Mrs. Venn laid the table for two.

Sienna saw it from the arch of the kitchen at a quarter to nine on Sunday morning, in a borrowed dressing gown with her hair in a damp rope down her back, and she stopped on the red tiles as though she had walked into a glass door. The long pine table ran down the middle of the room as it always did, with its bowl of pears at one end and its bread board at the other. But the bowl of pears had been moved. Someone had slid it deliberately to the far side, and at the near end, where two chairs stood side by side, there lay two white cups, two folded napkins, two plates of eggs, and two small china saucers, each bearing a single pinch of coarse gray salt.

Two saucers.

It was such a small thing. It had been for eight weeks one saucer, at one place, with a pear between it and the man across the table. Now there was one at each, and the chairs were so close that the arms would touch. Sienna put her hand over her mouth.

"The eggs will be cold," said Mrs. Venn.

She stood at the range with her back turned and a wooden spoon in her fist and an air of such perfect, immovable, innocent calm that Sienna could have wept. She did not turn her head. At the counter Tomas was rolling dough and humming a carol, a full month before it was seasonable, with a flush on his young face that went all the way to his ears. On the shelf by the window the clock said ten to nine. On the table, where the newspaper usually lay folded upside down at the third place, a small bunch of winter violets had been put in a glass.

"Mrs. Venn," said Sienna.

"Mm."

"Thank you."

"For what, miss?" said Mrs. Venn, to the pot. "I've done nothing. I only thought two cups would save me the walking."

A sound behind her. She turned. Matteo had come in through the arch from the back stairs, in shirtsleeves and yesterday's trousers, with his hair standing up and a faint shadow along his jaw, and he stopped dead on the threshold, looking at the table. He took it all in, the two chairs, the two saucers, the violets. The color started at his collar and went up in a slow dark wave. He did not look at Sienna. He looked at the back of Mrs. Venn's gray head, and he said, very gravely, in a voice not under his command, "Thank you."

"The eggs," said Mrs. Venn, "are going cold."

They sat.

It was the most ordinary breakfast she had ever eaten and she would remember it for the rest of her life. She tested the eggs. She tested the toast. He tested nothing, but watched her do it with an expression of such open, unguarded, helpless fondness that Tomas dropped a rolling pin. She put salt in her coffee and he put salt in his. She saw him do it, without thinking, a small pinch between finger and thumb, and said nothing, and drank. It tasted of nothing and of everything. Under the table their knees touched, and neither of them moved.

At some point she opened her mouth to say it.

She had meant to. She had come down the back stairs with the words ready, as she had promised herself, in the first gray light with his face in her hand. Tell me about the debt. She looked at the man beside her. He was buttering a slice of toast with great concentration, with the sun on his bent head and a small smile at the corner of his mouth that she was sure he did not know he wore, and she thought of him asleep, for one hour, in the dark. She thought of his hand, warm, on her back. She thought of a tear running into a pillow.

After Christmas, said a small clear voice in her head. It was the fourth time. She felt it, like a stair that is not there, and put her foot down all the same.

"Sienna?" said Matteo.

"Mm?"

"You've gone very quiet."

"I was thinking about toast," said Sienna, and he laughed, and she thought: I am a coward. I have always been one. It is only that I used to be afraid of the wrong things.

The weeks went by like cards turned over one at a time.

She did not know how it was possible, but the house changed around them. It did it so gradually that she never saw it happen. The long white kitchen filled up with small things. A second mug on the hook by the range, chipped at the rim, which turned out to be his. A pair of her gloves on the hall table, which Marco was found, one morning, solemnly drying on the radiator. A tin of the biscuits she liked on the library shelf. A shaving brush in the green room's washstand, and a razor, and a comb with several teeth missing. She said nothing about it. He said nothing either. But she caught him one evening standing in the door of her room with a drawer pulled open and a look of such quiet joy that she backed out into the corridor and went down to the kitchen for tea, to give him time.

He learned to make coffee. It was a terrible business. He had never in his life made a cup of anything, it transpired, and he approached the kettle with the wary courtesy of a man opening negotiations with a foreign power. The first morning he burned it. The second he put in so much salt that she had to pour it down the sink. The third, with Mrs. Venn watching from the doorway with her arms folded, he got it exactly right, and the look on his face when she tasted it was one she would have paid a great deal to bottle.

She learned to knot a tie.

It was a thing that she should not have needed to do, since he had worn one every working day since he was eighteen. But one morning in the third week of December, in the cold white light of the dressing room, she found him standing at the glass with a strip of black silk in both hands and an expression of baffled despair. His right hand had come out of its dressing, and the burn had healed to a pale shining mark across the back of it, and the fingers did not quite do what they were told.

"It will not take the knot," he said. "It has not since the fire. I cannot get the angle."

