The Assize Court of Marenna Bay sat in November, in a long brown room that smelled of wet wool and floor polish, and for nine days the whole city came to look at an old man in a gray suit.

Sienna had not expected the crowds. She came up the steps on the first morning with Hollis's constable on one side of her and Helena Roux on the other, in the plain dark dress she wore to the General on Mondays, and found Saint Brendan's Quay shoulder to shoulder with people. They had come in carts and trams and on foot. Fishwives stood on the cobbles with their shawls over their heads. A dozen men in dockers' caps held a banner that said, in crooked letters, THE WIDOWS THANK YOU, and did not seem to know which man they meant it for. Reporters shouted her name. A small boy was selling a penny sheet with a drawing of a burning table on the front, and in the drawing the woman in the ivory gown had been given a sword.

"I did not have a sword," said Sienna.

"No," said Helena, dryly. "You had a lamp. It is a much better weapon. Come in."

They had been preparing for three weeks. Fenwick had drawn the papers himself, with a shaking hand and a look of mortal shame, and Inspector Hollis had sat in the library at Cypress Hill with a notebook on his knee asking the same question forty times in forty different words, because, he said, a witness who has told it once is a witness who may be shaken, and a witness who has told it forty times is a rock. She had told it forty times. She knew it as she knew the weight of a vial.

She was called on the third day.

It was a long walk from the bench to the box. The room was very quiet. Above her, on a high dais under a faded royal arms, sat a judge with a face like a tired owl, and below him a row of wigs, and to the left, in a railed pen between two warders, a tall silver man in a gray suit with his spectacles on his nose and his hands folded in his lap. He did not look at her. He was looking at the floor, with an expression of attentive courtesy, as if he were listening to music in another room.

She took the oath. She said her name, and her trade, and the number of years she had worked at Marenna General, and a counsel for the defense, a smooth sleek man with a voice like warm oil, rose with a smile and asked whether it was not true that she was the wife of the principal witness.

"Yes."

"And that she had a most particular interest in the conviction of my client?"

"I have an interest in the truth," said Sienna. "I should be glad to show it to you."

A murmur ran through the benches. The counsel's smile did not alter. "Then perhaps the lady would be so good as to show it to the court."

She had hoped he would say it.

She had brought a case. It was a plain steel one, sealed with the Port's red wax, and it lay on the clerk's table with a violet lamp and two tall crystal flutes on a bed of gray satin. She broke the seal in front of the jury. She laid a strip of paper against the cruet of verjuice, and held it up, red as a coal, and then, with a pair of cotton gloves and a camel-hair brush, she showed twelve men and the owl on the dais, step by step, in plain words, what a harmless thing could do in a mouth if it was met by a sour one. She did not say how it was made. Hollis had asked her not to, and she had been glad to agree. She said only that there was a quiet salt in the grooves of the glass, that it did nothing by itself, and that it waited.

They drew the blinds. Gavin turned the little violet lens on the white cloth she had spread, and every long fine fingerprint on it burned out of the dark in a ghostly blue fan. A woman on the public benches caught her breath. The counsel for the defense stood with his mouth a little open, and Sienna said, gently, "Those are the prints of a left hand and a right, taken from the stem of the cup that was set before me. They are the same prints that were taken, with his consent, from the accused at the Port on Monday morning. You may compare them yourself."

The counsel did not. He sat down.

At the end of the second hour the judge leaned forward and asked, in a mild gray voice, whether the witness would explain to the court why she had drunk it.

She had known that someone would ask. She had not known that it would be him.

"Because I could," said Sienna. "I had found something that slowed it. I could not be certain that it would hold. But I knew that if I did not stand there, he would choose another night, and I should not know which." She drew breath. "And because the man beside me was going to drink it, my lord, whether I did or not. I did not think that he should do it alone."

