The Blind Duke Was Left at the Altar — the Poor Sister Took the Veil in Her Place, and He Never Knew

“She is not coming, your grace,” the vicar said, and the whole of St. Ocman’s went so quiet that Corwin could hear the wax weeping down the altar candles. He did not move. He had learned, over 11 years of darkness, that stillness was a kind of armor, and that a man who did not flinch could not be pitied. So, he stood at the chancel step in his wedding coat with his gloved hand resting on the head of his cane, and he let the silence tell him everything the vicar had not. 200 people.

He could hear them the way another man might see them. The rustle of silk as bodies turned to one another. The small wet click of a mouth opening to whisper. The creak of the third pew from the front where fat Lord Henry shifted his weight and did not trouble to lower his voice. The smell of them.

Hothouse lilies, hair pomade, the sharp green of crushed rosemary underfoot, and beneath it, rising like damp through a wall, the particular warmth that came off a crowd when it scented humiliation and found it delicious. “Repeat that,” Corwin said. The vicar swallowed. “Miss Vane, Miss Cassandra Vane, she is not in the vestry.

She is not in the church. Her maid says the carriage was gone before dawn, and there is a a letter, your grace, addressed to her father, and Mr. Vane has read it and gone gray as ash, and I am very sorry. I am so very “Do not be sorry at me,” Corwin said. “It is worse than being laughed at.” Somewhere to his left a woman tittered.

He turned his head toward the sound with the precision of a man laying a pistol, and the tittering stopped as though a hand had closed over it. So, Cassandra Vane, with her bright brittle laugh and her fondness for being looked at, had run. He had suspected it for a fortnight, had heard it, in fact, in the way her voice went thin and hurried whenever the wedding was mentioned, in the way she withdrew her fingers from his sleeve half a beat too soon.

He had told himself he was imagining faults where there was only maidenly nerves. He had told himself that a blind man should be slow to accuse. He had been right the first time. That was the bitterest part of it. Blind men are always right and never believed and never so much as by themselves. With whom, he asked? Your grace.

With whom, sir? You have read the letter in the old man’s face. Say it. A Captain Merriweather, the vicar whispered, of the of the Nineveh. They are for Gretna or for Dover. No one knows. Your grace, the settlements, the notices in the papers, the whole county. I am aware of what the whole county is, Corwin said.

He was That was the sum of it. In 1 hour the story would be in every drawing room from here to the sea. The blind Duke of Paiford who could not keep a bride he could not watch. They would not say he had been wronged. They would say he had been unwatchable. They would say gently, over tea, that of course the poor girl could not be expected, not with his affliction, not really.

And every one of the 400 souls who lived and worked on his land would feel the draught of that pity. And the price of Paiford wool would drop a farthing. And his sister’s girls would be looked at sideways at their come outs. And old Vane who had staked his last unmortgaged acre on this alliance would be ruined outright by Mycolmus. Corwin’s hand tightened on the cane until the silver head bit his palm.

Then he let let it go and breathed and began coldly methodically, as he did everything, to count the exits. There were none. A man cannot walk out of his own wedding. He can only be carried out of it in pieces by 200 pairs of hands. And then he heard the door. Not the great west door, the little vestry door, the one with the warped bottom rail that dragged on the flags and made a sound like a held breath. He knew that door.

He had knelt in this church every Sunday of his boyhood, and he knew every board of it, and the little vestry door made that sound, and nothing else in England made that sound. Footsteps. Light, quick, and unhesitating. Not the mincing tread of a lady conscious of an audience, but a walk with somewhere to be. Wool skirts.

He could hear the difference. Wool did not whisper the way silk whispered. Wool moved with a soft dry hush like a broom over stone. And with the footsteps came a smell that was not Lily’s and was not pomade. Beeswax and lavender and the faint clean bitterness of ink. The footsteps stopped beside him. The congregation made a sound he had never heard a congregation make.

A long indrawn incredulous gasp. 200 throats at once. “Forgive me, your grace.” said a voice at his shoulder. Low, steady, a little breathless. “I am late.” He did not know it. Or he knew it and did not know it the way one knows a room in the dark. He had heard this voice before, somewhere behind another voice, agreeing, apologizing, fetching ashore.