"Give it here."

He held it out. She stepped up close, and put her hands under his chin, and he lifted it for her without being asked. He smelled of soap and cedar and warm skin. She felt his breath on her temple. She looped the silk, and crossed it, and drew it through, and her fingers, which had held tweezers and pipettes and the delicate steel hairs of a forger's pen, found it quite hard to tie a knot while he was looking at her like that.

"You are doing it wrong," said Matteo, gently.

"I'm doing it perfectly."

"It's crooked."

"It's a character reference."

He laughed, silently, so that she felt it in his throat under her knuckles. She snugged the knot up and smoothed the collar flat with both palms. Her hands lingered. She felt his pulse against her wrist, quick and strong, and he put his hand over hers, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.

"I shall be late for the quay," said Matteo, at last.

"You will."

"Marco will say nothing about it."

"He will say it with his back."

"I am," said Matteo, "quite prepared to be said something with."

The Foundation sent flowers. The dock widows sent a hamper. The postman, a stout cheerful man called Orsino who had walked the Cypress Hill round for eleven years and had never once, in Mrs. Venn's recollection, spoken a word to anyone above the rank of cook, took off his cap to Sienna in the drive one morning and wished her the compliments of the season. She nearly dropped the letters.

There was a card among them on the twentieth, in a heavy cream envelope with a thin gold line round the edge. She knew the hand before she looked at the flap. It was a beautiful, upright, flowing script, and it said: To Mrs. Bellandi, with the warmest wishes of an old friend. Inside was a stiff square of cardboard, engraved with a branch of holly, and below it a few lines in the same pen. My dear child, I cannot tell you what a joy it has been to see this house awake again. I send a small remembrance. D.V.

The remembrance came an hour later, by a boy on a bicycle: a wooden case of six bottles, straw-packed, with a red wax seal on the neck of each.

Sienna tested the first one in the pantry with the door shut. She did it with a steady hand and her heart going slowly and heavily in her ears. A paper strip, a dropper, a flick. It stayed the pale clean yellow of an ordinary day. She tested the second. She tested all six, and each one was wine and nothing but wine, and when she had finished she stood with her back against the shelves of jam and drew in a long breath and held it.

Matteo found her there.

He looked at the case. He looked at the card in her hand. He did not say a word. He took the card, read it, laid it on a shelf face down, and then, gently, he lifted the lid of the crate and set it back on.

"We shall drink our own," he said.

"They're clean."

"I do not doubt it." His voice was very quiet. "It is not the wine I mind. It is that he sent it to you by name, and signed it, and wished you joy." He drew a breath. "I find that I would rather owe that man nothing, not so much as a sip."

She understood. She put her hand over his, on the crate, and he turned his own palm up under it.

"Mrs. Venn will pour it away," said Sienna.

"Mrs. Venn," said Matteo, "has been waiting to be asked since the twentieth. Do not tell her she may enjoy it."

Christmas came in white, and bright, and loud.

They kept it in the kitchen. It had been Sienna's idea, though she would never have admitted it. The great marble dining room, with its table for twenty and its painted ceiling, had been the room of a Bellandi Christmas for a hundred and forty years, and she had stood in the door of it on the twenty-third, on the arm of a man who said nothing at all, and looked at the long white cloth and the silver and the empty chairs. And she had said, in a voice she hardly recognized, "Could we not do it where it's warm?"

They did it where it was warm.

The pine table was dragged out from the wall and a second one carried in from the pantry to make an L. Tomas roasted a goose the size of a small dog. Mrs. Venn produced from some forgotten press a heap of paper hats, in red and green and gold, which had last been used, she said, at the christening of the young master in the year he was born, and which she was not in the least sentimental about. Marco, who had said that he would take his dinner in the hall, was found at four o'clock in the afternoon seated at the foot of the table with a gold paper crown on his head, carving the goose with the grave attention of a surgeon and saying not one word about it.

Nell came at three in a column of scarlet satin with her braids piled up like a tower and a bottle of her mother's elderflower cordial under each arm, shrieking. She kissed Sienna on both cheeks and then, to Sienna's utter astonishment, Marco, who went the color of a boiled beet and did not move. Edmund Hale came at half past, in his good suit, with a parcel under his arm, a second boat, a toy one this time, for no one in particular, and a fresh scrap of tissue on his jaw. He was installed at the right hand of the host and given a glass of something amber. He wept at once, with great decorum, into his napkin.