There was a silence. At the back of the room, on the last bench by the door, a thin gray man in a dark suit sat with his hands on his knees. She did not look at him. She had not looked at him once in three days. He had come every morning, at a quarter to nine, with Marco a pace behind, and taken the same seat, and left at the rising of the court without speaking to anyone. She knew exactly where he was in the room, as one knows where the fire is.

She stood down at noon. As she came out of the box her sleeve brushed the rail, and she felt, in the back of her neck, a quiet warmth, like a hand held a little way from her shoulder. She did not turn her head. But her step was very steady.

Helena was called on the fifth day, and was a long time in the box.

She wore gray. She stood straight, with her hands folded on the rail, and she said her name and her profession and the number of years that she had been physician to the house of Bellandi, and then she looked at the owl on the dais and said that she wished to give her evidence in her own order. He inclined his head. She told it all. She told of a wet Thursday and a tin of biscuits, and a lesson in how to turn an R. She told of a jar in a dispensary book and a green day-book in a locked drawer. She told it in the flat dry level voice that she used for a case history, and she did not once look at the prisoner, and at the end she said, in the same voice, that she had believed for nine years that she had killed a man, and that she had been told so by someone who needed her to.

Nobody stirred. The only sound in the room was the tick of the clock above the door.

"I should like it to be known," said Helena Roux, "that I did not."

It was then that the prisoner raised his head.

He had not spoken in five days. He had sat in his pen between the two warders with his spectacles on his nose and a gray blanket over his knees, turning his silver head to each witness in turn with a faint courteous attention, like a man at a recital. Now he stood up. He did it all at once, with a hand on the rail, and the warders started. He took off his spectacles and folded them and put them in his breast pocket, and his pale eyes came round the whole brown room and rested at last, with an expression of the deepest and quietest tenderness, on the tall woman in the box.

"My lord," said Dario Vance. "I shall not trouble the court further."

The counsel for the defense sprang up. "My lord, I must protest..."

"Sit down, my dear sir. I am sorry." He did not turn. "I have been very well represented, and I shall be glad if you will let it stand. But I find that I cannot hear any more of this. It is all quite true. The lady has told it much better than I could." A pause. "I should like to change my plea."

The room went mad.

The owl banged his gavel. The counsel waved his arms. A man in the gallery fell over a bench, and a reporter in the front row was already running for the door. And in the middle of the uproar, the old man in the railed pen stood still, with his hands folded and his silver head a little bent, looking at Helena Roux across the whole width of the court, and she looked back at him, and neither of them moved.

"Thank you," said Dario, very softly, so that only the bench could hear it. "For the one thing."

The sentence came on the ninth day.

They stood for it. The whole court stood, and in the high brown room the owl on the dais read from a long paper in a thin dry steady voice. It was life. It was not the rope. The Crown had not asked for it, and the judge said, with a faint dry bite, that he was not at all disposed to see a man hanged who had given up the whole of his case to spare a woman the sight of it. Rusk, who had talked steadily for eleven weeks to a stenographer, was given twelve years, and wheezed, and said that it was a hardship at his time of life. Mr. Teale, the clerk, got eight, and Mr. Nolan Gray of Fenwick and Gray, the cousin of a dead judge, who had talked even faster than Rusk, six. A fat man in the fourth row of the gallery with a good watch chain was called, unexpectedly, and fined, and went home in a cab.

They took the old man down by the stair at the back. He walked between two warders with his gray blanket over his arm, tall and slender and silver, and as he went by the last bench by the door he stopped.

The warders did not hurry him. Perhaps they had been told not to.

"Matteo," said Dario.

The thin gray man on the bench rose. He did it slowly. He stood with his hands at his sides, and looked at the old man, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

"I have left you the study," said Dario. "The ledgers, and the little room. It is all in a paper with Fenwick. They are only paper." A faint, ghostly, very gentle smile. "I thought that you might like to burn them."

"I do not think that I shall."

"No?"

"I think that I shall read them," said Matteo. His voice was steady. "Every one. I should like to know what was in the house. I should like to know it all, and be the sort of man who has read it."

