On the second Saturday of October, Mrs. Venn laid the table for two, and then, with great deliberation, she moved the bowl of pears.

She did not say what she was doing. She stood in the long white kitchen at a quarter to nine in the morning in her best black dress, with the sun coming through the tall windows in a gold wedge across the red tiles, and she lifted the great china bowl from the middle of the pine table and carried it to the shelf by the window, where it sat beside a copper pan and a clock and a pot of winter violets that someone had gone on watering since December. In its place she set a small plant in a clay pot.

It was a pear tree. It stood about eighteen inches high, a thin straight whip with six leaves and a bud, bound to a cane with a bit of raffia. A card was tucked into the soil on a split twig. Sienna read it standing in the arch with her bag still on her shoulder and her hair damp from the sea wind.

For the garden. V.

"It is a Doyenné," said Mrs. Venn, to the range. "They bear in four years. I shall want it in the east border, out of the wind, and I should be obliged if nobody were to consult me about the exact place." She turned a pot. "I have been meaning to put one in for some time. It seemed a pity to be always taking them out of the cellar."

"It's beautiful."

"It is a stick," said Mrs. Venn. But her broad weathered face had gone a deep, painful red, and she busied herself so closely with the eggs that she knocked a spoon off the stove.

They ate at the long table with their shoulders touching. It was the second Saturday of October, the day that she had once chosen in a long bright room above a quay with a pen in her hand and a man's name beside it, and neither of them said that it was the anniversary. They did not need to. She tested the eggs, and the toast, and the coffee, and he watched her do it with his chin on his hand, and when she had finished he reached across and slid the little white dish of coarse gray salt an inch toward her cup. Their fingers did not quite touch. She was almost sure that he had arranged it.

She had been at Cypress Hill for eleven days.

She had not decided to stay. It had simply happened, as the tide happens. She had come up the hill on a Monday with her canvas bag and the old vial in the pocket of her cardigan, intending to go home on Wednesday, and on Wednesday it had rained, and on Thursday Helena had been called to a patient in the old town and had asked whether Sienna would hold her bag, and by Friday a large man in a dark coat had carried a trunk from Tern Street up the back stair and set it at the foot of the bed in the east room without a word. Edmund had walked up the hill himself on the Sunday. He had come in his one good suit, with a pot of marmalade, and sat for an hour in the small drawing room with the little pine boat on the mantel looking at it, and said at the end that the house was a great deal larger than it had seemed from the street, and that he thought he should come on Thursdays.

There was a pale ring on the third finger of her left hand where the skin was still a shade lighter than the rest. It was almost gone.

After breakfast they went into the library, and wiped the blackboard.

It was his idea. He had stood in front of it for a long moment with a damp cloth in his hand, looking at the rules, which had stood there since the first week of the winter, one under another in two hands, hers and his. We say what we know. Anything that could hurt the other goes on the table the day it is learned. Nobody decides for the other what the other can bear. When one of us is afraid, we say so. And below them, in her small capitals, the ones that had been added in a different season. A pear, drawn badly. He's to ask before he touches me. In public we are married. In private we do not perform.

"I should like to take them down," said Matteo. "If you are willing."

"All of them?"

"I think that they have done their work." He turned the cloth in his hands. "I did not know when I wrote them that I was building a thing to hold me up. I thought that I was making a set of conditions. I find that I do not need them as I did. I should rather like to learn to do it without a wall."

"We'll keep one."

"Which?"

She took the chalk. She did not look at the board. She went to the left-hand corner, where a space had been left clear, and wrote, in her small hard capitals, a single line. We tell each other.

He read it. He did not smile. He said, very quietly, "It is the only one that was ever wanted."

They wiped the rest away together, one rule at a time, standing side by side with the damp gray cloth passing from hand to hand, until the black slate was bare, but for the one white line at the corner. A little white dust stood on his sleeve. She brushed it away, and he caught her hand and held it against his chest, and they stood there for a while in the gold light, not saying anything.

"I have something to say," said Sienna.

"I am listening."

"Sit down."

He sat. He did it on the edge of the long table, with his hands on his knees, as he had once sat in a study, and she stood in front of him in the middle of the carpet and found that her heart was going very slowly and very hard.

