The locker had been the lesser of the two thefts, and it took Sienna the best part of a week to understand why.

She had gone up to the changing room at a quarter past five with Matteo behind her, and had found Nell on her knees on the tiled floor in her cartoon scrubs, gathering a scatter of small things into her lap as though they were wounded birds. A lipstick. A hairbrush. A tin of the throat lozenges Sienna ate in winter. The steel door of the locker hung from one hinge, its lock sprung out like a tooth, and on the wooden bench beside it, under the high frosted window, a thin gray morning light lay across a seat that was, when Sienna put her palm to it, faintly and unmistakably warm.

The only thing missing was a notebook.

It was not the blue one. That lay in a drawer in the green room at Cypress Hill with its columns and its struck-through numbers, and nobody but she and one man had ever laid a finger on it. This was the other, a plain black laboratory book with a cloth spine in which she wrote her bench results, a dull catalogue of dilutions and peaks. It held the figures from the flutes, the October ones and the ones she had run on the night of the lemon. Every number in it was copied elsewhere. She had always copied them, because a result that lives in one place is a result that can be lost.

Whoever took it had not known that. Or had known, and taken it anyway, for the pleasure of showing that they could.

Mr. Aldous, interviewed in his box by the door with his crossword folded over his knee, swore on his thirty-one years that nobody had passed him after midnight, and Sienna believed him. It was the badge log that told the rest. The little machine in the hall, which clicked each time a card was drawn through, had recorded a single entry between one and five. At twelve minutes past three, a pass for the basement staff corridor. It was a good, clean, ordinary entry. It had been made with her own card.

She had been at the bench at the time, with a lamp in a man's fist beside her. Her card had been in her coat pocket, in the room under the stairs, six feet from her hand.

She did not tell Matteo at once. She carried it for a day, turning it over, and then she gave it to him in the library, flat and exact, as she gave everything now. He listened with his head bent. When she had finished he said nothing for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, that he would put two of Marco's men in the corridor of the hospital, and she said no. He said, then one. She said, in the hall. He said, in the hall, and in the car park, and at the top of the stair. She said that she would think about the stair.

It was the only time in four months that they had come near to quarreling over a thing that mattered, and it ended with his forehead against hers and a small defeated laugh. The man stood in the hall. He was twenty-four, and shy, and sat on a folding chair with a paperback. Within a week Nell had taught him to play rummy.

After that the weeks closed over it like water. The cherry trees on Cypress Hill went from white to green. The bulbs came up along the drive, red and yellow, and Mrs. Venn put away the winter hamper and brought out the summer one. A letter came from the poste restante in the county beyond Carrow, in a hand that Marco did not recognize, saying nothing whatever, and Marco put it in the fire. And on the twenty-first of June, which was the longest day of the year and Mrs. Venn's sixty-sixth birthday, the whole house went out into the kitchen garden to eat under the pear tree.

It was Sienna's idea, and Tomas's labor, and Matteo's quiet insistence that Mrs. Venn should be commanded, for once, to sit down.

She sat. She sat at the head of the long trestle beneath the old pear tree, in a gray silk dress that Sienna had never seen, with a paper crown on her head, and a face so scarlet with embarrassment that she looked as if she had been boiled. Around her, on benches dragged out from the kitchen, sat the whole household: Tomas in a clean white apron, and the girl who did the fires, and the boy who carried the coal, and the young man in the white jacket, and the gardener, who had not been seen in the house for nine years. Marco had taken off his coat. Edmund Hale had come in his one good suit and was telling a long story about the great herring to a stout woman from the dairy. Nell, who had arrived in a column of lemon-yellow linen with an enormous bunch of sweet peas under one arm, had succeeded in making Marco laugh, which was a thing that Sienna would have sworn on a Bible could not be done.

