In July the heat came down on Marenna Bay like a lid.

It came in from the sea at the beginning of the month, white and heavy and windless, and lay along the harbor until the water went flat as pewter and the tar on the quay softened in the sun. The cranes stood motionless. The gulls sat on the roofs of the sheds with their beaks open. On Cypress Hill the cypresses did not stir, and the lemons on the kitchen sill, which Mrs. Venn had refused to throw out and had refused, with equal firmness, to let anyone touch, went slowly gold and then slowly brown, until Sienna, in a fit of nervous fury, carried the whole bowl down the garden and tipped it into the compost heap.

Matteo got well.

It was a slow business. He had lain three days on the long sofa in the small drawing room with the windows open, and then a week in the green room, and then, to Helena's open disgust, he had got up and gone to the quay. He was thinner. He had a shadow of something under his eyes that the sun did not seem to reach. But he ate what Mrs. Venn put in front of him, and slept, for whole hours together, with his arm across Sienna's ribs, and one night in the second week she woke in the dark and heard him humming a thin, true, bashful thread of a tune that she knew to be a herring song.

She watched him all that month, and she saw it begin.

It was a look. She would have had difficulty describing it to a stranger. He gave it to her across the breakfast table when he thought she was reading, and in the hall when she came in from the hospital with her bag in her hand, and once, unforgettably, in the middle of a conversation about the price of tin, when he stopped in the middle of a sentence and simply looked at her with his mouth a little open. It was not the old look, the one that had learned her by heart in the long bright room above the quay. It was something much more deliberate. It was the look of a man standing at the edge of a high board, with the water a long way below, who has made up his mind.

She knew what was coming. She had known for six months. And as it came nearer, in the thick white heat of that July, she found to her dismay that she was no longer certain whether she wanted it to come at all.

It was not a thing she could say. She had examined it, in the small hours, in the dark, with the cold calm of a woman going over a result she did not like. She was afraid of the answer. That was the whole of it. She was afraid that on the other side of a plain sentence there stood a man she would have to forgive, and she did not know if she could, and she had never in her life been so happy. It seemed a very poor reason to be a coward. It was the only one she had.

So she tried to ask him, on the sixteenth, in the library, and was a clean second too late.

It was eleven at night, and the long room was very quiet. The doors to the garden stood open, and the smell of hot stone and night-scented stock came in on a breath of air that was scarcely a wind. The green lamp burned on the table. Matteo sat in his shirtsleeves with a ledger and she at the other end with the blue notebook, and for an hour neither of them had turned a page. She had decided. She had decided at supper, with a spoon in her hand, that she would put the notebook down, and say it, and be done.

She closed the book. She drew a breath.

"Matteo," she said. "I have been meaning..."

"Sienna."

He had said it at the very same moment. They stopped together. They looked at each other down the length of the green leather, and she saw him go a very faint dark red, and then, suddenly, laugh.

"You first," said Matteo.

"No. You."

"I should not like to talk across you."

"Matteo."

"Yes." He rose. He came down the length of the long table, slowly, with his hands loose at his sides, and stopped a pace from her chair. He did not touch her. He stood looking down at her, in the lamplight, with the plain naked seriousness she had seen in him on a pier, and she felt her heart stop and begin again, heavily.

"There is something I must tell you," he said.

She did not move.

"I have not told you before. I have wished to, for a very long time. I have wished it so much that I have not been able to find the first word." His voice was low and even and very careful. "It concerns you. It concerns, I think, a good deal that I should have said in the autumn. I do not want to say it badly."

"Then say it now."

"Not tonight."

The words fell into the quiet room and stayed there.

"Not tonight," said Matteo again, gently. He sat down on his heels in front of her chair, so that his eyes were on a level with hers, and took her two hands in both of his. They were warm and steady. "I should like it done properly. It is the one thing that I have never done properly in my life, and I should like to do it with a clear head and a clear day and a table with nothing on it but the two of us. I should like to do it when I am not tired from a fever, and you are not tired from a hospital, and Marco is not waiting in the passage with a telephone." A small, crooked, trembling smile. "I have a meeting on the twenty-fifth with Hartigan, a dreary one, about hulls. When it is over I shall come home and shut every door, and I shall tell you all of it. On the twenty-sixth. A Saturday. Will you let me?"