She had said it once. She had said it on a roof, in the dark, with a rug round her shoulders and the stars going round, and she had said it plainly, like a result. It had been true. She had not known the half of it. She had said it without the whole of the facts, and she had been so afraid, since, that it had been a thing said in a different country, by a girl who knew a good deal less than she knew now.

"I love you," said Sienna.

He did not move.

"I know that you kept me in a drawer. I know that you read my name on a Tuesday and could not make your pen go. I know about the fourteen cards and the boat in brown paper and the stub of a page you could not look at. I know what you are made of. I know what you were made by." Her voice shook, and she went on. "I know that you are afraid of your hands. I know that you cannot sleep. I know that if I said the word, you would let me go, and keep every promise, and go down to a cove on Sundays for the rest of your life." She drew breath. "And I love you. Not despite it. With every bit. I wished you to hear it said, once, by someone who had read the whole of the file."

He sat still. A tear ran down the side of his nose, and fell on his knuckle, and he did not wipe it.

"I thought that I should never hear that again," he said.

"You've heard it."

"I have heard it." His voice broke. "I should like to say something, and it is a thing that I have never said, to anyone, in either life. I have not known how."

"Say it."

He rose.

He came the one step between them and stood in front of her with his hands open at his sides and his eyes fixed on her face, steady, dark, shining.

"I do not need to keep you," said Matteo.

She stared at him.

"I want you. God knows that I want you. I want you in this house, and in that boat, and at the end of the pier in the morning. I should like you to be at every table at which I sit for the rest of my life." He drew a ragged breath. "But I do not need to keep you. I have found it out. It has taken thirty-three years and a great deal of damage, and I have only this month understood what it means. A man who loves a woman does not have to hold her. He has only to be where she can find him." He smiled. It was a broken, astonished, happy smile, and she saw that his eyes were wet. "It is a very restful discovery. I had not expected it."

She put her arms round his neck.

She did not ask. For the first time in a year she did not say may I, or wait for a yes, and he did not seem to mind. His arms came round her at once, and they stood in the middle of the library carpet under the high green windows, holding on, with her face in his collar and his chin on her hair, and the slow gold morning went by outside.

They told each other the rest in the afternoon.

It was not planned. They had gone up to the room at the end of the east corridor to fetch a book, and had stayed. It was a sunny, quiet, windy day. The balcony doors stood open. A thread of cold sea air moved the curtains, and the green walls were bright, and the bed was a wide plain one with a coverlet the color of pale celery. They lay on top of it in their clothes with their shoes off, side by side, looking at the ceiling, like two people on a raft.

"My mother," said Sienna.

He turned his head on the pillow.

"I never told you the end. The part after the fever." She was looking up at the white plaster. "I told you she died. I told you my father sat in the kitchen for a week with his coat on. I did not tell you what he said, on the last night, when he thought I was asleep."

"You need not."

"I want to." She drew breath. "He said, I have sold the boat, Marit. I did it for the doctor. I did not tell you. She was very weak, and she smiled at him, and said, then I hope it was a good price. And she died a little after dawn." Her voice was steady. "It was the Gannet. Her father's boat, her whole family. He had to sell it to pay for a physician who came three times and could do nothing. And then, a year after, there was a debt, and I was twelve, and I learned that a person can be sold for what she is worth to someone who is afraid."

He did not say anything.

"I think it is the reason I could not stand it," she said. "The being given. When my father signed the settlement with your family, in the autumn, I did not hate him. I understood. I only thought, well. It is my turn. It is only what happens to us." Her mouth shook. "And then I woke up in a laboratory, and I had a year, and I thought, I will not be paid for again."

"And I bought the debt."

"You did."

"I am so sorry."

"I know." She turned on her side and looked at him. "I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying that I wanted to tell you. It's the last of mine."

He lay for a long time looking at her. His eyes were very dark, and bare, and tender. Then he said, quietly, "May I tell you mine?"

"Yes."

He lifted himself on his elbow. He put his hand into the pocket of his waistcoat, which he had not taken off, and drew out a small flat thing, and laid it in her palm.

It was a tin. It was a very old one, a flat round box no bigger than a watch, with a picture of a long-vanished lozenge on the lid and rust at the hinges. She turned it over. The catch was stiff. She worked it open with her thumbnail.

Inside, on a square of faded yellow silk, lay a button.

It was a small thing, a shank button of pearl, a little yellowed, with four tiny holes and a thread of silk still caught in one of them. It was a woman's button. It had come off a dress. Nothing else was in the tin.

