On the second Saturday of April the sky over Marenna Bay was the color of clean glass, and Sienna Hale woke at five in the morning with the distinct sensation that she was about to be happy.

She lay for a long while without moving. The room was gray and soft. A thread of cold sweet air came in under the balcony door and stirred the curtains, and from far below, through the stillness, she could hear the sea moving against the foot of the cliff, long and slow and regular, like the breathing of something enormous in its sleep. The bolt was shot. She had shot it herself, the night before, as she had shot it every night for eighteen months, and she lay looking at the green ceiling and thought, with great tenderness, that she did not need it any longer and that she would go on drawing it anyway.

There was a faint tap at the door, two knuckles, light and unhurried.

"It is not yet six," said Matteo's voice, through the wood. "I have been told that I am not to see you. I have been told it three times, in three different voices, and Mrs. Venn has put a chair across the end of the corridor and sat on it with her knitting. I have come only to say that it is not going to rain."

"I know."

"I wished to be certain that you did." A pause. She heard him breathe. "And that I have not slept, and that I am well."

"Go away, Matteo."

"Yes." She heard him smile. "I am going. I am going at once. I should like it recorded that I went without being asked twice."

His step went away down the corridor, light and quick, like a boy's. In the distance she heard a chair scrape, and a very dry voice say, "I said not until noon, sir," and a murmured, helpless, delighted apology.

She put her head under the pillow and laughed until she cried.

She was dressed by nine, in a room full of women.

It was a small one, at the end of the east corridor, with the balcony doors thrown open on the garden and the long gold light pouring in across the carpet. Mrs. Venn stood behind her at the glass in her best black with a comb in her fist and her mouth full of pins. Nell, on her knees at the hem, in a frock of lemon-yellow linen with a posy of sweet peas pinned in her braids, was sewing with her tongue between her teeth. Helena sat on the end of the bed in gray silk, with her sleek dark hair loose for the first time in all the time that Sienna had known her, holding a small pot of something in her lap and looking, in her cool courteous fashion, quietly at peace.

"Hold still," said Mrs. Venn.

"I am."

"You are not. You are doing something with your face." She drew out a pin. "I have dressed four brides in this house, and not one of them held still. It is a thing I have learned to bear."

There was no ivory silk. There was no train. It was the cream one.

It hung on her as it had hung on a Saturday in October a year and a half ago, plain and cut to the knee, with a high round neck and a narrow waist and sleeves that ended at the elbow. She had found it in a second-hand shop on Calloway Street, and Nell's mother, who had been a seamstress for the opera, had taken it in without being asked. It had been in a trunk since. Nell had brought it up the hill in a paper bag, and shaken it out, and said that she had not the smallest intention of letting anyone make a fuss. It was only that it had been such a very good dress, and that nobody had really looked at it, the first time.

She turned. The skirt moved round her knees.

"There," said Nell, and sat back on her heels, and began, without the smallest warning, to cry.

"Nell!"

"I am not." She scrubbed at her face with the back of her wrist. "It is the sweet peas. I am dreadfully allergic. It has nothing to do with it at all." She sniffed. "Hale, I have known you nearly eight years. I have watched you eat toast at a sink at midnight. I never once, not once, thought that I should see you look like that."

"Like what?"

"Like a person who has come in out of the cold."

Sienna put her arms round her. It took some time. Helena was obliged to remove the pot of whatever it was from her lap, and Mrs. Venn pretended, with great elaboration, to be occupied with the comb, and said at last in a voice like a hinge that if anyone's face was to be ruined she should be glad if it were done before the hair was pinned.

There was one thing more. Helena brought it out of the pot.

It was a very small white flower. It had been cut that morning from the end of a thin brown twig in the east border, and laid in a twist of damp cloth, and she held it out on the flat of her palm without a word. It was the single blossom from the pear tree, a little browned at the rim, a thumbnail of white, and she had been told by a stout woman in black that it was to be put in her hair, and that she had been forbidden to inquire into the particulars.

"It is a Doyenné," said Helena, gravely. "I am told it is to bear in four years."

Mrs. Venn pinned it over her left ear.

They went down at eleven.