It was a voice that had spent its life in the second rank. “Who?” Corwin said very quietly, “is speakington to me?” There was a pause. He heard her breathe in. “Your bride.” she said. Behind him the vicar made a strangled noise. Somewhere in the nave a woman said, “Good God.” aloud, and Corwin, standing blind in his wedding coat before 200 people who were already composing the letters they would write about him, understood with the swift ruthless clarity that had made him feared in three counties, exactly what was being offered to him and exactly

what it would cost to take it. A veiled bride. A voice in wool. The vain name givenant. Jilting. No letter. No ruin. Not for paid. Not for the 400. A story that ended dully and respectably with a wedding. And a lie he would have to hold in both hands for the rest of his life. He turned his face toward her.

He was aware he was always aware that his eyes did not fix on anything. They rested somewhere over a person’s shoulder like a man attending to a distant sound, and that people found this unbearable. Let them. He had long since stopped arranging his face for the comfort of others. Give me your hand, he said.

He felt her hesitate. Then a hand came into his, bare, small, and cold, and not at all a lady’s hand. There was a ridge of hard skin along the inside of the first finger. The callus a pen makes on someone who writes for hours. There was a roughness across the palm that came from work. And there was a fine raised seam at the base of the thumb, an old scar healed badly, the kind of thing a girl gets from a kitchen knife when there is no one to do the pairing for her.

Cassandra Vayne’s hands had been soft as poured cream and always gloved, and had never once held his without wanting to be let go. This hand did not want to be let go. It trembled, he could feel that plainly, but it did not pull. “You are shaking,” he said so low that not even the vicar could have heard it.

“Yes, your grace.” “Are you afraid of me?” Another pause. “No,” she said, and he heard the truth in it the way he heard the truth in everything, in the throat and not the mouth. “I am afraid of what I am doing.” “That is a different thing.” Something turned over in Corwin’s chest. He put it down hard the way he put down every soft thing, and did not look at it again.

“The bells,” he said aloud to the vicar, in the voice that had ended arguments in the House of Lords. “You will ring them the moment we are done, and you will proceed, seed, sir, from where you left off.” “Your grace, I” “The name, I must have the name. You have the license,” Corwin said. “You have the name upon it. Read it.

” The whispering behind him rose like water. He heard veil and did you see good heavens it cannot be and someone unmistakably saying the little one the way one might say the spare umbrella. He stood in the middle of it with the cold hand in his and he did not turn his head. Louder, he said to the vicar. The back of the church is straining and I should hate them to miss a word.

Later he would not be able to say how long the service took. He remembered the smell of hot wax and the crawl of a draught around his ankles. He remembered the vicar’s voice cracking on in sickness and in health. He remembered that when the moment came for the ring his own hands were perfectly steady and hers were not and that he had to find her finger with his thumb and guide the gold home himself and that the whole church watched him do it and made of it whatever they liked.

He remembered that when the vicar said you may lift the veil, he said no. The gasp again. He almost enjoyed it. His grace may, that is, it is customary. It is customary. Corwin agreed. It is also a courtesy paid to a man who can see what he is uncovering. I will not perform it as a pantomime for the amusement of Lord Henry.

He heard Henry choke. My wife’s face is her own. She may keep it under lace until we are out of this menagerie and he tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. She came against his side lightly like a bird settling. Wool against his sleeve and he walked her down the aisle of St. Oakman’s at a pace that dared any soul present to stop them while above their heads the bells came crashing in ragged and triumphant and drowned every whisper in the county.

In the carriage she was silent for a full mile. He listened to her breathe. It was not the breathing of a woman who had won something. It was quick and shallow and once briefly it caught a small dry hitch immediately mastered. You are weeping, he said. No, your grace. Madam, Corwin said, I have been blind for 11 years.

I would not insult you by pretending I cannot hear. Do me the same courtesy.” Silence. Then, unsteadily, “Yes, a little. Why?” Cuz she said, “You were kind and I did not expect it and I find I cannot bear it.” Corwin sat back against the squabs and turned his face to the window he could not see out of, and for the first time in 11 years found that he did not know what to say.

Perford Hall received its new mistress at dusk and Corwin listened to it happen. He heard the servants ranged along the gravel, 40 of them. He could tell by the length of the murmur, and he heard them fall silent when she stepped down, and he heard, quite distinctly, the little collective hesitation when they saw that the Duchess of Perford had arrived in a gray wool traveling dress with a mended cuff and a bonnet that had been trimmed twice.