"It is from the yellow dress," said Matteo.

She looked up.

"The one in the portrait. In the east corridor." He had lain back on the pillow and was looking at the ceiling, and his voice had gone very quiet and even, the voice of a man reading from an old letter. "The winter after she died, my father had every picture of her taken down from the house. He had them carried to the east passage. I was twelve. I came down one night in my nightshirt, and found him in the study with the yellow dress in his two hands. It was the one that she wore in the portrait. He was standing still, holding it, as one holds a bird. He did not see me."

"What did he do?"

"He put it in the stove."

She made a small sound.

"He did it slowly. He did not weep. He fed it in a fold at a time, until it was gone. And when he had gone up to bed, I came into the study, and I raked the ashes with a poker, and I found that one button had not burned." He lifted his hand and touched the tin. "I have had it ever since. I have never shown it to anyone. I carried it in my pocket to every funeral. I did not know why. I thought that if I held it, nobody could say that she had been put out."

She closed the little lid. She held it in her palm, small and light and cold, and she thought of a man in a gray suit on the ninth floor of a limestone building, turning a signet ring round and round on his finger. She thought: it was this. He has had a button in his pocket for twenty-one years, and he has made every decision of his life as if it were the thing that he could not let burn.

"He kept things," said Matteo. "It was the only way he knew to hold what he loved. He kept a book. He kept a drawer." A faint tired smile. "And I found that I had inherited it, and that the one thing worse than being my father's son was to discover that I was a good deal more like him than I had hoped."

"You burned the book."

"I did." His eyes came round to her, steady and bare. "I should like to bury this. If you were willing. In the east border. Under a pear tree."

She was crying. She had not known it. It was running down her face without a sound, and she put her forehead against his shoulder and said, into the cloth, "Yes."

He held her. They lay together on the celery coverlet with the cold sea air moving the curtains and the afternoon going gold, and neither of them said anything more.

It was she who reached for him, at the end.

She did it simply, as one reaches for a thing in the dark that one knows is there. She did not ask, and he did not need her to. His hand found hers on the coverlet, and held, and she drew him down. It was slow. It was warm and plain and without hurry, as a long afternoon is without hurry, with the light going from gold to amber on the green walls. He kissed her throat, and the inside of her wrist, and the place where the ring was, and she felt him smile against her skin. She heard the balcony curtains breathe. She heard him say her name against her ear in the low rough voice that belonged to no one else, and she answered with his, and there was nothing in the room that had not been told.

When it was over, they lay with their foreheads together and their breath going slowly in and out.

"I have a question," said Matteo, drowsily.

"Mm."

"It is the first one that I have wished to ask in a year and been sure that I might." His lips moved against her temple. "Will you marry me?"

She lay still.

It was not at all what she had expected. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her from three inches away, with a faint humorous shaky light at the back of his own, and she understood that he had been holding it in for a month.

"I am married to you," said Sienna.

"By a registrar, in a contract, with a clause about a year." He cleared his throat. "I should like to be asked whether you would do it again. In the daylight. Of your own accord. With no debt in the room."

"Marrying my murderer," said Sienna, slowly, "again."

He laughed. It was a startled, delighted, helpless laugh, and it shook the bed. "I had not thought of it in quite those terms," he said. "But I find that it has a ring."

She was laughing too. She put her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders shook, and she said through it, "It's a terrible title."

"It is an excellent one."

"Ask me properly."

He rose on his elbow. He looked down at her, grave, with the sun on his hair, and he took her left hand in both of his and held it, ring and all.

"Sienna Hale," said Matteo. "Will you marry me? Again. On purpose."

She looked at him for a long time.

"Yes," she said. "In the spring."

"In the spring."

"On the shingle. Where nobody will be giving anything away."

"I could not think of a better place." He bent his head and kissed the pale ring on her finger. "I shall have to finish the boat."

They went down to supper at eight, hand in hand, by the back stair.

The long white kitchen was full of lamplight and the smell of roast chicken. Tomas had made a cake. It stood in the middle of the pine table on a blue plate, tall and lopsided and sprinkled with sugar, and Mrs. Venn was sitting at the end in her black dress with a face of such rigid innocence that Sienna nearly laughed again. Helena was there, upright in a chair by the stove with a glass of cold elderflower cordial in her hand, and her sleek dark hair in a loose braid, and a look of such open rested peace in her gray eyes that she scarcely looked like the same woman. Marco stood by the door with his hat in his fist. He had been told, forcibly, that he was to sit, and he had refused, and had consented only to lean.

