaks, and a knuckle of bone.

 And she did not sit down until all of these things were done. Only then did she pull the little stool close to the fire and hold her cold hands out toward the flames. You’ll catch your death, said Mrs. Pool from the bed, sitting in wet clothes. I’ve caught worse. The old woman was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Marin, yes.

 How did you pay for the medicine?” Marin did not answer at once. She spread her fingers to the fire. She watched the light catch on the little pale hairs at her wrist. I had enough, she said. Marin, I had enough, Mrs. Pool. The old woman looked at her for a long moment. Then she closed her eyes and a tear slipped from under her lashes, and she did not try to wipe it away.

 You gave her coin, Mrs. Pool said. Your mother’s coin. Marin did not answer that either. She stared at the fire and thought about how strange it was that everyone on the moore seemed to know about her mother’s coin, and how strange it was that she had never once, in all the years she had carried it, imagined giving it away, and how strange it was that when the moment had come to give it away, she had not hesitated more than the space of two breaths.

 She thought about the traveler whose name was probably not Callum, and about the way his hand had closed inside his coat, and about the way he had said that was not a shilling, and about the way he had watched her go up the road toward the north until she was over the rise. She did not think then that she would ever see him again, and she did not think then that it mattered whether she did.

 She was wrong about both of those things. In the morning the rain had stopped and there was a thin pale sun struggling through the clouds. Marin woke on the stool by the fire with a stiff neck and a headache and she found Mrs. Pool still breathing steadily which was more than she had hoped for. She washed her face in cold water from the bucket by the door and she ate a piece of yesterday’s bread and she stepped outside to bring in more Pete from the pile beside the wall.

 There was a basket on the doorstep. It was a large basket, and it was covered with a clean square of linen. Marin stood staring at it for a long moment before she bent to pick up the linen. Underneath there was a fresh loaf of bread, still faintly warm, and a wedge of yellow cheese, and a p of butter wrapped in a leaf, and a jar of honey, and a small croc of clear broth with a cork tied down with string, and a paper twist of tea, and a paper twist of sugar, and a paper twist of something dark that turned out, when she opened it

to be beef tea. Beneath all of it lay a small linen bag. It clinkedked when she lifted it. When she opened it, she found a quantity of copper and silver coins that added up when she counted them carefully three times to exactly one shilling. There was no note. She stood on the doorstep in the pale sun and stared at the basket for a long time.

She looked up and down the moore road. There was no one in sight. She looked at the doorstep for footprints. There were footprints, but they were not clear enough to tell her much beyond the fact that whoever had brought the basket had worn boots that were not new. She carried the basket inside.

 She did not tell Mrs. Pool about the shilling. She did tell her about the broth and the bread and the butter, and she fed the old woman a cup of the broth, and watched a little of the color come back into her face. She said nothing about who might have brought it. Mrs. Pool did not ask. Marin was grateful for that. Later, when the old woman was asleep again, Marin stood at the little window of the cottage and looked out at the moore.

 Her fingers were closed around the small linen bag of coins in her pocket. The weight was almost exactly the weight of the silver coin had been, but it was not the same weight. Nothing would ever be quite the same weight as her mother’s coin. She understood that she had made her peace with it on the pier. And still the little bag was a kindness, and she could not deny that she was moved by it.

 She wondered who had left it. She had a suspicion. She did not know quite what to do with the suspicion. In the days that followed, other small things happened on the moore. A cartload of good, dry coal arrived at Mrs. Pool’s cottage delivered by a boy who said only that the parish had sent it and who ran off before Marin could ask any further questions.

 A new pane of glass appeared in the little kitchen window which had been cracked for two winters. Marin had come home from a walk to find a glazier tapping the last of the putty into place, and the glazier had said only that Mr. Bramfield had ordered it, and had not been able to be persuaded to explain further. Mr.

 Bramfield, when Marouin went to thank him at the mill, had looked at her blankly and denied all knowledge of the window, and had then, in the middle of denying it, gone slightly pink around the ears, and had suddenly needed to attend to a bag of flour on the far side of the yard. Marin stood in the milly yard for a long time after that. She looked at Mr.