The lamp hissed. A moth beat against the shade. She heard her own breath, very far off, going in and out.

She had never in her life been so relieved, and so ashamed of being relieved, at the same time.

"Yes," said Sienna. "The twenty-sixth."

He let out his breath. He bent his head and laid it against her knees, and she put her hand on his hair, and felt the long shudder go through him. "Thank you," he said, into her skirt.

"You don't need to thank me."

"I do." He did not look up. "It is the thing I am most afraid of in the world. I find I am more afraid of it than of anything that has ever happened to me."

"Is it so very bad?"

"I do not know," said Matteo. "That is what I am afraid of."

She stroked his hair. She did not say anything else. She was thinking, with a strange cold clarity, that it was the first time in seven months that she had been given a date, and that she had thanked him for it, and that she had meant it, and that she was now, for ten days, relieved of the obligation to ask.

It was the ninth time. She no longer counted.

The button took them to Calloway Street.

It was Marco's doing, and a week of patient dull work in the heat. He had taken it to a man at the university who knew about horn, a small bent professor with a loupe screwed in his eye who had looked at it for five minutes and pronounced it, with disgust, the work of a very good craftsman who ought to have known better. It was a buffalo horn, carved by hand, polished with beeswax. It had been made in a shop on Calloway Street. There were, he believed, perhaps four such shops left in the whole country that still did buttons of that kind, and only one that put a brass shank on the back.

It was called Pike and Daughter, Tailors.

Sienna went on the Thursday, in the hottest hour of the day, with Marco waiting in the car and a man behind her who did not read his paperback. The shop was narrow and dark and cool, a small crooked room smelling of steam and chalk and warm wool, with bolts of cloth stacked to the ceiling and a long worn counter at the back. A bell tinkled over the door. A very old man in shirtsleeves and a leather apron looked up from a pair of enormous shears with the vague, courteous, preoccupied expression of someone who has been interrupted at a prayer.

"Madam," said Mr. Pike. "How may I be of service?"

She laid the button on the counter.

He did not touch it. He put on a pair of spectacles. He bent over it with his two hands clasped behind his back like a man looking at a rare insect, and for a long time there was no sound in the shop but the ticking of a clock and a small steam iron hissing somewhere in the back. Then he straightened.

"Ah," he said. "The old order."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Madam, I have been making these buttons for fifty-one years, and there has been one order in all that time that I have never forgotten." He took off his spectacles and polished them on his apron. "Winter of the year Mr. Bellandi, the elder, turned sixty. A dozen overcoats. Pure worsted, a gray they call Harbor, lined in silk, with a velvet collar. A little gift, he said, for his friends. Twelve of them. He had a list."

Her mouth went dry.

"They were the best coats I ever cut. Every one different, to the shoulder." He sighed, and a faint tender pride came into the old face. "I did the measuring myself. I went to the house on the hill, and to the quay, and to a hotel, and once to a funeral parlor, which is a thing I should not like to do twice. Twelve gentlemen. Fine, important gentlemen. And a button for each, of the horn."

"Do you remember who they were?"

"I have the book." He turned to a ledger on the shelf behind him. It was a vast, gray, soft-cornered thing, and he opened it at a place marked with a tape and ran a long crooked finger down the page. "Here. It is all written. My daughter keeps it very tidy." He cleared his throat. "Mr. A. Bellandi, naturally. Dr. Cassius Hartigan, of the marine insurance. A Mr. Vern Rusk."

She did not breathe.

"A Captain Orsolo, who is dead. A Mr. Pell, of Pier Four. A Mr. Abernathy of the customs, retired. A Judge Thorne, also dead." The finger moved. "A Mr. D. Vance."

"Is that all?"

"There were twelve." He smiled apologetically. "I am an old man, madam. I can only remember the wearers I liked. But the coats are all in the book."