The sun was low and gold. The long grass at the foot of the wall was full of bees. Somewhere above the cypresses a skylark was going up and up in a thread of sound, and the smell of warm earth and roast lamb and crushed mint hung in the air like a held note. Sienna sat at the middle of the table with her feet in the grass and her cheek on her hand, and watched it, and thought: this is what I wanted. I did not know the shape of it. It was this.

Matteo was sitting beside her. His sleeve touched hers. He had loosened his collar, and his dark hair had fallen over his forehead, and when Mrs. Venn rose, with immense reluctance, to be toasted, he laid his hand over Sienna's on the board and left it there.

It was Tomas who brought the lemonade.

He came across the grass with a tray held high, his young face intent, his white apron already stained with sugar. On the tray stood a great glass pitcher full of cloudy gold liquid with the lemons floating in it like small suns, and around it, in a ring, a dozen tall glasses. They were the summer set. She knew them. They had been brought out of the pantry that morning, a dozen slim tumblers with a thin etched band of tiny stars round the rim, and Mrs. Venn had said, as she said every year, that they had been Mrs. Aurelio's, and must not be put in the dishwasher.

"Mrs. Bellandi," said Tomas, with a flush. "You'll want to see it first."

She laughed. She took a strip from her cuff. It had become a ceremony, over the winter, the thing she did at the table in front of everyone, and nobody remarked on it any longer, except to hold their breath for the colour. She dipped it into the pitcher. Yellow. She dipped it again, in the middle, where the lemon slices lay. Yellow. She held it up to the light and the whole table gave a small ironic cheer.

"Clean," she said.

"Thank heaven," said Nell. "I couldn't drink a thing otherwise."

Tomas set the tray down at the head of the table. He did not pour. Mrs. Venn, who had not yet been told that she was to be waited on, rose to do it herself, and was pressed back into her chair by five pairs of hands. And in the confusion, with the skylark going up and the sun in everybody's eyes and Edmund bellowing for a glass, the tray was passed hand to hand down the length of the board. Each person took the nearest tumbler. Tomas filled them as they went.

Matteo's was the sixth.

She saw him take it. She would see it for a long time afterwards, with the dreadful clarity of a thing watched through glass. He reached across her, without looking, for the glass nearest his hand, the way a man reaches for a thing he has reached for ten thousand times. Tomas poured. The lemonade ran gold into the tumbler and caught the light on the little etched stars. He lifted it. He said something to Edmund, over her head, about herring. And he drank.

He drank once. He lowered the glass an inch, and went on talking. He drank again.

He stopped in the middle of a word.

It was such a small thing. Nobody else noticed it. A man put down his glass, slowly, and turned his head a quarter of an inch, as though a distant sound had caught him. His face did not change. But she felt his hand under hers on the wood, and the fingers, which had been warm, were not.

"Matteo?" said Sienna.

"It tastes," he said, quietly, "of a coin."

The sound of the garden went out.

She would never be able to say how it happened. The bees went on. The skylark went on. Nell was laughing at something. And in the middle of it, a very great way off, she heard the tick of the clock in the great hall and the faint hiss of a lamp turned low, and a voice that was not Matteo's, her own, from another summer. Peripheral coldness first. Metallic taste. Then the throat.

She was on her feet. The bench went over behind her with a crash.

"Don't swallow," she said. "Matteo. Don't swallow, spit it out, look at me. Look at me!"

He looked at her. His eyes were dark and calm. He lifted his hand from the table and looked at it, curiously, turning it over, as one turns over something that has been handed to you by a stranger. The fingers curled, and uncurled. "It's cold," he said. "That is very curious. My hand. It's the oddest..."

"Marco!"

It came out of her in a scream. She had never in her life made such a sound. It rang off the old brick wall, and the table went still, and every head turned. Edmund Hale half rose with his mouth open. Mrs. Venn dropped her crown. And in the silence she heard Marco's chair go over, and the great dark shape of him came across the grass like a thing falling.

"In," said Sienna. "The kitchen. Now. Carry him."