He waited to hear her flinch. She did not. “Mrs. Ledwidge, I think,” she said to the housekeeper. “His Grace has told me you have kept this house 18 years. I shall be glad of your patience. I have never kept anything larger than a still room, and I would rather learn from you than pretend.” There was a pause of exactly the right length, and then Mrs.

Ledwidge, who had frightened three governesses and one bishop out of Perford, said, in a voice Corwin had not heard her use since his mother died, “You’ll do very well, Your Grace.” That night, alone, he stood a long while at the window of his study with his palms flat on the cold sill and made himself think it through.

He had married a stranger. He had heard it in the church and he had known it in his bones. The voice was not the voice, the hand was not the hand. And he had said nothing. He had walked her down the aisle and let 200 people carry the tail of a perfectly ordinary wedding into the world, and he had not asked a single question because the questions all had the same answer, and the answer was ruin.

Perhaps she had been ill. The veins had written of a fever. Perhaps a woman weeping and terrified sounds like another woman. Perhaps hands rough and perhaps Corwin turned the perhapses over like a man testing rotten planks with his foot and knew each one for what it was and stepped on them anyway. He was Duke of Perford.

He had held a county together with his hands and his memory and his temper for 11 years without eyes. And he had not had the courage in the one hour of his life that mattered to ask a woman her name. He did not ask it in the days after, either. She was your grace to the house and my wife to the county and madam to him, and the world required nothing further, and the world was fed.

But he began, without at first admitting it, to study her. She rose early. He heard her on the stairs before the maids were up, and one morning he followed the sound out to the kitchen garden and found her by the crunch of her tread on gravel, by the beeswax and lavender that hung about her, kneeling in the wet at the espaliers.

“There are gardeners for that,” he said. “There are,” she agreed. “One of them is Tom Ayres, and his hands are bad with the rheumatism, and he cannot get down to the low branches, and he is too proud to say so. So I get down to them, and he tells me I am doing it wrong, and everyone is satisfied.” Corwin stood in the cold morning with his cane in his hand and found that his mouth had done something unfamiliar.

He identified it after a moment as a smile. “You have been here nine days,” he said. “Yes. How do you know the name of a man who prunes my pear trees?” “Because I asked him,” she said. “Your grace, nobody in this house tells me anything but what they think I want to hear. So I go out and ask people who are too busy to bother.

” “That,” said Corwin, “is precisely how I have run this estate for 11 years. There was a small silence. Then he heard her sit back on her heels in the wet grass and heard her breathe out, and he thought, though he could not be sure, and it maddened him that he could not be sure, that she was looking at him. Yes, she said, I know.

He asked her that week to read to him. It was the sort of duty one gave a wife, and he expected to endure it. He had suffered a succession of dutiful readers over the years, all of them going at his newspaper like a funeral procession, all of them stopping to explain the long words. She read him the corn returns, the county sessions, and a leader on drainage, and she read them straight and fast and with an unmistakable dryness on the sentence Lord Hendry rose to observe that the laboring poor are improvident by nature. Corwin lifted a hand. Again.

She read it again, drier. You disapprove of Hendry. I disapprove of a man who has never in his life had to make one candle do the work of three, she said, explaining to those who have that they are improvident. But it is not my place to say so. It is precisely your place, Corwin said. You are the Duchess of Perford.

If you will not say it, who in England will? And then, because the room had gone very still, read the drainage. I want the figures twice. After that she read to him every evening, and then she read to him in the mornings, and then she began to read him the estate books. Which no one had ever offered to do, and within a month Corwin found that he had a wife who could hold four columns of a ledger in her head and tell him, without prompting, that the Hollow Meer rents had been footed wrong for 3 years running, and that Mr. Enderby, his

steward, had been quietly covering the error out of his own pocket rather than confess it. Do not dismiss him, she said at once, before Corwin had drawn breath. Please. I had not said I would. You had gone very still,” she said, “which is how you look when you are deciding something you will not enjoy.” Corwin sat back.

He was aware of an odd, expanding sensation beneath his ribs, and he had no name for it, and he did not much like being without names for things. “Nobody,” he said slowly, “reads my face.” “Nobody looks,” she said. “They are all too busy arranging their own in case you should see it.” He kept Enderby. He also, that night, stood alone at the window again and understood that he had stopped hoping she would turn out to Cassandra Vane, and had begun, with a coward’s care, one plank at a time, to hope she would not.

