He sent for them on the Tuesday, and they came.

That was the first surprise. Sienna would have wagered, if she had been a woman who wagered, that half of the circle would find some good reason to be in the country. A hundred and forty people had seen a table burn blue. A hundred and forty people had gone home on Sunday night in their carriages and cars, through a dark wet city that was already full of it, and by Monday noon every tongue on the quay had said the thing aloud. Dario Vance. The charitable old gentleman with the apricots. In the gaol on Linnet Street, in a cell with a cot and a bucket, not weeping, not speaking, with a plain gray blanket over his knees and an untouched cup of tea beside him on the floor.

They came at noon. They came in black coats and gray, with their hats in their hands, in twos and threes up the long gravel drive, and Mrs. Venn, standing on the top step in her best black with her lace cap straight, received each one with a short stiff nod and led him through the marble hall into the great room. Sienna watched them go in from the little gallery at the head of the stairs. It was a narrow oak balcony with a rail, meant once for the musicians. She had asked Marco to put a chair there, and he had, without a word.

She had not been asked to come.

Nobody had asked her anything. She had woken on Monday at noon in the narrow room at the end of the east corridor, with a line out of her arm and a bruise on her hand and Mrs. Venn sitting upright in a chair at the foot of the bed with her knitting, and she had lain for a long time looking at the ceiling. She was aware of her body as one is aware of a house after a flood. Everything was in its place, and everything was a little damp. Helena had come in, and taken her pulse, and said that she would live, and sat down on the edge of the bed with her hair tied back in a ribbon and a look of such open rested peace on her thin face that Sienna had not been able to say anything.

"He is asleep," said Helena. "He slept eleven hours. His pulse is sixty-eight. He ate a bowl of porridge at nine, and a slice of toast, and he wished to know whether you had." A faint smile. "I told him to ask you himself."

"He won't."

"No. I do not think he will." She laid her cool dry hand over Sienna's. "I shall be here for a week. It is not for him. It is for me." A pause. "I find that I do not wish to go anywhere. I have not slept in a house where I felt safe since I was thirty."

Sienna had turned her hand over under the other woman's, and held it.

She had stayed, because she was a patient. That was what she told herself, and everyone else, and the large soft policeman who came on Monday afternoon to take her statement in the small drawing room, with a notebook on his knee and an air of embarrassed tenderness. She was a patient, and she was under a physician's orders, and a woman who had drunk a cup of tin on an empty drive was in no state to go anywhere on a tram. Mrs. Venn had put a fresh jug of salted lemonade on her bedside table, tested, with a slice of lemon floating in it, and had not said whose idea it was.

On Tuesday she had felt well enough to walk as far as the gallery.

They were all in the hall below. She counted them as they came in, by the lamplight and the gray fall of the afternoon through the tall old windows. The banners hung as they had on Sunday, in their ring of dark red silk, and the candles had been taken down and the great carved chair carried away. Someone had swept the black and white marble till it shone. The long table was gone. In its place, in the center of the dais, where the cup had stood, there was nothing but an iron brazier on three legs, ancient and blackened and ornamented with a rope in relief, standing in a pool of cold light from the high windows. It was empty. It had been lit, she thought, a hundred and forty years ago for the fire of Saint Ilaria, and had stood in the cellar since.

Cassius Hartigan was the first to speak. He had taken the front bench on the right, enormous and pink in a plain black coat, with his white mane brushed back and his hands folded on the knob of a stick, and he looked, for the first time since she had known him, a good deal older than his voice.

"Well, boy," he said, in a subdued rumble. "We're here."

There were twenty-two of them. She knew some. A small bent old man with a ribbon in his buttonhole, who was Abernathy of the customs. A broad stooping person in a pilot's blue serge, with a face like a walnut, whom Marco had once called Old Lantern. A lean gray foreman with a sharp jaw, a man who didn't drink, who sat bolt upright with his cap between his knees. There were the heads of three shipping houses, and a fat unhappy magistrate's brother, and Fenwick, dry and neat, with his briefcase on his lap, and beside him an empty place where a younger man with a high forehead should have been. Hollis had taken him on Monday morning, in his office on Saint Brendan's Quay, over a cup of cold coffee, and he had been talking ever since.