Bramfield’s back. She thought about the shilling in the linen bag. She thought about the coal. She thought about the pane of glass. She thought about the traveler at the crossroads, saying, “That will be for me to decide.” She walked home slowly along the Moore road. The wind blew across the heather, and there was the smell of gorse blossom on the air, sharp and sweet, and a little like coconut, and somewhere far off a shepherd was whistling to his dog.

 She walked with her hand in her pocket, and her thumb was on the little linen bag, and she was frowning. She did not go back to the crossroads. She had told him not to come to her door, and she had meant it, and she was not going to walk out to meet him halfway, either. But she also did not stop thinking about him, and this bothered her more than anything else did.

 He came to her door on the ninth day. She had known all through the previous evening that he was going to come. She could not have said how she knew. She only knew that when she woke that morning, the moore was very still and the sky was very pale, and the air had that particular expectant quality that comes before something changes.

 She spent the morning at the small kitchen table, mending a torn pettic coat for the miller’s wife, and every so often she looked up at the door, and every so often she looked back down at her sewing, and by noon her fingers had gone slightly clumsy with waiting. He knocked at 3:00 in the afternoon. Two short wraps, not loud.

 Polite, she set down her needle. She stood up. She smoothed her apron. She opened the door. He was standing on the step in a dry coat and a clean hat and boots that were not new, but had been recently cleaned. He was holding in his gloved hands the small linen bag of coins. His face had been made calm on purpose.

 She could see the effort of it around his mouth. Miss Ashcom, he said, sir, she said. She did not step aside to let him in. May I speak with you? You are speaking with me. May I come in? No, she said, you may say what you have come to say on the step. It is a fine day. He did not argue. He nodded once, and he did not seem to hold it against her.

 You have taken back the shilling, she said. I do not know if you meant me to notice. I meant you to notice, he said. I did not mean you to be angry. I am not angry. You are not pleased either. She looked at him steadily. His eyes in the daylight were less like storm water and more like the color of a riverbed. Rain caught in the lashes was gone.

 His mouth was still that thin careful line, but around it at the corners there was a small softness she had not seen at the pier. I would like the truth, she said quietly. That is what I am not pleased about. Not the shilling, not the coal, not the pane of glass. I would like to know who has been leaving these things at my door and why, and I would like him to have the manners to say so to my face. His shoulders eased. She saw it.

It was a very small movement, but she saw it. That is fair, he said. That is more than fair. Then my name is Alistister Ferncliffe, he said. I am the seventh Duke of Ravencross. I have been away from this estate for 9 years. I came back a fortnight ago. I did not intend to be recognized before I was ready.

 My purse was stolen on the last stage of my journey. You paid my fairy fair. I have been trying since that day to repay you in ways that would not embarrass you. He said all of this in a level voice. He did not adjust his shoulders while he said it. He did not lift his chin. He did not do any of the things a man might do who wanted to be admired for what he was saying.

 He simply said it the way one lays down a set of cards. And then he was quiet and he watched her and he waited. Marin stood in the doorway with her hand on the latch. And for a long moment she could not think of anything at all. The world had gone still in a way that had nothing to do with the Moore, and everything to do with the fact that a duke was standing on her doorstep, and she had bought him a ferry ticket, and she had told him to walk with her only as far as the crossroads, and she had told him not to come to her door. She

looked at him. She looked at his boots. She looked back up at his face. “Your grace,” she said. It came out very quietly. “Please,” he said, “not that, not from you. That is what you are. That is what I am, he agreed. But it is not what I was on the pier. And it is not what I would like to be when I speak with you.

 She did not answer that at once. She stepped back from the door, not to invite him in, but to give herself a little space to think in. Her heart was going very fast. She did not want it to be going very fast. She wanted more than anything to be the woman she had been at the crossroads, plain and steady and unimpressed. But she had bought a ferry ticket for a duke with her mother’s silver coin, and she was not sure yet whether she should feel foolish about that or whether she should not. You lied to me, she said.

 I did not tell you the whole truth. That is a lie. It is, he said after a small pause. It is a lie. Yes, I am sorry for it. Why? Because I did not want to be recognized before I had seen the estate with my own eyes. Because I have been lied to a great deal over 9 years by people who wanted things from me.