He did not ask a question. He took Matteo up in both arms, as he had once, in another life, carried two people to a bed, and ran. She was behind him. She did not know how she crossed the garden. She remembered only the grass whipping against her stockings and a thin high voice, somewhere to her right, crying out a name, and the red tiles of the kitchen floor coming up under her feet like the deck of a ship.

He lay across the long pine table, with his head turned towards the window. His face was gray. The color had left his lips, and his eyes had a faint glassy brilliance that she knew. She had seen it once from the floor of a room at the top of a hill.

"Salt," said Sienna. "Mrs. Venn. Salt and water. A big jug. Quickly. As much as it will take."

The stout old woman did not ask why. She was across the kitchen before the word was out, in her gray silk and her stockinged feet, with a great stone crock of coarse salt in her arms and a copper jug in her fist. Sienna took them from her. She tipped salt into the water with her bare hand and stirred it with her fingers, and lifted Matteo's head onto her knee.

"I need you to drink this," she said. "I'm sorry. I know what it tastes of. I need you to drink all of it, and then I need you to be sick. It's the oldest thing there is. It was my mother's, and her father's, and it's the only thing I have in my hands."

"I know," said Matteo.

He said it so clearly, and with such perfect gentleness, that it nearly broke her. He lifted the jug in his own cold fingers and drank, and gagged, and drank again. She held his shoulders. She felt the long convulsion go through him and heard Marco, behind her, draw a breath like a man being struck. It was done three times. It was done until there was nothing left in him but a thin clear water, and he lay back against her knee with his eyes shut and a fine sweat standing out on his forehead.

"How much did you swallow?" she said.

"Two mouthfuls." A breath. "Perhaps three. I noticed. I put it down."

"Thank God." She was shaking so badly that she could scarcely hold his head. "Two. You only took two. Last time you drank the whole glass."

"I was happy," said Matteo faintly, "last time."

"You're happy now, you absolute idiot."

"Yes," he said. "That is why I noticed."

Her own pulse was going so hard that she could hardly hear. She put two fingers to the side of his throat, as he had once put two fingers to hers, and held them there, and watched the second hand of the clock on the shelf. She counted. Seventy. Sixty-four. Fifty-eight. It was a slow, drunken, dreadful descent, like a man going down a stair in the dark.

"Marco. Helena."

"Sent, miss." His voice came from a great way off. "Gavin's boy ran. She is in the annex. It is four minutes."

"It's too long."

"She will run."

She ran.

It was a thing that Sienna would turn over in her mind many times afterwards, with a kind of wonder. It was four minutes and ten seconds by the kitchen clock. The back door crashed open and a tall woman in a gray cardigan, with her dark hair coming down and a leather bag in her fist, came across the red tiles at a flat run, and was on her knees at the table before anyone had said her name. Her face was white. Her hands were steady.

"How long?" said Helena.

"Eleven minutes since the first swallow. Pulse fifty-four and falling. He took two or three mouthfuls. He has brought most of it up. The agent is the one I described to you in October. The quick one. The quiet one."

"Peripheral cold, metallic taste, no pain." Helena's gray eyes flicked to Matteo's face, his fingers, the sweat on his temple. "Yes. I see it." She tore open the bag. "Hold his arm. Steady. I'm going to give him atropine, and then I'm going to put a line in, and then you are going to tell me everything you know about what it does to the conduction, because I have only read it once in a book."

"I've watched it," said Sienna.

"Then we are both ahead of the field."

They worked for eleven hours.

She remembered it afterwards as a single long slant of light that moved across a kitchen floor. The afternoon sun lay across the red tiles in a gold wedge, and then in a red one, and then it was gone and the lamps were lit. They had moved him, at some point, to the long sofa in the small drawing room, with a pillow under his head and a blanket round him, because the pine table was too hard and the room too bright. Marco carried him. Mrs. Venn walked beside the sofa, with her gray silk dress soaked through at the front and her paper crown still hanging crooked from one hairpin. Nobody told her to go. Nobody could have.