It was a long way. She had not known how long. The great hall of Cypress Hill lay open to the morning with the double doors thrown back, the black and white marble swept bare and shining, and no candles lit. The banners had been taken down. Someone had gone through the house in March with a stepladder, and unhooked a hundred and forty years of dark red silk, and sent it, at Matteo's instruction, to the museum at Carrow, where a delighted curator had said that it was the finest set of guild standards on the coast. The iron brazier stood in the middle of the floor, filled to the brim with white lilac.

It was a plain day. It was a day of open windows.

She came out by the garden door, and the bright morning struck her in the face.

They had come in the old gray estate car, and the black one, and in a hired wagon with a patched canvas hood, up the long drive in the early light, and now they stood about the lawn in knots, with their hats in their hands. She knew every one. Inspector Hollis, large and mild, in a brown coat that looked as if he had been wearing it for a week, with his drooping moustache combed. Old Lantern, in his blue serge, leaning on a stick. A lean gray man who did not drink. Gavin, grinning, with a violet lamp in his pocket that he said was for luck. Cassius Hartigan, vast and pink in a white waistcoat, with Marguerite on his arm and a carnation the size of a saucer. A thin freckled girl in a gray dress, holding the hand of a smaller, sallow, bright-eyed child who was running on the grass, and who had, as she ran, the bright reckless gait of a person who has been told she may. Tomas, in an apron, beside a trestle of food. Pavel, with a paperback. Dr. Pryce, in a dinner jacket three sizes too large, standing stiffly beside the lilac with the air of a man at a court-martial who has just been told that he is to be decorated.

She took one step. The lawn turned.

"Oh, my girl," said a voice.

It was her father. He was in his one good suit, with a scrap of tissue on his jaw and his glasses on the end of his nose, and he had been standing at the foot of the terrace steps for some time with something in his arms. It was large and round and covered in an old gray sack. He was holding it against his chest like a man carrying a baby.

"Dad," said Sienna. "What have you got?"

"It is a surprise," said Edmund. He was weeping, steadily, and had given up trying to hide it. "I'll show you at the cove. I should like to hang it on the wall."

She took his arm.

They went down through the cypresses by the long stair, in a slow bright procession, with the whole company strung out behind them in the dappled light. Marco went first. He had a hat in his hand, and a large basket of something over his arm that he would not allow anyone to carry, and he walked with the grave glad stiffness of a man at a funeral that has turned, to his unspeakable surprise, into something else. Mrs. Venn came last. She had refused a chair, and a stick, and the offer of an arm. She came down the stone steps in her best black, step by step, with her lace cap straight and her square hand on the cliff, and her cheeks were wet, which she took no notice of whatsoever.

The cove lay below them in the sun.

The sea was blue. It was a blue she had not seen since a morning in September of another life, the deep clear blue of a coast on a good day, and the black stones of the shingle were washed gold, and the whole bowl of the bay lay as flat and bright as a plate. The great doors of the little building under the overhang stood open to the water. The letters over the lintel, LIVIA, which had been flaked and gray when she first saw them, had been painted over in new white, and under them, in a fresh clean hand, someone had hung a garland of ivy and the first primroses of the year.

He was standing on the shingle.

He had put on a white shirt. That was all. It was open at the throat, with the sleeves turned back to the elbow, and a pair of plain gray trousers, and no jacket, and no tie, and no ring on the right hand but the heavy old gold signet, which he had moved, a year and a half ago, to the smallest finger. His hair blew in the wind. He stood with his feet apart on the wet stones, a thin dark figure against the blue, and his hands hung open at his sides.

He did not move as she came down. She saw him see her, suddenly, at the foot of the stair, and she saw him stop.

She walked across the shingle.

It was a very long way. The stones shifted and clicked under her shoes, and the wind took the skirt of the cream dress and wrapped it round her knees, and the little company had stopped on the stair behind her, and the sea went on and on. She did not look at them. She looked at the man in front of her. She watched his face change as she came, slowly, from the eyes downward, as a house changes when someone lights a lamp in every window. And when she stopped, a yard in front of him, with the white blossom in her hair and the wind in her face, he opened his mouth to speak, and nothing came out.

"You had a sentence," said Sienna.