 Because I wanted for one day to walk on this land as an ordinary man and to see what an ordinary man saw. And what did the ordinary man see? She asked. She meant it to come out lightly. It did not come out lightly. He looked at her and he did not blink. He saw a woman on a pier with three coins in her pocket, he said, and he saw her give the last of them to a stranger who had done nothing to deserve it.

 You did not do nothing, Marin said, and she was surprised at herself for saying it. You had lost your purse. Anyone would have. No, he said. They would not have. I have stood on many peers in 9 years, Miss Ashkam. I have watched a great many people. I know what most of them would have done. She looked away from him.

Then she looked out at the moore. There was a lark rising somewhere above the heather, its small brown shape climbing up and up into the pale sky, singing as it went. The sound of it was thin and clear, and made her chest ache in a way she did not quite understand. “Why did you come here today?” she asked.

 To tell you the truth, he said, and to give you back your shilling, or rather to give you back the shilling in a way that could not be denied. In a linen bag on a doorstep, you may leave it there or return it, and I will not know what to do about it. In my hand, given to you in the daylight, on your own step, you must accept it or refuse it in front of me. That is fairer.

 Fair, she repeated. She almost smiled. She did not. Yes. And if I refuse it, then I will put it in my pocket and walk back to Ravencross, and I will find some other way to repay you that does not offend you. I would prefer not to find another way. I would prefer that you took the shilling. But I will not put it in your hand against your will.

 She looked at the small linen bag in his gloved hand. She could see through the fabric the small hard shapes of the coins. 12 p. Exactly. A shilling. Exactly what she had paid. Exactly. And no more. Where is the silver coin? She asked. The one I actually gave the fairerryyman. He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached into the inner pocket of his coat, and he drew out something small, and he opened his gloved hand.

Her mother’s coin lay on his palm. The bent edge caught the pale sun. She would have known it anywhere. He tried to spend it in the tavern at Harabbridge. Alistister said, “The tavern keeper is a friend of my gamekeeper.” “My gamekeeper is a friend of mine. I bought it from the tavernkeeper.

 He was, I believe, cheated in the transaction. It is worth more than a shilling.” She stared at the coin. She stared at his hand. She stared at his face. “How did you know?” she said very slowly, “that I would want it back.” “I did not know,” he said. I only knew that if you did want it back, it should not be difficult for you.

 So I made it not difficult. The moore was very quiet around them. The lark had stopped singing. Somewhere at the back of the cottage, a hen made a small sleepy sound and then was still. Marin did not move for a long moment. She stood in her doorway with her hand on the latch, and she looked at the coin in his palm, and she felt something that had been closed inside her chest for a great many years begin.

very slowly to open. She reached out. She took the coin from his palm. Her fingers brushed his glove and she felt the warmth of his hand through the leather and she thought quite clearly. Oh. She closed her fingers around the coin. She pressed her thumb to the bent edge. The metal was warm from having been against his chest.

Thank you, she said. Her voice was not quite steady. She did not care. Miss Ashkam. Yes. May I come in now? She looked up at him. She was still holding the coin against her thumb. She looked at his face, which was made of something that did not bend easily, and she looked at the small softness at the corners of his mouth, and she looked at his eyes that were the color of a riverbed.

 And she thought about all the things a duke could do and be. And she thought about the linen bag of coins on the step and the pain of glass and the coal and the beef tea in the paper twist. And she thought about a man standing at a crossroads with his hand raised in a quiet salute. And she thought about how she had known all through the previous night that he was going to come today.

You may sit at the kitchen table, she said. I will make you tea. I will not offer you sugar because I do not have any. And please do not send me any tomorrow because I do not want a great deal of sugar in this house. Yes, Miss Ashkam. And you will not in this house be called your grace. You will be called sir. That is all I can manage today.

Yes, Miss Ashkam. And you will not, she said, sit long. Mrs. Pool is asleep in the next room, and I do not wish her to wake and find a strange man at her table. Yes, Miss Ashkam. She stepped back from the door. She turned. She led him into the small kitchen, and he ducked his head under the low beam without being told to, and he sat down at the little scrub table with his hat in his lap, and he watched her put the kettle on the hook over the fire and reached down two cups from the shelf.