The winter turned hard, and he learned her. He learned her step and could pick it out of any house, the quick light tread that went up on the toes and hurried, and never once in 6 months came to him with the slow, soft, creeping tread that people used with the blind, as though he were an invalid or a horse. He learned that she stood on his right when they walked out and left his cane hand free, and never took his elbow to steer him.

That she said three steps down once, quietly, and did not repeat, and did not say it all in the rooms he knew. He learned that when the rector’s wife said, loudly, that it was such a mercy his grace had a companion now, his duchess replied, in the sweetest voice imaginable, that his grace was chairman of the bench, had drained 600 acres, and had that morning found an error in a ledger she herself had missed.

And that she supposed the mercy was largely hers. He learned the smell of her hair when she leaned across him to set a paper straight. And he learned that she stopped breathing for a moment when she did it. And he learned to sit very, very still. And in February, riding home late from the sessions in a sleep that had turned the lane to glass, his mare came down and Corwin went into the ditch, and he walked the last 2 miles to Parford by the ring of the flint wall under his stick and found her at midnight out on the ice-crusted gravel in her

nightgown and a shawl with the whole household behind her carrying lanterns they did not need for him. “You are soaked.” she said. Her hands were on his coat, on his shoulders, on his face, her cold, calloused, ink-stained hands on his face and they were shaking and she was not troubling to hide it.

“You are frozen, Corwin.” She stopped as though she had walked into a wall. It was the first time in his life that any living soul had used his name without the title in front of it since his mother had died. Corwin stood in the sleet with her hands on his jaw and did not move. “Say it again.” he said. “Your Grace, I Madam.

” he said and his voice was not steady. “I have been Parford since I was 19 years old and the poor Duke since I was 28. Say it again.” A long breath. “Corwin.” she said. He turned his head and pressed his mouth very briefly to the palm of her hand, to the scar at the base of the thumb and the ridge of hard skin along the first finger where a pen had lain for a thousand hours and then he stepped back before he could do anything else and said, “Get inside.

You will take a chill.” and went past her into the house with his heart going like a hammer. That was the night he sent for the letters. They were in his cabinet tied in ribbon, the correspondence of his betrothal, six months of it written from Harrogate and read aloud to him by Enderby in Enderby’s flat Yorkshire voice.

He had agreed to marry Cassandra Vane for the plainest reasons in the world, an old alliance, a settled estate, a name and he had expected nothing from her but civility. What he had not expected were the letters. They were funny. They were fierce. They argued with him about tenant leases and at whether a blind man might sit as magistrate, they described the frost on a window at Harrogate so exactly that he had known its shape.

They told him once that the writer had thought a great deal about what it must be to lose sight. And had concluded that she had nothing whatever to say about it that was not impertinent, and would he please tell her instead about the drainage. He had fallen in love with those letters. He had walked into that church prepared to be tolerably happy for the rest of his life on the strength of them.

“End of by,” he said, “when the man came, the Harrogate letters, describe the hand.” “The hand, your grace, the writing, is it a large hand, small, smoked?” “Small, your grace, very neat. Cramped at the ends of the lines as if the writer grudged the paper.” Corwyn sat with his fingers steepled against his mouth, “And the household books,” he said, “the ones her grace has been keeping since Christmas.

Fetch ones. It’s paper.” The particular hesitation of a man who has been asked a question he suddenly wishes he had not been asked. “Well,” Corwyn said. Enderby cleared his throat. “It is the same hand, your grace,” he said. Corwyn dismissed him and sat alone in the dark that was the only room he had and did not move for an hour. “The same hand.

” So the woman who had written to him, the mind he had married before he ever married anybody, was the woman now sleeping under his roof. Which meant that either Cassandra Vane had left the altar and come back to it a wholly different creature, voice and hand and heart and all, or else there had never been a Cassandra in those letters at all.

He could have called her in. He could have said, “Madam, what is your name?” and had it over in a minute. He did not. And he was honest enough, sitting there with the fire ticking down, to know exactly why. Because he was afraid, not of the truth, of what a decent woman might do with it once it was spoken aloud, that she might feel herself released, that she might go.