They were all looking at the door.

He came in alone.

He had dressed for it. He wore the plain dark suit, and a white shirt, and a black tie, knotted by his own fingers, and she saw from the gallery that his hands were empty and his face colorless. He had lost weight in two days. The collar stood off his neck, and there were fine gray lines at the corners of his mouth that had not been there on Friday. But he walked up the length of the hall between the two rows of benches with his head up, at an even pace, and his step did not falter, and as he climbed the three shallow steps of the dais, he did not lay a hand on anything.

He stopped beside the brazier.

It was very quiet. A man coughed. Somewhere beyond the great doors a clock struck the quarter.

"Gentlemen," said Matteo.

He had not raised his voice. He did not need to. It carried into the cold lofty room as a pebble carries into still water, and she saw the rings go out. Hartigan shifted his stick. Abernathy took off his spectacles.

"I thank you for coming. I know what it must have cost some of you." A pause. "I have not asked you here to speak of Sunday. That is in the hands of the Port, and will be dealt with by a court, and I do not mean to prejudice it. I have asked you here to say a thing that I should have said nine years ago, and have been too much my father's son to say."

He took something from the inner pocket of his coat.

It was a small, thick book, bound in black oilcloth that had gone gray at the edges, and tied round with a bit of sailor's twine. He held it up in the cold light, so that the whole hall could see it, and a long low breath ran down the benches like wind through a field of wheat.

"You know what this is," said Matteo. "Some of you have seen it. Most of you have never heard of it, and have lived your whole lives under its shadow. It is the book of favors of Aurelio Bellandi. A hundred and twelve entries, in his hand. A pilot's son. A customs officer. A man with a debt to a bookmaker, and a man with a mistress." His voice did not alter. "A tug captain, a foreman, a clerk. Your names, or your fathers'. He wrote down everything that any of you ever owed him, and the day he was owed it, and what he meant to do about it."

Hartigan had gone very red. He did not move.

"It was in Mr. Rusk's keeping for nine years. It was taken from his car on Sunday night by the Port, on the cliff road, and Inspector Hollis has been good enough to give it back to me, after the pages that touch the law were copied." A short grim smile. "I had a copy of my own, made in March by Marco's hand. I have kept it at my elbow for six months and read it every night. I do not think there is a man in this room who knows how it feels to hold such a thing and to be told that it is yours."

The fat magistrate's brother mopped his face.

"I have been the master of this house for nine years. In that time I have not once called in a favor from this book. I should like it to be known that I have never, in all that time, forgotten that I could." He drew a long breath. "That is the thing, you see. It does not matter whether the hand is used. A leash is a leash, even when it is slack. You have all of you walked a little more carefully on my quay than you would have walked on any other, and you did not know why, and you hated it, and you did not say."

He came down a step.

"I am going to burn it."

It landed in the cold hall and stayed there. She heard a bench creak. She heard, in the second row, a hoarse involuntary sound, like a man struck in the chest.

"Every page. The original, and the copy, and the one that Inspector Hollis kept for his own use, which he has promised me he will return when the court is done." He turned. He laid the black book in the iron brazier, on the old cold ash, gently, as one lays a child in a cot. "I do not release you from any debt. You never owed me anything. I release you from the knowledge that I held it."

He took a match from his pocket.

"It is a very small thing," said Matteo. "It will not undo what he did. It will not bring back a boy of twenty-three in a ditch, or a girl in a scullery who thought it was only to listen. But I should like it to be said, in this hall, in front of the banners, that the house of Bellandi does not keep a book."

He struck the match.

There was a faint dry rasp, and a small flame stood up in the cold air, orange and steady, and she saw his hand. It was the right hand, the one that had been burned in a fire on a quay and bandaged with her own fingers in a kitchen on a gray morning. It did not tremble. It held the little flame as quietly as a candle in a church, and in the high cold light of the windows she saw, on the back of it, the pale shining mark where the skin had healed.