Helena ran a line into the crook of his arm, and a second. She hung a bag of clear fluid from a hook that Marco drove into the plaster with his fist. She took out a small gray instrument with a green screen and clipped it to his finger, and a thin bright line began to run across it, like a thread drawn over a pane of glass. It rose and fell. It was too slow. Sienna sat on a footstool at his right hand and watched it with her whole body, as she had once watched a number come up on a mass spectrometer. Forty-six. Forty-four. Forty.

At forty, the line stopped climbing, and began to flutter.

"Again," said Helena.

She drew up a second dose. Her mouth was a thin line. She did not look at Sienna. She leaned over the sofa and gave it, and waited, and they both watched the little green screen, side by side, with their heads nearly touching, like two people watching for a ship.

It held.

"Thirty-eight," said Sienna, very low. "That's the floor."

"How do you know?"

"I don't." Her voice cracked. "It's what I'd hoped."

They sat there through the dark. At ten the line crept up to forty-two, and Helena let out a breath and rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist. At midnight it was forty-six. Mrs. Venn had gone, at last, to make tea, and returned with a tray that nobody touched. Marco stood at the window with his back to the room, still, his big hands clasped behind him, and Sienna realized after a long while that he was praying. He moved his lips. He did it without a sound, like a man who has not done it in thirty years and does not wish to be seen.

At two in the morning she took Matteo's hand.

She had not meant to. It lay on the blanket, long and brown, with the line taped into the back of it, and the fingers curled loosely upward, white. She took it in both of hers. She felt the coldness of it go up her wrists. She held it hard, so hard that the knuckles whitened, with her thumbs pressed into the palm and her fingers laced through his, and she said, out loud, in the quiet room, in the voice of a woman speaking to a patient, "I have you."

Helena did not look up.

"I have you," said Sienna. "I'm not letting go. I wasn't able to, before. I couldn't make my hand close. I can now. I can feel every one of your fingers. I'm holding on with all of it."

She talked. She told him everything that came into her head. She told him about the lemon on the windowsill and the little boat on the mantel. She told him that Nell had taught the young man in the hall to play rummy and that the young man had lost four pounds. She told him that Mrs. Venn had thrown her crown into the stove and wept. She said that the Gannet needed a new sail and that she would sew it herself, badly. She told him the whole of the herring song, with all eleven verses, in her cracked flat dreadful voice, and she saw Marco's shoulders shake at the window.

At three the line went to forty-eight.

At four, to fifty-two.

She was still talking when Helena put a hand on her arm. It was a cool dry hand, gentle, and she looked up and saw that the sky beyond the long windows had gone the color of pearl.

"He is out of it," said Helena. "Or nearly. I think he is going to be perfectly all right."

Sienna did not say anything. She put her head down on the blanket beside his hand, and her shoulders began to shake, without a sound, and Helena sat down on the stool beside her and was quiet for a long time.

It was Helena who broke it, at last, in a voice so low that it might have been a breath.

"I am sorry I was afraid."

Sienna lifted her head.

The tall woman was looking at the fire. Her cardigan was ruined, and her hair hung in a rope over one shoulder, and there was a dark smear of dried blood on the back of her wrist that she had not noticed. She looked very tired, and a great deal older than she had in a white room in October.

"I have been afraid for three years," she said. "It's a kind of habit. You build a house of it. You get used to the rooms." She drew a long breath. "I told you in the clinic that if I spoke a name I should be dead by the weekend. I believed it. I still believe it. But I ran across the lawn this afternoon with my skirt in my hand, and I thought, if he dies, I shall have been afraid for nothing."

"Helena."

"I am not going to say it." Her gray eyes came round. They were clear, and wet, and very steady. "Not tonight. I'm not able to. I only wished you to know that I am not on the other side. I never was. I have only been a very great coward." A faint, dry, crooked smile. "It has been the great labor of my life."