She could feel his eyes on her back the whole time. She did not turn to look at him. She put her mother’s coin down on the table between them. She did not know why she did that. It felt right. He looked at the coin and he did not touch it and he did not say anything about it. And she liked him a little more for that. How is Mrs. Pool? He asked.

Better, she said. The medicine has helped. The broth has helped. The coal has helped. Good. I know it was you, she said. She still did not turn around. The coal, the broth, the window, all of it. I thought you might. You should not have. I know. Then why did you? He was quiet for a long moment.

 She heard him shift in his chair. She heard the small creek of the wood. Because you gave a stranger the last coin in your pocket, he said. And because when I asked you why, you said it was because I needed the ferry and you had the coin. And it seemed simple. And because in 9 years I have not heard anyone say a thing so simple as that and mean it.

 And because you look after an old woman who has no one else, and you walk six miles in the rain for a bottle of medicine, and you carry a bent silver coin against your hip as if it were the whole of your heart, and because I have money, and I have coal, and I have a glazier who will do what he is told, and it seemed to me that a man who cannot spend some of what he has on the woman who paid his fairy fair is not much of a man.

 She stood very still by the fire. She did not turn around. She could feel her face growing warm and she did not want him to see it. She stared at the kettle. The kettle began to sing. “That is a great deal to say,” she said quietly. “You asked.” “I did not ask all of that. You asked why.” “That was all of the why.

” She lifted the kettle off the hook. She poured hot water into the little brown teapot on the hearth. She let it steep. She busied her hands so that she would not have to look at him yet. When at last she turned around and set the pot on the table and sat down opposite him, she was, she thought, more or less in command of herself.

 He was looking at her across the table. He was not smiling. His eyes in the low light of the kitchen were very steady. There is one more thing, he said. Sir, I would like to see you again. She had known he was going to say it. She had known since he stepped inside the door. She had known, if she was honest, since the crossroads. She had, she now realized, been preparing an answer for it all through her sewing that morning, though she had not admitted this to herself while she was doing it.

 She poured the tea into his cup first. She poured it into hers second. She set the teapot down. She put her hands flat on either side of her cup. She looked at him. You are the seventh Duke of Ravencross, she said quietly. I am the daughter of a tenant. I have no dowy. I have no name that anyone remembers. I have a cottage that is not mine and an old woman in the next room who depends on me.

 If you are asking to see me again as a duke sees a woman like me, then no, sir, you may not. I have my pride and I will keep it. That is not what I am asking. Then what I am asking to see you again, he said as a man sees the woman who gave him a ferry ticket. Nothing more, nothing less.

 If over time we come to something else, then we will come to it honestly and in the daylight, and everyone in the county may know about it, but I will not come at you crooked, Miss Ashkam. Not now, not ever. I did that once, and I do not intend to do it again. She did not answer at once. She looked down at her tea.

 The steam rose from the cup and warmed her face. The smell of the tea was very ordinary and very comforting, and outside the small window she could hear a ren singing in the gor, and inside the kitchen she could hear Mrs. Pool’s slow breathing from the next room, and she could hear the small tick of the fire, and she could hear the sound of her own heart, which had slowed a little now, though it was still going faster than it should.

 She lifted her eyes to him. You may call on me on Sunday afternoon, she said, in the daylight at the front door where the neighbors such as they are may see you. Yes, Miss Ashkam, and you will not bring me anything. No baskets, no coins, no panes of glass. Yes, Miss Ashkam. And you will not from this day forward hide anything from me.

 Not who you are, not what you are doing, not why you are doing it. If you cannot be plain with me, sir, you should not come at all. He looked at her for a long moment. There was a small light behind his eyes that she had not seen there before, and around his mouth the careful line eased into something that was almost, though not quite, a smile. Yes, Miss Ashkam.

They drank their tea. They did not speak of great things. He asked after the miller and after the shepherd whose whistle she had heard the day before, and she answered him plainly, and he listened plainly, and neither of them tried to make the conversation more than it was. When the cups were empty, he stood up and put on his hat and thanked her for the tea, and she showed him to the door, and he stopped on the step and turned back. “Sunday,” he said.