He touched it to the twine.

It caught. It ran along the string like a bright thread, and the oilcloth blackened, and curled, and the little book flared up in the old iron bowl with a soft dry roar. A thin gold light sprang up the pillars. A smell of scorching paper and hot oil rolled out through the hall, and a hundred and twelve pages of small cramped hand went up in smoke, name by name, favor by favor, forty years of patient remembering, into the dark of the roof beams.

Nobody spoke.

She leaned on the rail of the gallery. She had not known that she was crying. It ran down her face without a sound, and she did not wipe it away. Below her, in the flickering gold, the man at the brazier stood with the dead match between his fingers and his head a little bent, watching, as one watches a thing one has loved burn down to ash.

It was Old Lantern who rose first.

He was a very old man, and he did it slowly, with a hand on the bench in front. He stood in his blue serge with his cap crushed in his fist and his walnut face working, and he said, in a high cracked sea-roughened voice that carried to the roof, "My father's name was Pietro Corso. It was in there. I know it was. I've known it forty years. He lent a boat to a man who was running something that he shouldn't, and he was never able to speak of it, and he died of it. I never asked."

"Mr. Corso," said Matteo.

"I never asked." The old man's chin shook. "I'd like to say that it's the best day's work I ever saw done on this quay." He put on his cap. He took it off again. He sat down all at once, and put his face in his hands.

A sound began, from the benches, quite low. It was not applause. It was a rustle, like a great crowd of birds settling. She heard Abernathy blowing his nose. She heard Hartigan clear his throat, with a noise like a landslide, and say in a thick rumble, "Damn it, Bellandi, that was a very handsome thing," and then, with great dignity, "I have something in my eye."

Then, gruffly, wiping the corner of his eye with a knuckle: "You left me sitting at the Halloran in July, boy, in the middle of my third sentence, and I never did learn what you meant to ask me." He sniffed. "I shall be obliged if you'll ask it now. I find I am in a mood to answer."

"Later, sir," said Matteo. Something that was nearly a smile touched his mouth. "It will keep."

Matteo lifted his head. He looked down the hall, at the ranks of dark coats and gray, and a tired, humorous light came into his eyes.

"There is one thing more," he said. "I am afraid that it is not so handsome."

He stood a moment with his hand on the rim of the brazier. The fire had sunk to a thin red glow, and the cold daylight came down over his face.

"The lease of Pier Four," said Matteo, "was obtained by fraud. I signed it in March under a threat that I did not understand, to a company named Kittiwake, whose directors were Mr. Rusk and a clerk now missing. It will be declared void. Mr. Fenwick has already been so kind as to say that he will draw the petition himself."

Fenwick, from the second row, said, in a thin dry voice, "I shall, sir."

"The pier reverts to the house on the first of October. I intend to put it at the disposal of any master or foreman who wishes to use it at the rate that he paid before. There will be no preference. I have asked Mr. Corso, who has more sense than any of us, to sit on the committee." He looked down. "And I shall resign from the board of the Bellandi Harbor Trust, and from every other trusteeship that I hold, with effect from the end of this month. The Dockside Welfare Fund will pass to the widows who draw from it. They will elect their own board. I do not want to be on it."

The magistrate's brother half rose. "But, my dear fellow. The harbor. The family. It has been in the hands of your..."

"It has been in the hands of my family for a hundred and forty years," said Matteo. "I think that is quite long enough."

There was a stir. She heard it begin, and she did not like the sound of it. It was a low ugly grumble from the back benches, the rustle of men who have been told that a floor they stood on was never there. A big heavy person with a red face and a good watch chain was on his feet, and was saying, in a loud hoarse voice, that it was madness, that it was the act of a boy who had had a fright, that a man could not be expected to sit still while the whole order of the port was dismantled by a lad with a bad conscience. He said it was an insult to Aurelio's memory. He said that he for one would not be a party to it. He took up his hat, and went out through the great doors, with a clatter of boots on the marble, and slammed them behind him.