She copied the list into the blue notebook with a hand that did not shake. She thanked him. She bought, because she could not help it, a yard of the gray worsted, and he wrapped it in tissue with great ceremony and would not take a penny. At the door he said, in a mild, scholarly voice, "If it is a lost button, madam, you must not be anxious. It is a very easy thing to replace. I have a whole tray."

She stood on the hot pavement of Calloway Street with the tissue under her arm and the sun beating on the back of her neck, and read the list again. Twelve names. A dead sea captain. A dead judge. A retired customs man who spent his days in a deck chair in Carrow. A foreman who had sold a manifest and been put on a train.

Hartigan. Rusk. Vance.

It was the entire circle, and it was not a clue. It was a drawing of a hand with the fingers held out, and she could not tell which finger she was meant to take.

He told her he would be home late on the twenty-first.

She went into his study at half past nine because she wanted a pen.

It was a small and stupid errand. She had left her own on the library table, and the house was dark, and Marco had gone with Matteo to the quay. She went along the passage in her bare feet with a candle in a saucer, because the electric lamp in the corridor had blown that afternoon and nobody had mended it. The door of the study was ajar. She had held the key to it, a brass thing on a ring, since the night of the cheque, and she did not need it now. She pushed it open with her hip.

The room was dark and low and smelled of leather and cold ash. The moon came in at the window in a long white slant. His great flat desk lay across the middle of it, with the green-shaded lamp and the blotter and the inkstand, and on the wall behind it hung a map of the harbor, very old and very large, with the wharves and slips drawn in faded ink. She lifted the candle. She found a pen in the tray, a heavy black one with a gold band, and held it for a moment against her palm.

There was a drawer in the desk that did not belong.

She had seen it before, many times, and had thought nothing of it. It was the bottom drawer on the right, a deep one, with a plain brass escutcheon and a keyhole. It had been shut. It was always shut. But tonight the candle threw a thin flickering circle across the dark wood, and she saw that the little brass plate was newer than the others. It had been fitted, at some time in the last two years, by a man who knew what he was about. Someone had put a lock on a drawer in a room where no one else had a key.

She stood very still.

She knew, as she knew the weight of a pen in her hand, what was in it. She had known it since she woke in the dark in the middle of December. A page folded in four. A hand that had written, I will keep the debt so that no one can touch her, and had torn the sheet out of its book and had not been able to look at it since.

It would take her four minutes. She had spent six years opening locked things. The little brass lock was a good one, and the hairpin in her braid was a poor tool, but she had never in her life been stopped by a lock that did not wish to keep her out.

She knelt on the carpet. She set the candle on the floor. She took out the pin.

She held it in her fingers for a long time.

The moon moved across the carpet a little way. A clock struck ten, somewhere very far down in the house. She thought of a man on his heels in front of her chair, with his head against her knees. I should like it done properly. She thought of a date on a calendar, the twenty-sixth, and ten days, and a table with nothing on it but the two of them.

It was his to say. It was hers to hear. That was all of it, and she knew that if she opened the drawer, she would have taken it from him, as he had once tried to take an hour from her, and she would be what she had told him she would not forgive.

She put the pin back in her hair.

It was a strange feeling, rising from her knees in the dark, with the pen in her fist. She had expected triumph, or shame. She felt neither. She felt very small and very clear, like a woman on a high thin ridge, and when she looked down at the little brass lock, shining dully in the moonlight, she found that she hated it. She hated it with all her heart. She hated it for being a good lock. She hated that it had kept him safe, and kept her out, and that she had chosen to leave it so.

She blew out the candle and went to find him on the roof.

He had gone up at eleven. She knew because Mrs. Venn told her, from the pantry door, with her arms folded and her eyes on the ceiling. He had taken a blanket and a flask and gone up the back stair like a boy, and she was to take the other flask and a shawl, because the nights were cooler up there than anyone credited.