The old man looked at him. Then he bowed, very slightly, with the old courtly grace, as to a man he was proud of, and went on down the stair, and the door closed behind him.

Nessa Brill had given her evidence on the sixth day, in a gray dress, with Mrs. Venn on the bench behind her and Matteo, to her visible astonishment, at her side. She had spoken in a whisper. She had said that she had listened at a little iron door on the night of the sixth of December, because a kind old gentleman had paid for a child's operation and asked, so gently, for a small thing in return. She had not been able to finish. The judge had told her that she need not. She stood in the box with her small freckled face working, and then she said, very quickly, in a high clear voice that rang off the brown walls, that Lissa was thirteen now and could run.

There was not a dry eye on the jury.

Hale Marine Supply opened its shutters on the first Monday of December.

It had been shut for three years in everything but name. Edmund had gone down to it in the gray of the morning with a ring of keys, in his one good suit, with a bucket in one hand and a feather duster in the other, and by nine o'clock the whole of Tern Street knew, because a hand-lettered card had gone up in the window. OPEN. UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. And underneath, smaller, in his careful, unsteady capitals, THE OLD ONE.

Sienna stood in the doorway at noon with a loaf under her arm and found him behind the counter in a clean apron, beaming.

It was full of people. It was the oddest thing. She had never in her life seen the shop with more than two customers at a time, and now they were standing three deep in the dim green light between the coils of rope and the brass fittings behind glass, shoulder to shoulder, in oilskins and caps, with their hands in their pockets. Old Lantern had come, in his pilot's blue. A lean gray foreman who did not drink was examining a coil of manila with enormous care, and beside him, wheezing slightly, stood a little crowd of seamen from Pier Four who had heard it said at the Exchange that a man on Tern Street sold a decent shackle. Marco was by the door in his dark coat, with a coil of tarred twine in his big hand and an expression of grave embarrassment, as though he had been caught at a vice.

"I am only buying string," he said.

"You have bought eleven yards," said Edmund, "of the best."

"It was a very good string."

Her father rang it up. He did it with a tiny silver bell, and a flourish, and a hand that shook so that he had to try twice. He wrote the sum in a great green ledger. The first sale in three years. He tore off the slip and laid it very gently in the middle of the brass cash drawer, and looked at it for some time, and then he saw her in the doorway, and took off his glasses, and wiped them, and put them on again.

"Sienna," he said. "Love. Look."

On the wall above the counter, between a ship's clock and a calendar from a firm of chandlers, hung a round brass thing with a dim dial and a single needle. It had stood at FAIR for twenty years. Its glass was clouded with salt. A man had come in at ten o'clock and tapped it, as a man will, with the knuckle of his finger, and said that it was a handsome old piece but that it had stuck, and her father had said with great dignity that it was not stuck, it was simply of a settled opinion.

She looked at it. The needle had not stirred.

"It will move," said Edmund, comfortably. "When it has something to say."

Nell and Marco had been seen at the pictures.

It was Mrs. Venn who reported it, in the long white kitchen on a December morning over a pan of porridge, in the tone of a woman announcing the loss of a ship. She had it from Tomas, who had it from the girl at the dairy, who had been in the next row. It was a French film. Nobody was able to say what it was about. It had been observed, said Mrs. Venn, that a very large gentleman in a dark overcoat had sat bolt upright for ninety minutes with his hat on his knees and his eyes on the screen, and that beside him a lady in lemon-yellow had laughed in all the wrong places and eaten two bags of sweets, and that at the end he had been seen to offer her his arm.

"She took it," said Mrs. Venn, grimly.

"Mrs. Venn!" said Sienna.

"I have said nothing." She turned the porridge. "I only observe that there has been a very great deal of elderflower in this house since October, and that it is not to be accounted for by the season." A pause. "He wears the paper crown, you know. The gold one. He keeps it in his pocket. He believes that nobody has seen."