"I had a sentence." It was barely a voice. "I have been rehearsing it all week. In the glass. In the boathouse. To Marco, who asked me to stop." His mouth shook. "It has gone."

"I thought that it might."

"It was a very good one."

"I'm sure it was."

He drew a long unsteady breath. And then he laughed, helplessly, and put his hand over his eyes, and she heard a sound behind her on the stair, a great rumbling sob that could only have come from Cassius Hartigan, and a stout woman's voice saying in a tone of deep disgust that if anyone was going to be sick it was to be done behind the lilac.

"May I?" said Matteo.

"Yes."

He took her hands.

It was Hollis who married them. He had asked to, in a letter, with a most apologetic note about his authority as a justice of the peace of the port, and had been told by two people, simultaneously and in two hands, that he would do very well. He stood at the edge of the shingle with a little brown book in his fist and his bowler under his arm, large and sad and mild and flushed, and read out the words of the law in a husky voice. It was a ceremony of eight lines. It did not take long. There was no priest. There were no banners, and no rite, and no cup. There was a stout old woman in black on a flat rock, a very large man in a dark coat at her elbow with a basket, a lemon-yellow girl wiping her eyes on a sleeve, and a thin freckled child who had come to the front and was sitting cross-legged on the stones to see.

"We have written our own," said Sienna.

"So I am told," said Hollis. "I am to say nothing at all."

He stood back.

She had thought about what she would say for a month. She had tried it in the lab, in the dark, at a bench with her hands flat on the steel. She had written it, and struck it out, and written it again, and in the end she had thrown away the page and said it aloud to a flat gray sea, and found that it came out whole. She did not take out a paper. She held his two hands in hers, with the ring against the gold of his, and looked up into his face, and said it as she would have given a result.

"I, Sienna, take you, Matteo, for the second time."

A faint ripple went round the shingle. His eyes were brimming. He did not blink.

"I know now who you are. I took you before without knowing, because I had a debt to pay and a murder to prevent. I take you now with the whole of the file. I know about the drawer. I know about the book. I know about the hands, and the fear, and the button in a tin." She drew a breath. "I promise to ask. I promise to tell you what bears on you, the day I learn it, and to say so when I am afraid, and to say pears when I need to go. I promise that you will always be allowed to say it too."

He made a small sound.

"I promise," said Sienna, "to stay. Not because I have nowhere else. Because I should rather be here than anywhere in two lives."

The wind blew a strand of hair across her mouth, and she did not brush it away.

He was crying. He did not try to hide it. It ran down his face, openly, and fell on their joined hands, and he stood in front of her in the sun and the wind with his heart in his eyes and said, in a voice that cracked and steadied and cracked again:

"I, Matteo, take you, Sienna, for the second time."

"It is customary," said Hollis, in a husky whisper, "to wait for the lady to finish."

"I have finished," said Sienna.

"Then I beg your pardon."

He did not look round. He was looking at her, and nothing else existed. "I had a sentence," said Matteo, "and it was a very bad one. I will tell you the one that I have." He drew breath. "I promise to ask. Every time. For the rest of my life, I shall say may I, and I shall wait for the answer, and I shall be glad of either." His voice shook. "I do not need to keep you. I have found that out. I promise that I shall never again try. I shall be where you can find me. And I promise, whatever else is ever true, that I shall hold on."

He took a small thing from the pocket of his trousers.

It was a ring. It was not new. It was the plain thin band of gold that had lain for nine weeks against his ribs and a day over her knuckle, and he had taken it off the day before, to have it engraved. She looked at it, in the palm of his hand. There was a line of tiny letters inside the band, cut so fine that she could not read it in the glare.

"May I?" said Matteo.

She held out her hand.

He slid it on. It went down over the knuckle, and settled, and fitted, and she turned it a little against the light and read it. It was five words. They were cut in a small upright hand, very neat, a man's, with a firm tick to the right at the end of the last stroke.

Ask me. I will stay.

"By the authority vested in me," said Inspector Hollis, who had given up all pretence of a dry voice, "by Her Majesty's Port, and by a good deal of common sense, I pronounce you married." He blew his nose. "Again."