The roof of the Bellandi house was a long flat leaded walk behind a stone balustrade, between two chimney stacks, with a view over the cypresses to the sea. She had never been up there. She came out through the little door at the head of the stair, into a great cool dark that smelled of lead and night and the faint salt breath of the harbor, and stopped, with her hand on the doorpost.

The sky was full of stars.

She had not seen a sky like it for years. In the city, with the lamps on the quay and the glare off the cranes, she had forgotten what the dark was. It lay over her like a vast and silent bowl, gone from black to deep blue at the rim, thick and shining with small cold fires from edge to edge. A white river of them ran straight across the zenith. Far out to sea, a ship's lantern burned a single steady yellow, and the water below it was as flat and black as oil.

He was sitting on the leads with his back to the balustrade and a rug over his knees.

"Mrs. Venn," said Matteo, without turning his head, "has no discretion whatever."

"She told me you'd taken a blanket."

"I did. It was a mistake. I have been up here an hour, and I was never meant for a rug." He held up a corner of it. "Come and be cold with me."

She sat. She slid in under his arm, and he drew the blanket round them both, and she felt the warmth of him go through her whole side like a hot brick in a bed. He smelled of cedar and starch and the clean night air. She put her head on his shoulder. For a long time neither of them said anything at all.

"That is Vega," said Matteo at last, quietly. He pointed. "The bright one. And that is a ship, which I believe is an oil tanker, on its way to Carrow, and that is the lamp on the end of the Plover Quay breakwater. It is a very dreary view, really. I have been looking at it since I was nine."

"Did your father bring you up here?"

"No. He did not like heights." A pause. "I came by myself. In the winter after my mother died, I used to climb out of the window in the east passage and across the slates, and lie on my back, and count."

"Count what?"

"The stars." She felt him smile. "I thought that if I could get to the end of them, she would come back. It was a poor plan. They are very numerous."

She turned her face into his throat. She did not say that she was sorry. It would have been the wrong thing, and he would have understood it at once. She lay with her cheek against his collar and listened to his heart, strong and slow and steady, and a long way off on the water, the ship's lantern moved a hair's breadth to the left.

"I should like to tell you something," said Matteo.

Her stomach turned over.

"Not that. Not yet." He tightened his arm. "That is for Saturday. It is a smaller thing. I should like you to know that I have been looking at these stars for twenty-four years, and I have never once wished to count them since the night I read your name." His voice was very low. "I do not wish it now. I am quite content to lie here and not know how many there are."

She lifted her head. In the starlight his face was very pale and very quiet, with the dark eyes fixed on hers.

"I love you," said Sienna.

It was out before she knew. She had not said it aloud. She had written it in her head a hundred times, and tested it, and held it up to the light. She had not been able to find a way to say it that was not also, somehow, a plea. And it had come out of her at last in the middle of a cold roof with a rug over her knees, plain and unadorned, like a result.

He did not move.

He looked at her. Something went across his face that she would remember on the last day of her life: a long slow breaking, like ice on a river in March. His lips parted. His eyes filled, and he did not blink, and the water stood in them, shining, and then slid down on either side of his nose.

"I have wished to hear it," said Matteo, "for two years. In two lives. I had a speech." He laughed, a broken wet sound. "It was a very good speech. It has gone."

"Then say something else."

"I love you," he said. "I love you. I loved you before I knew your face. I loved you in a ledger." He drew her against him so hard that she could scarcely breathe. "I shall go on loving you whatever you say to me on Saturday, whatever you think of me afterwards, whatever you do. I want you to hear that. Do you hear it? Whatever you do."

"I hear it," said Sienna.

It went into her, and she did not ask what he meant.

They did not go in until the sky began to pale. They lay on the leads under the rug, in the middle of the long warm silent dark, and he asked her, very softly, whether she was cold, and she said no, and he asked whether he might, and she said yes. It was quiet and slow, with the stars going round overhead and the lead still holding the heat of the day against her back. She remembered his hands in her hair, and the murmur of her name against her throat, and the astonishing tenderness of a man who had been afraid for two years of being allowed. She remembered, afterwards, the two of them lying tangled in the rug with their breath going slowly in and out, and a single falling star, silent, drawing a thin white thread across the south.