They ate. They ate for three hours. Sienna tested the goose, and the sprouts, and the plum pudding, and the sauce, and the second pudding that Tomas had made in case the first was not enough, and Nell, who had at first stared, ended by testing her own glass of elderflower cordial with a borrowed strip, solemnly, to cheers. They pulled crackers. Edmund told the story of the Gannet and the great herring, which had grown considerably since October. Marco was made to wear a second crown. Mrs. Venn sat at the end of the table in her best black dress and a purple paper hat, and said, at the end of the goose, in an unnatural voice, to nobody in particular, "Forty-one years." She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose with a sound like a trumpet, and the whole table pretended not to hear.

She had never been so happy. That was the trouble. She sat with her elbow on the pine and her cheek on her hand, in a paper hat the color of mustard, with her father laughing and Nell shouting and Matteo beside her with his shoulder warm against hers, and she thought: this is it. This is what I would have asked for, if I had known what to ask. And she thought, in the same breath, with the cold small voice that never slept: and he has not told you.

He turned his head and looked at her.

He did not say anything. He looked at her with a kind of dazed, bright, private astonishment, and under the table his hand found hers, and she held it. She thought: after Christmas. She thought it so firmly that it felt like a vow.

They exchanged presents in the drawing room afterwards, by the fire, with the dark come down and the snow beginning again at the windows.

He went first. He had hidden it behind a cushion, and he brought it out with the air of a man defusing a bomb: a small flat box, wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string. She undid the knot with fingers that had begun, absurdly, to shake. Inside, on a bed of straw, lay a little glass vial.

It was a new one. She knew it at once, though it was a different shape from the first, a slim blown bottle with a cork stopper and a label in a plain neat hand. She held it up to the firelight and the label said, in capitals that were not quite a girl's, but were trying very hard to be: SALT.

It was full. She drew the cork, and there lay a pinch of fine gray crystals that had a faint gleam of sea in them.

"It is from the pan at Carrow," said Matteo, a little stiffly. "Where your mother's father fished. I had Marco go on the train. He was unhappy about it, and stood on the beach in his coat for an hour and a half, and he says it is the finest salt in the country, though he is a man of no imagination." He cleared his throat. "I do not know whether it is better than the other. I only thought you should like to have a little of it in a house where there are no shelves with anything on them."

She could not speak.

She sat with the little bottle in both hands and the fire going soft and bright around her, and she saw the old one, a girl's careful capitals on a shelf at the back of a room on Tern Street, and a girl of eleven putting salt in the dark. She saw a beach, and a man in a coat, and a train. She put her hand over her mouth.

"It was not meant to make you cry."

"I'm not crying."

"No," said Matteo, gravely. "It is the smoke."

She laughed, wetly. She leaned over and kissed him, thoroughly, in front of the whole drawing room, and when she drew back, Edmund had found something deeply interesting to look at on the mantelpiece, and Nell had put her hands over her eyes with a loud theatrical groan.

"Mine," said Sienna, "is not nearly so good."

"I should like to be the judge."

She gave it to him. It was a small book, bound in plain black cloth, with a rubbed spine and thick cream pages. She had bought it on Calloway Street on the nineteenth, from a stationer with a gilt sign, and had spent three evenings failing to think of what to say. She said it now, quickly, because it was the only way.

"It's blank. I thought, the other one, the old one, is full of me. It's full of the most terrible things. I'd like you to have one that's for something else." She was looking at the fire. "Not for watching. For anything. For boats, and pears, and the names of ships. For nothing at all."

He was silent.

She turned her head. He was holding the little book in both hands, still, and his face was not the face he wore for strangers or for ledgers. It was naked. He ran his thumb along the black cloth of the spine, slowly, as a man strokes a sleeping thing, and she saw his throat move.

"I have never been given a blank page before," said Matteo.

He opened it. It was only a sheet of cream paper, empty and faintly ruled. He looked at it for a long time. Then he laughed, a sudden, startled, delighted laugh that rang through the room, high and young and without care, and she realized that it was the first time she had ever heard him laugh aloud.

Edmund stopped in the middle of a sentence. Marco lowered his glass. Mrs. Venn, in the doorway with a plate of mince pies, went rigid, and a great slow tear ran down her broad weathered cheek and was brushed away with a floury hand.

She thought: I would do anything. I would do anything at all to hear that again.

It was the thought that stayed with her afterwards, in the cold, in the quiet, long after the guests had gone and the house had gone to bed. She lay in the warm dark with her head on his shoulder and the snow going down past the window, and she heard it again, the laugh, in her mind. And she thought, clearly, as one reads off a figure: I will not be the one to make it stop.

It was a very small decision. It was the fifth.

In January it snowed for nine days.

They went down to the boathouse on the third Sunday, with a flask of cocoa and a blanket and a very large pair of Mrs. Venn's knitted socks. The steps were buried. He went ahead and kicked a path with his boots, and she came behind with her arms full of firewood and her breath going up in white clouds. At the bottom, the cove lay under a foot of snow, and the sea was black and still and steaming faintly in the cold, and the little building with LIVIA over the lintel looked, in the blue light, like something out of a book.