There was no kiss in the book. There was none in the contract, and none in the register, and it did not seem to matter in the least. She put her arms round his neck, and he put his round her waist, and they kissed in front of the shingle and the sea and the wet shouting company, long and slow and without fear, and the little child sitting on the stones said clearly that it was very rude, and was hushed by three people at once.

It was Edmund who unwrapped the surprise.

He did it at the door of the boathouse, with a good deal of ceremony, while the company stood round in a ring. He drew off the old gray sack, and held up in both hands a round thing of dull brass with a clouded dial and a single needle, and the company drew a breath. It was a ship's barometer. It had hung for twenty years on the wall of a shop in Tern Street. He had polished it, that morning, with a rag and a little oil, till the brass shone.

"I thought," said Edmund, "that it should have a new home." He was beaming through his tears. "It is a very fine piece. It has been settled in its opinion for a great while. I thought that the sea air might do it good."

"Dad, it's stuck."

"It is not," said Edmund, with dignity, "stuck."

Marco took the hammer out of his basket. He drove a nail into the beam beside the door with three clean blows, and Edmund hung the old brass barometer on it, and straightened it with a careful forefinger, and stood back with his hands clasped.

The needle quivered.

It was a very small thing. She would not have seen it if she had not been looking. The long black needle, which had lain against the pin at FAIR since she was nine years old, gave a faint shiver, like a living thing, and drew away from the brass by the breadth of a hair. They all saw it. Nobody said a word. It moved a little more. It crept along the dial, slow and trembling and without hurry, across the clouded glass, past CHANGE, and slid up toward the little black letters at the very end, and stopped, and stood still.

SET FAIR.

"Well," said Edmund Hale. His voice cracked. "I said it would move when it had something to say."

They brought her out of the boathouse on a cart.

It was the whole company that did it, in the end. A dozen men took the long ropes, and Marco and Gavin took the stern, and the pale boat came gliding down the ramp on her cradle in the sun, with her keel to the shingle and her stem to the sea. She was twelve feet long. She was clinker-built, with the strakes lapped one over the next, cedar and oak, glowing like the inside of a shell, and she had two thwarts and a pair of long ash oars laid in her bottom and a little brass cleat on her bow. She smelled of varnish. She was the most beautiful thing that Sienna had ever seen.

She had a plate on her stern. It was a small oval of brass, polished, and blank.

"I could not engrave it," said Matteo, at her side. "I wished it to be said first."

She took the little pot of white paint from Mrs. Venn. It was a quiet, ordinary, steady thing to do. She took the brush, and knelt on the wet stones at the bow of the boat, and Matteo knelt beside her, and held her hand, and she felt his thumb move across her knuckles. She did not write it on the plate. She wrote it on the planks, along the bow, in a plain upright hand, in white, in letters a hand high, where every soul on the shore could read it.

STAY.

Nobody said anything. She heard a small broken sound behind her, and knew whose it was. She rose, with the brush in her hand, and looked at the man at her side, and saw on his face an expression she would carry to the end of her life.

"I wrote it," said Matteo, very low. "In the book. In October. I did not cross it out."

"I know."

"You said that it was a surprise."

"It was the same one," said Sienna. "I thought that you'd want to know."

They put her in the water at noon.

It was Marco who gave the word. He stood on the shingle with his big hands on his hips and his hat on the back of his head, and said "Heave" in a rumbling voice that went across the cove like the sea, and the company took the strain at once. She slid down the ramp, over the wet stones, with a long soft hiss like a sigh. The keel touched the water. The little bow rose to the first low wave, and dipped, and rose again, and she floated. She lay on the bright blue water with her white name shining, and rocked, and was entirely herself.

They got in. It was Sienna's idea. She took off her shoes and stockings in front of the whole of Marenna Bay, and held up the skirt of her cream dress, and waded in to the knee, and Matteo put the oars in the rowlocks with a hand that did not tremble. He held the boat steady. He gave her his arm. She stepped over the gunwale, and sat down on the stern thwart, and the little craft rocked, and he pushed off, and sprang in over the side, and took up the oars.

They went out across the cove in the sun.