11 years blind and he had never once been a coward until he had something to lose. So, he said nothing and March came. And he took her to the tenants’ dinner and heard 400 voices call her your grace with a warmth they had never given anyone of his blood. And he taught her to ride the gray mare and was told, tartly, that she had ridden since she was seven and had merely never had a horse worth the trouble.

And one evening in the long gallery with the rain coming at the windows, he stopped walking and said, “I should like to know your face.” She did not answer. “You need not permit it,” he said. “Corwin,” her voice cracked clean across, “there is a thing I must tell you. I have tried a hundred times.” “I have written it and burned it and I have stood outside your door.

” “Tell me, then.” “I cannot,” she whispered, “while you are being kind.” “Then I shall be extremely disagreeable,” he said in a moment. “Stand still.” He set down his cane. He lifted his hands and found her, the wall at her shoulder, then the line of her throat, then lightly the sides of her face, and he read her the only way he had.

A small face, a wide brow with the hair scraped back and escaping anyway. Straight brows, a nose that had been broken as a girl and set crooked by somebody careless. And wet, her cheeks were wet, running. And she stood under his hands like a woman at a whipping post and let him find every bit of it. “You are crying again,” Corwin said. “Yes.

” “You have cried in this house perhaps four times and every one of them was when I was gentle with you.” He held her face and felt his own heart go over. “Madam, whatever it is you think you have done, you have kept my land, my name, my books, and my honor in your two hands since October, and I am” he stopped.

He had not intended to say it and could not now stop it. I am in love with you, irretrievably. I should like that stated before whatever it is you are about to say, so that you cannot suppose I said it after, out of pity.” She made a sound he never forgot, a laugh and a sob and something breaking.

“Corwin, I am not” The door opened. “Your Grace” said Mrs. Ledwidge in a voice like a dropped plate. “There is a lady in the hall who says she is the Duchess of Perford.” Corwin heard his wife stop breathing. He picked up his cane. He put his hand upon her arm, not for guidance. He had no need of guidance in his own gallery, and he walked her the length of it and down the great stair, and the whole way he could feel her shaking under his fingers, and he did not let go.

The hall smelled of wet fur and civet perfume and the particular sourness of a coach traveled too long in. “Corwin” said a bright, brittle voice. “My dearest, I have come home. I have been very ill-used and very foolish, and I have come home to my husband.” He knew it at once. Of course he did. He had heard that voice across a dinner table a dozen times, laughing a half second too late at everything.

“Cassandra Vane” he said. “Cassandra Merriweather for a little while” she said with a horrible gaiety. “He is dead. A fever at Ostend, and there was nothing, Corwin, nothing at all. He had debts and there is no marriage to speak of, no lines, nothing anyone can prove, and so you see it is all as it was, and here I am, and we shall simply go on.

” A rustle of silk as she came forward. “You poor dear man, you never even knew, did you? Eight months and you never knew.” “Knew what, madam?” “That she is not me.” A laugh delighted with itself. “That my sister, my drab little sister, who has donned my stockings since we were girls, put on my veil and stood up in my place, and has been playing Duchess in my gowns.

” “She has not worn one of your gowns, Corwin said. She wears gray wool and mends it herself, and I have felt every stitch. Silence. You are being absurd, Cassandra said. It is fraud. It is the most shameless fraud, and the moment I open my mouth in this county Thomasin Corwin said. He did not know he had the name until it was out.

He had it from a dozen scraps from a letter Enderby had read, from a servant’s slip in a corridor, from a signature he had once made a man spell for him aloud and then pretended to forget, and it had been lying in him for months like a stone in a shoe, and he had walked on it and said nothing. His wife made a small ruined sound.

You knew, she said. I knew that the hand that came into mine at that altar was not the hand I was promised, Corwin said. I knew it before the vicar drew breath. I have known it every hour of every day since, and I did not ask you, madam, because I was a coward and because I could not bear to be told to give you back.

He turned toward the sound of her breathing. Tell me the rest, all of it, now. And she did. She told it standing in her own hall in her mended gray, in a voice that shook and never once stopped. How she had found the letter at 5:00 in the morning and run to her father and found him gray in his chair with the ruin of the family in his fist. How there were 300 people already in the church and the settlements signed and the notices in every paper in England, and a man at the altar who had done nothing to deserve being made a byword.

How she had taken her sister’s veil off the bed where it had been thrown. And had walked to the church across the wet park with her heart going like a bird in a box, and had known every step that it was the wrong thing and the only thing. I signed my own name, she said, in the register, Thomasin Vane, in my own hand before God and the vicar.