Sienna put out her hand. It was a thing she would not have believed, in October. She laid it over the other woman's, on the arm of the footstool, and felt it turn under hers and close.

"Stay in the house," said Sienna. "Please. There's a room in the east wing."

"I should like that."

"We'll find a way."

"I know," said Helena. "That is rather what frightens me."

He woke at dawn.

She was asleep. She had not meant to be. She had put her head down on the edge of the sofa, with his hand still clasped in both of hers, and the gray light had crept over the room, and she woke to a faint pressure on her fingers, so slight that she thought it a dream.

She lifted her head.

His eyes were open. They were dark and clear and a little bewildered, and they were turned upon her, steadily, with an expression that she knew better than her own. He had a crease down one cheek from the pillow. His lips were chapped. The color had come back into his face in a thin warm wash, and his hand, in hers, was warm.

It was warm.

"Sienna," said Matteo.

"I'm here."

"I know." His voice was a thread. He did not try to smile. He only looked at their joined hands, on the blanket, in the first gold light, and she saw him look at the knuckles, white with the pressure of her grip, and she saw something wake in his face that she had never seen before, a sort of slow, radiant, incredulous wonder.

"You held on," he said.

"I did."

"All night."

"All night."

"I could feel it," said Matteo. "I was a very long way off, and it was dark, and I could not feel anything else. But I could feel that. It did not slip." His fingers tightened a very little, in hers. "I thought, there it is. There is the place I am to come back to."

She put her forehead down on his knuckles. She did not say anything. She could not. She felt his other hand, the one with the line in it, come up very slowly and rest on her hair, and she let it, and she did not ask whether she might.

Marco found the cloth at seven.

He had not slept. He had gone out at dawn with a lantern, though there was no need of one, and had worked his way through every room in the kitchen wing, floor by floor, on his knees. Sienna heard it from the sofa, where she sat with a cup of salted tea in her hand and Matteo asleep with his head on her shoulder. She heard the heavy tread in the passage and the quiet knock. She looked up. He was standing in the doorway, vast and gray and spent, with something held out before him in a clean white handkerchief.

"The pantry, miss," he said. "Behind the flour bin. It was pushed right back against the wall, where no one would look."

It was a rag. It was a plain gray cotton cloth, such as every kitchen in the world has by the dozen, with a few threads pulled at one edge. It was damp. When he held it a little closer she smelt it, and every hair rose on her arms. It was a sharp, thin, sourish smell, like vinegar left in a tin, and under it, very faint, a bright metallic edge.

"That's it," she said, softly. "That's what they washed it with. The glass. Somebody wiped the inside of the tumbler with this, before it went on the tray. It's still wet."

"I thought so."

"There's a second thing." He turned his hand. In the palm of it, small and black and round, lay a button. It was a coat button, a good one, of carved horn, polished until it gleamed like a drop of oil, with four small holes and a brass shank at the back. A few threads of gray worsted still clung to it. "It was caught on a nail," said Marco. "At the edge of the shelf where the flour bin stands. At about the height of a man's hip."

She looked at it for a long time.

"Nobody in this house wears a coat like that," she said.

"No, miss."

"Not the staff. Not Matteo. Not you."

"I have never owned a coat that cost so much," said Marco, gravely, "in my life."

She took the button. She laid it on her palm and it lay there, small and black and perfect, a thing you could hold in your hand. And in the pale light of the morning, with the dead man's son asleep against her shoulder and a skylark beginning, somewhere far off, to go up in a thread of sound, she thought of a gray worsted coat with a velvet collar, and a hat, and a fat pink hand holding out an orange. She thought of a dove-colored suit.

She thought: it is a coat. It is only a coat. There must be a hundred in the harbor.

She closed her fingers over the button, and held it, very tightly, until the horn bit into her skin.