Two more went after him. Then a third, a thin sallow man in black, who paused on the threshold and looked back with an expression of icy contempt, and said in a carrying whisper that he would remember this. Matteo did not turn his head. He stood by the brazier with his hand on its edge, a thin gray figure in a dark suit, and let them go.

Marco, at the foot of the dais, did not move. He stood with his arms folded and his hat on his chest, as he had stood at the end of a pier at sunset, a vast dark wall in a stable yard. He did not look at the door. He looked at the man on the dais, and the stolid square face was without expression, and she saw his lips shape, once, in silence, two words that were not sir.

It did not matter. She saw that at once, from the balcony, and she felt it settle like a hand on her shoulder. He had lost something. He had lost a great deal. There was a sallow man at the back of the hall who would never again take his hat off to him on the quay, and a fat man with a good watch chain who would put it about on the Exchange that the Bellandi boy had gone soft in the head. He had given away a pier, and a name, and the whole dark inheritance of a hundred and forty years, and he stood there in the high cold light and did not appear to feel it. He looked like a man who has put down a bag at the end of a very long road, and is standing upright for the first time in years.

"Mr. Fenwick," he said.

The dry man rose. He had been sitting with his briefcase on his knees. He came forward at a measured pace, with the air of a clerk summoned to a hanging, and mounted the steps.

"You have a paper that I should like you to destroy."

"I have several, sir."

"This one is called Schedule Four."

Fenwick's face did not change. But a faint stiffness came over his shoulders. He opened the briefcase, and drew out a single thick document clipped in blue, and he held it for a moment in both hands.

"The annex," he said. "It has not been signed. It was to have been executed at the rite, in the presence of the family." He cleared his throat. "I should like to say, Mr. Bellandi, that I did not read the fourteenth clause until Monday. I do not make the excuse. I draw what I am told to draw, and I have for thirty years. But I should like it known that I did not understand."

"I believe you."

"I do not think that I deserve it."

"No," said Matteo, "nor do I. It is a great comfort."

He took the paper out of the lawyer's hands. He looked at it. It was a long close-typed thing of eleven pages, with a crest at the head. He did not read it. He tore it down the middle, slowly, with both hands, from top to bottom, and then across, and again, and he let the pieces fall into the brazier on the hot gray ash. They blackened. They flared, and went out.

"My wife," said Matteo, "will be provided for by the settlement of October, which I drew myself, in plain words, and which is now amended in a single sentence. It says that she is to be given whatever she asks, on her own signature, and nothing that she does not." A pause. "It does not name a trustee. It does not name a clause. If anything should happen to me, which I do not at this moment intend, she will be free."

It dropped into the hall very quietly. She had her hand pressed to her mouth.

"Free," he said again, as if it were a word that he had only lately learned to say.

She went down the gallery stairs.

She did it without deciding to, in her blue cardigan and her borrowed shoes, with a hand on the rail and the old wood creaking under her feet, and she came out at the bottom into the long cold hall as the last of the circle was drifting toward the doors. They parted for her. They did it without meaning to. Hartigan lifted his stick in a kind of salute, and said "Ma'am," in a deep voice, and the small bent man in the ribbon bowed. She went by them with her eyes on the dais.

He had not seen her. He was standing by the brazier with the dead match still in his fingers, looking down at the cold ash, alone. He had taken out his handkerchief, and was wiping the soot from his hand with a slow absent care. There was a smear of it on his cuff. There was a line of gray on his cheek where he had touched his face.

She stopped at the foot of the steps.

He lifted his head. He did it slowly, as one does who has had a long day, and his eyes found hers across the length of the dais, across the pool of cold light and the thin red glow in the iron bowl. They were dark and very tired. They were not guarded. They had not been guarded, she thought, since a boathouse in the snow.

"Sienna," said Matteo.

"I heard," she said. "From the balcony."

"I did not know that you were there."

"I know."