Dr. Pryce sent for her in January.

He received her in his cluttered office with a stack of journals on every chair and a smell of cold tea, behind a desk that had not been cleared in a decade. He looked at her over the top of his spectacles with an expression of the deepest suspicion. He said that the laboratory was to be reorganized. He said that Dr. Ferris was retiring, and that the post of head of toxicology would fall vacant at the end of March, and that he had been considering, for some weeks, whom the department might possibly find to fill it.

"I should like you to take it," said Pryce.

She did not say anything. She had not expected it. She had thought that she would be dismissed, after the notoriety, or asked in a gentle way to go on a long leave.

"I do not say that you are the most obviously suitable person. You are young. You are married to a man with a reputation. You have been absent from the bench for half the year and have caused my department to be written about in the newspapers." He cleared his throat. "You are also the only person in this hospital who has ever found the lift in the stroke of a letter. I should like to have that on my side of the building."

"I should like to say yes," said Sienna.

"Then do."

"On one condition."

He took off his spectacles. "I thought that there would be one."

"The mass spectrometer. The old one, in the corner of the sample room. The one that is always screaming about its queue." She drew breath. "I know that the committee wishes to replace it. I should like it kept."

"It is thirty years old, Hale. It has been mended four times with string."

"I know," said Sienna. "It has never once lied to me."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then, very slowly, the dry gray face cracked, like a plate, and Dr. Pryce laughed. It was a short, rusty, startled sound, like a hinge. He put his spectacles on again, and bent over his journals, and she saw, as she went out, that his ears had gone a deep and painful pink.

Spring came to Cypress Hill in the second week of March.

It came all at once, as it does on that coast, with a warm wind off the sea and a smell of wet earth, and in a single night the long garden turned green. The lilac came out along the wall. The lawn, which had been cut for the rite and left to itself since, put up a shout of daisies. In the east border, under the lee of the old brick wall, where the sun came in at ten and stayed till noon, a thin straight whip in a clay pot had been put into the ground in October by a stout woman in black, and had stood all winter through the frost, bare as a stick. On the first of March it had put out a bud. On the tenth, a single white blossom had opened at the tip, small and cold and perfect, no bigger than a thumbnail.

She stood looking at it on the morning of the twelfth, with her cardigan wrapped round her and a cup of salted coffee in her hand.

He came up behind her. He did not say anything. He stood a pace off, with his hands in his pockets, in his shirtsleeves, with the early sun on his hair, and she felt the quiet of him like a warm wall at her back. He had grown a little thicker through the shoulders since the autumn. There was color in his face. His hands, when she looked at them, were still.

"The button," said Sienna.

"It is under the third root." He did not smile. "Mrs. Venn watched me do it from the kitchen window. She did not say anything for a week."

"She's said it now."

"She has said it to Marco. He told me that she said that it was the first sensible thing that a Bellandi had ever put in a flower bed." A faint, rueful movement touched his mouth. "I believe that it was meant as a blessing."

She laughed. She put her free hand into the crook of his arm, and he drew it close, and they stood together in the thin gold light looking at one small white flower on the end of a stick.

"It is finished," said Matteo, after a while, quietly.

She turned her head.

"The boat. I put the last coat of varnish on at eleven last night." He was looking at the pear. "I did not tell you. I wished to say it in the daylight. She is dry. She has her thwarts, and her oars, and a small brass plate at the stern that I have not been able to bear to engrave." He drew breath. "I should like to bring her round on a cart to the shingle. If you were willing. I should like her to be put in the water by someone who was not afraid."

"When?" said Sienna.

"I thought that it might be in April."

"On the second Saturday."

"If it does not rain."

"It won't," said Sienna. She leaned her head against his shoulder, and felt his arm come round her, warm and sure. "I've asked."

He laughed. It went through her like warm water. And above them, on a thin brown twig in the lee of an old brick wall, the single white blossom trembled a little in the wind, and held.