 Sunday, he touched the brim of his hat. he went. She watched him walk down the little path away from the cottage and out onto the Moore road and along the road until he was a small dark shape against the pale sky and then over the rise and then gone. She stood in the doorway for a long time after he was gone.

 She had her mother’s coin in her hand. She was turning it slowly between her fingers. It seemed simple, she had said to him on the moore. He had not believed her. He had been right not to. It had not been simple. It had cost her something. It had cost her the last thing she owned that was truly hers. And now, in a way she could not have imagined on the pier, he had given it back to her.

 And he had given her something else besides, and she did not yet have a name for what that something else was, though she suspected she would find one in time. She closed the door. Alistister did not come only on Sunday. He came in the weeks that followed in many small and open ways, and the county saw him, and the county talked, and Marin discovered that she did not mind the talking as much as she had thought she would.

 He did not appear at her door with grand gifts. He did not send flowers. He sent once a load of sound firewood to Mrs. Pool’s cottage, and he did not pretend it was from the parish, and Mrs. pool thanked him for it directly and he took the thanks without fuss. He walked with her on the moore road on Sundays.

 He sat at her kitchen table on Wednesdays. He drank tea he had not brought sugar for. He asked her questions and he waited for her answers and he did not try to fill her silences. Sometimes they walked without speaking for half an hour, and the wind came off the moore smelling of gorse and Pete and cold stone, and the lapwings called overhead, and neither of them felt the need to say anything, and Marin thought in those silences that she had never in her life stood beside another person, and been so quiet with them, and so unafraid.

One afternoon, halfway through the summer, they were walking along the edge of the beck that ran down from the standing stone. The water was low and clear over the pebbles, and there were small brown trout in the pools, and the sun was warm on their shoulders. Marin was carrying a basket. She had been gathering meadow for Mrs.

 Pool’s pillow because Mrs. Pool liked the smell. Alistister, she said she had begun some weeks ago to call him by his name when they were alone, and he had never once corrected her for it. May I ask you something? Anything? Why did you go away? For 9 years, 10 in the spring. He did not answer at once. He walked several steps in silence.

 She watched the way the sunlight caught on the edge of his jaw. She had learned over these weeks to read the small movements at the corner of his mouth, and she could see now that he was choosing his words with care. “My father was a hard man,” he said at last. “He and I quarreled. It was a bad quarrel.

 I said things I should not have said. He said things he should not have said. I left. I went to the continent. I told myself I would not come back until he was dead. He died 4 years later. I did not come back then. I told myself I would not come back until I could look at the house without feeling ashamed of the boy who had left it. That took another 5 years.

 He paused. I am not sure even now that I can look at the house without feeling ashamed. But I have come back anyway. That will have to do. She listened to him. She thought about the great grim house at Ravencross, which she had seen once at a distance when she was a child. She thought about a boy walking out of its gates in anger.

 She thought about a man walking back through them on a rainy afternoon with an empty purse. You do not have to be ashamed forever, she said quietly. I know you do not have to be ashamed at all. In fact, he is gone. You are here. The house is a house. It is a set of stones and beams and windows. It does not remember what you said to your father.

 He looked at her and there was something in his face that she had not seen before. She looked away because she did not want to embarrass him. You are a great deal like your mother. I think he said after a moment. Piers Hobbes told me about her. He said she was the only person in the county who could argue with my father without making him angry.

She was a stubborn woman. So are you. I know. They walked on. The Beck murmured beside them. A dragonfly hovered over the water, blue and quick. Marin was quiet for a long time. Alistair. Yes, I would like to see the house. He stopped walking. He looked at her. Something in his eyes went very still.

 Are you sure? Yes. Not to be a duchess. Not to be shown around like a visitor. to see it because you are ashamed of it and I do not think you should be and I would like to be with you the first time you look at it properly.” He did not answer for a long moment. Then he held out his hand and she took it and they walked back along the beck toward the moore road and neither of them spoke but their fingers were laced together the whole way and Marin felt for the first time in her life that her hand fit inside another hand the way a key fits inside its lock.