Nobody said anything. They all looked at the two of them in the doorway.

"Well," said Mrs. Venn. She cleared her throat. "Eggs are in the oven. The pear is in the east border. I put it where it will not be consulted."

"Mrs. Venn," said Matteo. His voice shook. "We have something to tell you."

"I have been told," said Mrs. Venn, "by the state of the east corridor, that you have been making a good deal of noise." She did not smile. A single tear ran down beside her nose. "I should like to say that I think it very proper. It is the first spring I shall have seen in this house in forty-one years. Sit down. You will have the cake."

They sat. Sienna tested it. She did it in front of them all, with a strip from her pocket, solemnly, and Tomas, who had gone the color of a boiled beet, put his hand over his heart, and Marco made a sound in his chest that was nearly a laugh. It was clean. She ate a piece. It was lopsided and dry and very sweet, and she thought that it was the best thing she had ever tasted in her life.

She went to bed at eleven, in the green room, with the bolt shot.

They did not need it. She knew that. The key lay in the lock where it had always lain, and she could have opened it at any hour, and so could he. But she drew the bolt, gently, as one winds a clock, because it had been the first thing in two lives that was entirely hers, and she wished to be the one who decided whether to open it in the morning.

She took out the blue notebook.

It lay on the writing desk, under the green lamp, with the pen beside it, and she sat down in the old chair with her feet tucked under her and turned the pages. She came at last to the end. There was a margin there that had held a column of small hard figures, M.B. 70, M.B. 65, and a line struck through, and the two letters N/A. She read them over. She thought of a girl at a steel bench in a basement room, with her hands pressed flat on the cold metal, giving a man a percentage.

She drew a line through the whole column. She did it with a single clean stroke, from the top to the foot of the page, steadily, and under it, in her small upright hand, she wrote the initials that she had written a hundred times.

M.B.

She stopped. She looked at the two letters. She thought a long time, with the pen over the paper, and the old house creaking round her and a gull crying somewhere over the sea, and then she wrote the rest, very slowly, in a hand that did not shake.

I am not measuring.

She put down the pen.

She took from the pocket of her cardigan, where it had been since the previous Monday, a small blown vial with a cork stopper and a label gone yellow at the edges. A girl's careful capitals. SALT. She stood up. She crossed the room to the high shelf by the wall, where a slim new bottle with salt from Carrow in it stood alone beside a row of books, and she put the old one next to it.

They stood side by side. They did not match. One was plain, and one was fine. One had a pinch of gray crystals that had once stood in a narrow room on Tern Street, and one had held the salt of a beach where her mother's father had fished. She looked at them a long time in the light of the lamp. She did not feel that anything had been put right. She felt that two things had been put side by side, and that that was a different and a better thing.

A knock came at the door.

It was two knuckles, light and unhurried. She knew it as she knew her own pulse.

She drew the bolt.

He stood in the passage in his shirt, with his hair damp from the bath and a faint line between his brows, and in one hand a small black book bound in cloth with a rubbed spine and thick cream pages. He held it a little away from his body, as one holds a thing that one is not sure one is permitted to show.

"May I?" said Matteo.

"You never have to ask."

"I should like to go on asking." He came in. He sat on the edge of the bed, with the little book on his knee, and he did not open it. He looked at it for a long moment. "I have been trying to write all week," he said, "in the one you gave me. I find that I have only the one thing to put in it, and I cannot decide how it is spelled."

"What is it?"

"A name." He looked up. His eyes were dark and open and shining. "I wrote it once. I crossed it out. I have written it again tonight, and I have not crossed it out, and I have been standing in the corridor for twenty minutes unable to knock." The corner of his mouth shook. "I should like to ask whether you have thought of one."

She came and sat beside him on the coverlet. She put her shoulder against his. She did not look at the book, and he did not offer it. She took his hand, and held it, with her ring against the gold of his, and she said, very quietly, "I know."

"You know what she is to be called?"

"I know."

He waited. She saw the question climb up into his face, and the faint breathless hope behind it, and she turned her head and met his eyes, gravely, with her whole heart standing in her own.

"But it's a surprise," said Sienna.