He lit the stove. She stood by the half-built boat in her coat and a pair of ridiculous socks and looked at the new ribs, glowing gold in the firelight like the bones of something sleeping. He had done a dozen since December. The planking had begun on the starboard side, pale cedar strakes lapped one over the next, and the smell of it filled the whole long room.

"I have been thinking of names," said Sienna.

"I should like to hear them."

"Thaddeus."

"No."

"Marmalade."

"Certainly not."

"The Second Mrs. Bellandi."

He put down the plane. He turned and looked at her with the shavings in his hair and the firelight on his face, and his mouth twitched. "It is a very dreadful name."

"It's a very good boat."

"It would be the only boat on the coast," said Matteo, "to have its own legal standing."

She grinned. She felt it all the way down, a pure, silly, helpless happiness, and she saw him see it and go still. He crossed the floor in two strides. He took her face in his hands, with the shavings falling off him like snow, and said, without a trace of humor, "I want to ask you for something."

"Anything."

"Do not say it until..."

"Matteo."

"...until you have heard it. I should like to hear you sing."

She stared. "I beg your pardon?"

"My mother sang," said Matteo. "Badly, I'm told. I have never heard her. I was too young to remember, and my father would not have it spoken of. But I have thought, for a long time, that if I had been able to choose any one sound in the world, it would have been that." He hesitated. "I thought you might sing. In the boathouse. For her. I will not listen, if you would rather."

She laughed so hard that she had to sit down on the trestle.

"I don't sing," she said. "I'm dreadful. Nell says I sound like a goat in a bucket."

"Then it is quite perfect," said Matteo.

She sang. She sang the only thing she knew by heart, a herring song of her mother's with eleven verses and no tune to speak of, in a voice that wobbled, and cracked, and went flat on the high notes. He stood in the middle of the boathouse floor with his arms folded and his head bent, motionless, listening. By the third verse he was laughing. By the fifth he had come over and sat on the floor at her feet with his back against the trestle. By the eighth, he had begun to hum, a thin, true, bashful little thread of sound that wound in and out of hers and did not quite match, and she realized, with a sort of delight, that he knew the tune. He had known it all along. It was the one that his mother had sung, in a yellow dress, in a house that he had not been allowed to remember.

"She sang that," said Matteo, when it was over. "Did she not? I remember it. I had thought it was a dream."

"It's a very old one. Everyone's mother sings it."

"Mine did." He laid his head against her knee. "I had no idea."

She put her hand in his hair. They stayed there for a long time, with the stove ticking and the snow going soft against the boards, and neither of them spoke.

The rest of the afternoon was short, and bright, and almost made of laughing. There was a moment of clumsiness with a blanket and a great deal of whispering about cold feet. There was a long slow kiss that tasted of cocoa, and a hand that found the hem of a ridiculous knitted sock and withdrew it with a groan of reverent exasperation. There was nothing in it at all that she would have called passion, in the sense of the cold bright thing of the first night. It was a different warmth. It was a slow, silly, golden thing, like the last of the sun on a wall, and it left her lying on the blanket among the shavings with her hair full of cedar and her cheek against his chest, helpless with giggles, while he said gravely that he had never in his life been so thoroughly defeated by a pair of socks.

She looked up at the ribs of the boat, glowing in the firelight, and she thought: I am happy. I am, I am. She said it to herself like a person touching a bruise to see whether it had healed. And it had. There was nothing under it. Not for the length of that afternoon.

The telephone rang at the villa as they came up the steps.

They could hear it from the garden gate, a thin faraway trill in the dusk, and Mrs. Venn's voice answering, and then the faint heavy thud of a door. By the time they reached the kitchen passage, Marco was standing at the foot of the back stairs in his dark coat, with a gray folder held flat against his chest and snow melting on his shoulders.

He did not hurry. He did not speak. He only waited until they were close, and looked at Matteo, and then at Sienna, with that broad grave unreadable face. And it seemed to her that his eyes were very tired.

"Sir," said Marco. "Miss. I'm sorry to disturb you."

"What is it?"

"Gavin's cousin, in the north docks." He drew a breath. "He's seen him. Last night, a little after eleven, going into a warehouse on Plover Quay. Fat man, gray coat, an expensive hat." His mouth tightened. "He says he looked exceedingly well."

The kitchen did not change. The range ticked. The clock on the shelf said six.

"Rusk," said Matteo.

"Yes, sir." Marco's eyes went to the snow melting on the floor. "Alive. And in the harbor."

Sienna felt the warmth go out of her hand. It went all at once, as it does when one has been holding something hot, and she looked down and saw that Matteo's fingers had closed on hers, hard, and that for the first time in many weeks they were not steady.