And Mr. Prescott saw me do it, and I begged him, and he he let it stand because the license was made out to Miss Vane of Harrogate, and no other name was written on it, and he said it was no lie in law, and he would answer for it the judgment. And I meant to tell you that night, and I did not. And I meant to tell you the next day, and the next, and I have not.

And every single day I have taken more from you than I had any right to take, your table, your name, your Her voice went. I never meant to be loved. I only meant to stop it. “I only meant that you should not be laughed at in a church.” “Are you finished?” Corwin said. “Yes.” “Then attend to me.” He turned his head deliberately toward the perfume and the wet fur.

“Mrs. Merriweather, you will go into the morning room, and you will wait, and you will not speak, or I will have you set down in the lane, and you may explain yourself to the parish. Ledwidge, go with her, and count the silver on your way out.” He heard the swish of the housekeeper’s skirts, and the outraged intake of Cassandra’s breath, and the door shutting.

Then there was only the rain, and his wife’s breathing, and his own. “Give me your hand,” Corwin said. “Corwin, give me your hand. You did it once for 200 strangers. You may do it once for me.” The hand came into his bare, cold, calloused, scarred at the base of the thumb. He closed both of his around it. “11 years ago,” he said, “I lost my sight, and every soul I knew began to speak to me as though I were a room they were leaving.

My betrothed ran from me, and the county said she was quite right to. And then a woman I had never met walked into a church where she had nothing to gain and everything to lose, and put her hand in mine so that I should not be pitied.” His grip tightened. “You call that fraud?” “I call it the only unbought thing that has ever been given to me.

” “But you were cheated,” she cried. “You contracted for her.” “I contracted for a name and a settlement, said Corwin. I fell in love with a hand that wrote to me about frost on a windowpane and told me, quite rightly, that I was talking nonsense about tenant leases. Did she write those letters, madam? Your sister? Or did you? Silence.

Then, very small, she’d not be troubled. She said it was all drainage and rain. Then I have married the woman I was courting, Corwin said. And she has married a man who never once had the wit to ask her name. And of the two of us, I know who was deceived, and it was not I. He heard her go. He caught her.

She came against his chest, and her fists were in his coat, and she was weeping in a way he had not heard from her in 8 months. The whole of it at once. And he stood with his blind eyes over her head and held on. Say it in the church, he said at last, into her hair. Every word of it. We shall have Prescott read the register aloud from the chancel step to the whole parish, and you shall stand up and be seen.

I will not have you hiding under lace for the rest of your life for the crime of being merciful to me. They will tear me to pieces. Madam, said the Duke of Perford, they will not. They did not. They came, all of them, Hendry with his neck like a boiled ham, the rector’s wife, 300 of the curious and the cruel. And they had Mr.

Prescott read out, in a voice that gathered as it went, that on the 14th of October the register of Saint Oakman’s had been signed Thomasin Vane in her own hand before witnesses without concealment. And then Corwin rose in the ducal pew and put out his hand and waited until his wife’s hand came into it. He heard the whole church hold its breath, the way it had once before.

And he walked her to the chancel step and turned his unseeing face upon them all. This is my wife, he said. She has run my house, my books, and my land since October, and there is not a tenant on Pyreford who has gone hungry since. On the day she married me, she had nothing to gain and everything to lose, and she came anyway.

Any man or woman here who wishes to say the word fraud may say it to me now, and to my face, and I will hear it. Nobody said anything. Then you will call her Duchess, Corwin said, and you will mean it. The bells rang again that day, and Corwin, who could not see the sun coming through the east window onto the two of them, felt it on his face and knew it was there.

Cassandra was pensioned to a cottage in the Dales with 200 a year on condition of residence, and wrote every Christmas, and was answered every Christmas by her sister, who forgave her, which Corwin thought was overdoing it and said so, and was ignored. And on a spring evening a year later, he sat in the long gallery with the windows open and heard his wife come up the stairs at that quick light tread that went up on the toes.

The tread of a woman who had somewhere to be, and had been coming to him at a half run for 2 years. And he set down his glass and turned toward the sound before she reached the door, the way he always did. How do you always know it is me? She said. Corwin held out his hand and waited, and felt the small scarred hand come home into it.

Madam, he said, I have never once mistaken you for anybody.