"Wish," said Matteo.

"I haven't anything left."

"Then wish for me."

She closed her eyes. She wished, with her whole heart, for a Saturday. She wished it as one wishes for a thing that is going to be taken. She wished that it would be good, and that she would be able to bear it, and that when it was over she would still be lying here with his heart under her cheek.

She did not wish for a lock to be opened. She did not wish for anything to be forgiven. She wished, very simply, to be strong enough when it came.

She was asleep before the star had gone out.

He sat alone in the study at the end of the east wing, at three in the morning, with the shutters closed and the door locked, and a single candle burning in a saucer beside his hand.

Dario Vance did not use the electric lamp. He had never cared for it. It threw a hard white light on everything, and he had spent his life in rooms where the light was kind. He sat in his shirtsleeves at the little writing table, with his silver hair a little disordered and his thin gold spectacles pushed up onto his forehead, and the candle laid a soft gold wash over his face and the sheet of cream paper in front of him and the horn button between his fingers.

It was the twin. There had been a dozen coats, and a dozen buttons to each, and a tray of spares. He had had his own for eleven years. He had noticed, three weeks ago, in the cold of a July morning, that the second button from the top was gone.

He turned it over. It caught the candle. He smiled a little, with a fondness that was unaffected, at the ridiculous inadequacy of a man who could plan for six years and lose a button on a nail.

Poor Tomas, he thought. Poor, sweet, stupid Tomas. It would have been so very much cleaner if the boy had not hesitated.

It had not been Tomas. He had never so much as spoken to the boy. But a household is a delicate thing, and a clever man knows that kindness opens more doors than any key. There was a girl who did the fires, who had a sister in Carrow with a hole in her chest. There was a man on the telephone exchange. There was a boy from Pier Two who wept when he was caught, and went on taking the money. It was all very sad, and very small, and he regretted it from the bottom of his heart.

He put the button down on the blotter.

He took up the pen. It was an old one, a broad-nibbed black thing with a barrel worn smooth by a long dead hand. He dipped it, and shook it once, and bent over the paper, and began to write.

It was a thing he did very well.

He had begun at nineteen, on the back of a tailor's bill, in a rented room in Carrow, with a copy of a hand he had spent a summer studying across a dining table. It had been a kind of game, then. He had been a boy with a gift. He had taken pleasure in the long slanting upright line, the cold elegance of it, the way the downstroke of every capital swelled before it drew in. A man's hand is a portrait. It tells you what he is afraid of. He had spent forty years learning every fear Aurelio Bellandi had, and he could set them down on a page in the dark with his eyes shut.

Forgive me.

He looked at it. The two words stood on the cream paper in black ink, upright and fine and faintly sorrowful, exactly as they had stood once in a dying man's dream. He wrote it again beneath. And again. He filled a whole sheet. He was not pleased with the third. The F had begun to lean. He crossed it out with a small neat stroke and wrote it afresh, and this time the ink ran true.

It was a beautiful hand. It had always been. It was the only gift he had ever been given in that family, and he had never been allowed to use it under his own name.

Half brother, said a small cold voice in his mind. It was not a voice he heard often. It belonged to a boy of nine in a borrowed jacket on the steps of a great house on a hill, with a woman's hand in his and a gray-eyed man in the doorway looking down. Aurelio's blood. Never Aurelio's name. They had given him a place at the table, and a pension, and the use of a study, and a nickname that Aurelio had thought was affectionate. Tin. A cheap bright metal pretending to be silver. It was the sort of thing a clever child understands at once.

He had not minded for a very long time.

He had minded when the boy was born. He had stood in the hall of the great house, a man of thirty-four, in a good gray suit, and watched a nurse carry a small furious bundle up the stairs, and heard Aurelio say quietly, to nobody, that now the house was safe. He had minded when the trust was drawn up. A fund of three hundred years, a whole harbor, held in the name of the heirs of the blood. He had read it twice. There was a clause. There was always a clause. If the son died without issue, it would pass, by a very old and very silly law of the guild, to the nearest trustee of the line. And the nearest trustee was, by a quirk of a dead man's temper, the man who had been kept out of the house all his life.