He put the handkerchief in his pocket. He came down the three steps, one at a time, and stopped a pace from her on the black and white marble. He did not touch her. His hands hung open at his sides, and she saw that they were steady, and that it cost him something to keep them so.

"I have nothing left to keep you with," he said.

He said it quietly, without drama, as a man gives a figure at the end of a long column. "I wished you to know it. I do not hold a debt. I do not hold a page. I do not hold a trust, or a clause, or a bolt on the inside of a door. I have nothing in the world that you could not walk away from in an afternoon." His voice shook, and he steadied it. "And I find that it is the first time in my life that I have felt entirely honest."

"Matteo."

"I am not saying it to move you. I should be ashamed if it did." A rueful, painful smile. "I am saying it because it is true, and because I think that you should hear it said, in a room with the doors open, by a man who has nothing in his hands." He drew breath. "You are free to go, Sienna. Truly. There is no one at the end of the road. There is no one in the car. I shall not send Marco after you, or write, or stand at the corner of Tern Street." The old humor touched his mouth. "I have been told that I am rather good at not doing it."

She looked at him.

She looked at the gray face and the shadowed eyes and the soot on his cheek. She looked at the thin red glow in the old iron bowl, and the black flakes drifting up on the cold air, and the pale ring on the finger of her own left hand where a small animal had once slept. She had a great many things that she could have said. She had thought of them all in the long hours of the night, in a narrow bed, with Mrs. Venn's knitting needles clicking in the dark. She said the one that came.

"What will you call the boat?"

He was silent for a very long moment.

It was such a small, plain, absurd thing to say. It fell between them in the vast cold hall like a coin dropped in a church, and she saw it go into him. She saw it travel across his face, slowly, past the weariness and the courtesy and the thirty-three years of care, and settle somewhere a long way down.

"I have a name," said Matteo.

"Have you?"

"I wrote it down. In a book that you gave me. I crossed it out." His voice was hardly more than a breath. "It is not mine to give. I should not like to presume."

"Then I'll wait," said Sienna.

She did not know where it came from. It came up out of the bottom of her, past the anger and the grief and the bruise on her hand, and it was as quiet and sure as a pulse. "I'll wait till you've finished her. I should like to see her in the water."

He did not answer. He stood on the black and white marble with his hands open at his sides and the light of the high windows on his hair, and she saw his lips part, and close. His eyes had filled. He did not blink. He looked at her as a man looks at a shore that he had stopped hoping to see, a long, dazed, unguarded look, and the thin red glow in the iron bowl sank, and winked, and went out.

"I have eighteen years," said Matteo, hoarsely.

"I know," said Sienna. "You told me."

"I think that I shall not need so many."

She turned away. She did it gently, because there was nothing else that she could do, and because if she had stayed one moment longer she would have crossed the inch of marble between them and put her arms round his neck in front of the banners and the dead fire and the watching gray hall. She went down the long aisle between the empty benches with her head up, as she had once gone up it in a gown. At the great doors she stopped.

Mrs. Venn stood there in her black, with a tray.

It held two cups, two saucers, a little white dish of coarse gray salt, and between them, wrapped in a twist of tissue, a single green-gold pear. A square of card lay under it. She did not have to read it.

"For emergencies," said Mrs. Venn. Her broad face did not move. "I thought that you might be requiring one."

"Mrs. Venn."

"I have said nothing, miss."

"No."

"I never do." She held out the tray. "Take the pear. I shall carry the cups." A pause, and then, very gruffly, looking at the ceiling, "He has not eaten properly since Thursday. If you were minded to sit with him, I should not call it interfering."

Sienna took the pear.

She held it in her palm for a moment, small and hard and ripe, in the long cold light of the doorway. Then she turned, and looked back down the length of the hall. He was standing exactly where she had left him, beside the dead brazier, with his hands at his sides and his head a little bent. He had not moved. He would not, she knew, unless she asked.

She did not ask. Not yet. She put the pear in the pocket of her cardigan, and went out through the great doors into the gray gold afternoon, with a stout old woman in black beside her carrying a tray, and the whole long drive stretching away under the dripping cypresses to the sea.