The water was clear as glass. She could see the stones on the bottom, gold and brown and green, and the long weed swaying, and a small silver fish. The sound of the oars was a soft dip and drip. Behind them, on the shingle, the company stood in a row, small and bright and very far away, and a hand was waving, and a thin high child's voice cried out, very faintly, something about a boat. A gull went over. The cliffs rose on every side, tawny and gray, hung with the first green of the year, and at the head of the long stair a small iron gate stood open.

He rowed. He rowed in long even strokes, with his shirt open at the neck and the wind in his hair, and he looked at her. He did not look away. She sat in the stern with her hands in her lap and the white blossom trembling over her ear, and she thought that she had never in her life seen anyone look so entirely and quietly at home.

"Sing," said Matteo.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said that you would. In the boathouse. A year ago, with the snow." He pulled. "I have wished all winter to hear it in the water."

"I'm dreadful."

"I know," said Matteo. "It is perfect."

She sang. She did it in the sun, on a flat blue sea, in a small boat called Stay, in a cracked and flat and wavering voice that went up over the cliffs and came back. It was the herring song. It had eleven verses and no tune to speak of. She sang the first, and the second, and by the third, in the middle of the bay, a thin, true, bashful thread of sound came in under hers and began to wind in and out. It did not match. It never had. He hummed it with his eyes shut, and the oars dipped, and the little boat went round in a wide slow gold-lit circle with the cove at her back.

On the shingle, Mrs. Venn sat down on a rock with her hands in her lap and looked at the sea.

He shipped the oars at the end. He let the boat drift, slowly, in the middle of the bay, with the sun on the water and the sleepy blue hush of the afternoon closing over them. He came down the length of the boat on his knees, carefully, as one crosses a floor in the dark, and sat down on the bottom boards at her feet, and put his head against her knee.

She laid her hand on his hair.

"I have a thing to tell you," said Sienna.

"Anything."

"I've been wanting to say it for three months. It's not important. It's only the last of it." She was looking at the horizon, where a thin white line lay between the sea and the sky. "I finished the blue notebook."

"I know."

"You don't."

"I saw it on the desk." She felt him smile against her knee. "I did not open it. I do not look at what you have not asked me to."

"I'd like you to."

She had it in the pocket of the cream dress. She had sewn the pocket in herself the night before, quite badly, with a needle and a length of white thread, because it seemed to her that a woman ought to be married with a notebook about her person. She took it out. It was soft, and a little battered, and blue, and it fell open in her hand at the last page.

She held it down, so that he could read.

There was one line. It stood alone at the foot of an otherwise blank leaf, in her small hard upright capitals, under a date that was this morning's. She had written it at six o'clock, in the gray, with the balcony doors open and a thread of cold air moving the curtains, in a hand that did not shake.

Not a number.

He read it for a long time. He did not say anything. She felt his head press a little harder against her knee, and the warm wet of his face through the thin cloth, and the long slow shuddering breath that he let go.

She closed the book. She put it back in the pocket.

Then she did the thing she had been going to do since a morning in a boathouse. She slid down off the thwart, and knelt on the bottom boards of the little boat in her cream dress, with the sun on her back and the sea going by, and took his hand in both of hers. It was long and brown and warm. It had a pale shining mark across the back where a fire had been, and a faint white line on the inner wrist where a winch cable had once run. She held it between her palms, and turned it over, and closed her own round it.

Her fingers folded down over his, easily, and met.

They did not slip. They did not go numb. They did not grow cold. She felt every one of his, the pad and the knuckle and the long strong tendon, close in answer, and hold, and she knelt there with her heart in her hands and knew that she could hold on as long as she liked.

"I have you," said Sienna.

"I know," said Matteo. His voice was very low. "I have you."

The boat rocked softly. A gull cried. On the shore, a long way off, a small boy was jumping up and down and shouting, and a large man in a dark coat was trying, with the grave courtesy of twenty-two years, to prevent him from falling in. A stout woman in black had risen from her rock. A lemon-yellow girl had put her arms round the neck of the very large man, and been permitted. And over the door of an old gray boathouse under a cliff, among the first primroses and the new white paint, a round brass dial hung quietly on a nail, with its long black needle pointing to the sun.