He would have waited. He had not wished to be a murderer. He was a man of letters, and of quiet habits, and he had a great aversion to noise. But the boy had married. And a girl with clever hands and a magnifying glass had been made, by a lawyer's clause that he himself had drafted with such delicate care, the sole trustee of the fund in the event of Matteo's death. Which meant that two deaths were required, and not one. Which meant that the fourteenth of September, the old feast of Saint Ilaria, the one day in the year when the circle came together in a single hall, was not only the best night for it. It was the last.

He set down the pen. He blew very gently on the page.

She was a dear girl. He had meant that, in the drawing room, by the fire. She was clever and loyal, and she loved the boy as plainly as a hearth loves a flame. It was very sad. He thought that if the matter had been in his own hands, he would have found some other way. But it was not. It was in the hands of a dozen things he had put in motion, long ago, and could no longer call off.

Eight weeks.

He had been very good, he thought, about the pace. A less patient man would have struck in June. He had wanted to, God knew. He had stood in the drawing room with the Gannet in front of him and the girl's hand under his, and felt the beating of her pulse in her wrist, and had been very near to a thing that was not quite pity. But the lemon had failed. The boy had noticed the taste. It was the boy's own doing, that curious acute inheritance of Aurelio's, the nose for a lie, and he had had two mouthfuls and put it down.

It would not have mattered, in the end. Dario was not a man who was troubled by a failure. A failure is only a draft. He had already begun, in his mind, the second.

The real danger was the girl.

The real danger had always been the girl. A man in love tells you everything. He had watched it for ten months, and had been content. He had watched Matteo grow soft and warm and careless. But a clever woman who has been told that her husband is hiding something does not grow careless. She grows quiet. She counts. She writes it down in a little blue book with the door bolted, and in the end she puts it all together, and he had seen that morning, in the gray light of the library, the exact moment when she had begun to.

She had held up a button.

He turned the horn thing over in his fingers once more, and smiled. She would not be able to prove it. It was a coat, and there were twelve, and the circle was a small one. She would go to Calloway Street and ask. She would come back with a list. And she would sit at a long table with the man she loved, and look at the names, and there would be one that she did not wish to see.

It did not matter. He had not meant her to prove it. He had meant her to doubt. A suspicion is a thing that grows best in a warm house, and he had a great deal of time.

Matteo meant to tell her on the twenty-sixth.

He knew it as he knew the pulse of his own heart. He had heard it from a woman in the kitchen, who had heard it through a door. A date. A table with nothing on it. The boy was going to put his whole weight, at last, onto a plank that he had been told was sound, and a clever girl was going to look into his face while he did it.

He had no wish to prevent it. That was the beauty of the thing. It would be a kindness to let it happen. It was only necessary to see that when the plank gave, it gave in the right way, and in front of the right eyes, and that the pale tender person who stood on the other side of it did not hear the explanation first from the man who had made it.

He set the sheet aside to dry.

It was a very good hand. It would pass anyone who was not looking. It would pass a woman at a magnifier at midnight, with her whole heart in her mouth, if she wanted very much to believe. He thought of her, at a bench, in a blue-lit room, with a white coat across a sleeping man's shoulders. He thought: she will be at the General on Friday morning. And a note will be waiting.

He folded the paper and sealed it in a cream envelope with a plain black wax. He did not write anything on the face of it. There was no need. There was only one person in the world who could possibly mistake it.

He sat looking at the candle.

It had burned very low. A long gold tongue of wax had run down its side and congealed. Outside the shutters a long way off the first bird had begun, thin and uncertain, to try the dark. He put his two hands flat on the table and bent his silver head, and said to the empty room, very softly, in the tone of a man giving thanks, as he might have said grace before a meal:

"Eight weeks. Let her trust him a little more first. It makes the fall so much cleaner."