They came to Ravencross in the late afternoon. The gates were open now, and the drive had been cleared of its weeds, and the lime trees on either side threw a soft green shade across the gravel. The great house at the end of the drive was tall and gray and stern, and it had rows of windows that stared out over the park like the eyes of an old man who had seen too much, and Marin could see as they walked toward it why a boy might have run from it, and why a man might have been afraid to come back.

 They went in through the side door because Alistister did not want the servants to make a fuss. The hall smelled of beeswax and old wood and faintly of the Pete fires that had been lit in three rooms only. Their footsteps echoed on the flagstones. Marin stood in the middle of the hall and looked up at the high ceiling, and the ceiling looked back down at her, and she was not afraid of it.

 “It is a house,” she said quietly. It is a house,” he agreed. He showed her the rooms he could bear to show her, and he did not show her the ones he could not, and she did not push him. They came at last to a small parlor at the back that overlooked a walled garden gone to seed. The parlor was dim and dusty.

 There was a small piano against one wall, and a great many books on shelves, and a pair of chairs drawn up to a cold hearth. This was my mother’s room, he said. His voice had gone very quiet. It is a good room. She died in it. I am sorry. He stood in the doorway and looked at the room.

 She could see the muscle at the corner of his jaw move once, the way it had moved on the pier. She stepped past him into the room. She went to the window. She opened the shutter. The late sun came in and lay in a bright square on the dusty floor. It needs a fire, she said. And it needs the shutter open, and it needs someone to sit in one of these chairs and read a book in it.

 That is all it needs. He came slowly across the room. He stopped beside her. They stood together in the square of sunlight and looked out at the garden that was gone to seed, and the smell of the dust was in the air, and the smell of the beeswax, and the very faint smell of the meadow in her basket. Marin.

 Yes, I did not come back to this house for its own sake. I came back because I could not go on being ashamed of it. But I do not know how to live in it. Not alone. Then do not live in it alone. He turned to look at her. His face was very still. I have nothing to offer you, she said quietly, except a mother’s silver coin and a stubborn habit of walking six miles in the rain when I have promised to.

 I am not what a duchess is meant to be. I would embarrass you at every dinner. I would say the wrong thing to the wrong people. I would be at best an odd choice. You would be the choice I made, he said. She looked up at him. The sunlight was on his face. She could see the small softness at the corners of his mouth and the storm water color of his eyes and the thin white scar along his jaw that she had noticed for the first time a fortnight ago.

 and had not yet asked him about. She thought about the pier and the coins in her pocket, and the way he had stood there with his hand inside his coat, and the way he had said that was not a shilling, and the way he had walked her only to the crossroads because she had asked him to, and the way he had come to her door in the daylight, and said, “My name is Alistister Ferncliffe.

” She thought about her mother, 10 years in the grave, who had pressed a coin into a small girl’s hand and said, “This is the last thing I own that is only mine.” She thought about how a silver coin could be spent and still come back, and how the coming back was not the same as the being kept, and how the difference between the two was the whole of what her life was made of.

 “Yes,” she said very quietly. “All right.” “Yes, he did not kiss her.” Not. Then he lifted her hand, the one that was not holding the basket of meadow, and he pressed his lips to the back of her fingers, and he held them there for a long moment. She felt his breath on her skin. She felt the small warmth of his mouth. She closed her eyes.

 Outside in the walled garden, a blackbird began to sing. “On Sunday,” he said, when he lifted his head. His voice was not quite steady, and she loved him for it. At the front door, where the neighbors, such as they are, may see us. On Sunday she agreed. They stood there for a while longer in the sunlight, in the room that had been his mother’s, and neither of them spoke.

Then she took his hand and she led him back down the long corridor and out through the side door. And they walked together down the drive under the lime trees and out onto the moore road and back toward the cottage at the edge of the moore where an old woman lay sleeping and a fire needed feeding and a life waited to be lived.

 At the crossroads where the sign had lost its paint years ago, she stopped and turned to him. She reached into her pocket. She drew out her mother’s silver coin. She placed it on her palm, and the bent edge caught the low golden light, and she looked at it for a long moment. Then she closed her fingers around it, and she slid it back into her pocket, and she rested her thumb on the bent edge one more time. It was warm.

 “Come home, Alistister,” she said quietly. And he did.