Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 13: Telling the Girl
He came back from the funeral wrung out and strangely full, the way a man is full after a great occasion that went well, and he could not be alone with it, and there was no one in the house to be not-alone with but the girl; so he had her brought, and told her to sit, which startled her, and he hardly noticed that it did.
“There were hundreds,” he said. “I want to tell someone and you’ll do. Hundreds, girl. The street outside the church was full of them. I never knew she had — that we had — that many people.” He shook his head, marvelling. “It was beautiful. The whole thing. Beautiful, like she was. She’d have been proud of it. She’d have run it better, mind, she’d have had opinions about the flowers, but she’d have been proud.” He was quiet a moment, lost in it, and the quiet went on long enough that the girl read it the way she read everything and judged that a word was wanted.
“I’m sure it was beautiful, master.”
“It was. You’d have liked it.” He said it without thinking and did not hear how it sat — that he was describing to the girl the beautiful thing she had not been let within a mile of, and assuring her she’d have enjoyed the view. She said nothing to it. There was nothing in the pause this time that asked her to.
“The people who came,” he went on, warming. “The Marshall himself — the Marshall, girl, standing in the second row with his head bared. A whole rank of uniforms behind him. Her people, of course, the whole House of Jutor in their black, her father like a felled tree. And men from the court — actual court, the chamberlain’s deputy, two of the old families. People I’d not get past the door of in the ordinary way, and there they were, in my church, for my wife.” He named them, the names rolling out of him with a grief that was also, underneath, a kind of accounting — who had come, what it meant that they had come, the standing of the thing. “And our own circle, all of them. The Harrolds. The Vessants. Sera and her lot. People you’d know, girl, you’ve served them all.”
A pause. She filled it. “I’m sure they were all very beautiful, master.”
“They were.” He didn’t notice she’d given him nothing. “Her brother spoke. The eulogy.” And here a small frown came, a genuine critic’s dissatisfaction surfacing through the grief. “It was — it was good, I suppose. But I’ll tell you, it wasn’t right, quite. He spent half of it on her before. When she was a girl, her people, the country house, all that — half the eulogy on a Vinda I never even — on years that had nothing to do with —” He stopped, and turned it over, honestly puzzled, asking it of the air and not of her: “What should it have been about, then? If not that?”
And because he had stopped, and a stop might want filling, she filled it.
“The singing, master.”
He looked at her. He had not expected the girl to be there, in the conversation; he had expected a wall that occasionally said yes master; and the wall had said a true thing, and it stopped him. “The singing,” he repeated. And then, slowly, coming to it: “Yes. God, yes. Her singing.” And he was off, and grateful to be off, eulogising the voice for a while — how it carried, how she’d sing about the house with no one asked to listen, how a room would go quiet for it. It was the truest thing he’d said all evening and he’d had to be handed it. He didn’t notice that either.
“And her charity,” he added, when the singing ran down, reaching for more good to say of her. “She did a great deal, you know. Sang for the Mercy twice — no, three times. Gave to the — there was a thing for the foundlings, and the other one, the widows’ fund. And she fed the beggars, sometimes, did Vinda. Turned no one away.” He said it warmly, and the girl looked at her hands and said nothing, because there was nothing in the pause that asked.
“What else,” he said. “We should say what else she was. What else was she.” He did not really mean it as a question to her; he meant it as a thing to say aloud. But he had stopped again.
“She gave the best parties, master.”
“She did!” He seized it, delighted. “Didn’t she. The best in the quarter, everyone said so.” And he went through them, the great nights, the triumphs of her table, and came as he always came to the best of them, the one he turned to like a tongue to a sore tooth. “That dinner. The one with all her friends, the spring before last. You remember — you were there, you served it. Wasn’t that the best night? The whole table of them, and the wine, and her at the head of it lit up like a lamp. Wasn’t it the best night.”
“Of course, master.”
“And she was beautiful.” He had drunk a little, and the grief and the wine ran together. “I don’t say it to be — she was. The hair. The way her back curved when she turned. That walk of hers, that lilt, you could pick her out of a crowd of a thousand by the walk alone. Didn’t you think so? You saw her every day. Wasn’t she beautiful.”
“Of course, master.” And then, because the pause held open and wanted more, and because for once she gave him a thing instead of a wall — a small thing, a chosen thing, carefully laid down: “It was her eyes, master. The way they made you feel important.”
He stared at her. “Her — “ He had been going to agree about the eyes, the colour of them, and that was not what she had said. The way they made you feel important. He turned it. It was true. It was so exactly true that he had lived inside it for years and never once seen it from outside, the particular gift she’d had of turning the whole warm light of her attention on a man until he felt himself the only worthwhile thing in the room — on him, she’d done it to him, every day, and he’d thought it was simply how it felt to be loved by her, and it had been a thing she did, a skill, and the girl had seen the skill where he’d only ever felt the warmth. “Yes,” he said, oddly unsettled. “I suppose she did. I never thought of it as — yes.”
He recovered. “And clever with it. Lord, she was clever. She could take a whole table of clever men and run rings round the lot of them and have them thanking her for it.” He half-laughed, and then said, with a sudden uncharacteristic flicker of something near honesty: “Round me too, if I’m truthful. She’d run rings round me. Did you ever notice that? You’d have seen it, you were always there with the dishes.”
And the girl said, “Oh no, master.”
He looked up, surprised, almost disappointed. “No? Really? Never?”
“Oh — maybe, master. Sometimes.” A pause. “She did like her little jokes.”
“She did.” He smiled, comforted. “She did like her jokes.”
He sighed, and the house seemed very large and very quiet around them. “She ran this place like a clock, you know. I never had to think about a thing. Never once. What I’m going to do without her I genuinely — who’s going to tell me what to do, eh? What about you — who’ll tell you what to do? Who runs it now?” He said it half to himself, the widower’s bewilderment, a grown man suddenly without the hand that had steered his domestic life. He stopped, and the stop turned toward her almost by accident.
“I suppose I keep doing what she told me to, master,” said the girl. “Until you say otherwise.”
“Yes.” He brightened; it was a relief; it was a plan. “Yes, that’s the thing. You keep on as she had it. She had it right. You keep on exactly as she had it.” And the girl said, “Yes, master.”
“You know what I’ll miss.” He had gone soft and inward now, the wine and the hour working on him. “Coming home. Coming in the door of an evening and going straight up to —” He stopped. He looked at the girl, and something almost like delicacy crossed him, and then went. “— well. To bed. You know about it. The whole house knew about it, she was not a quiet woman.” A short laugh. “She enjoyed it. By God she enjoyed it.”
“I noticed, master,” said the girl. And he realised that of course she had — she’d knelt at the head of that bed and taken his wife’s weight on her braced arms so the enjoying could go easier, and all that noise had been right in the girl’s face; and she’d washed the after of it off her in the mornings, so she could hardly say otherwise; and the saying of it was so flat and so exactly true that it might have been carved from stone.
“She was the best I ever had,” he said, simply, to the fire. “That’s God’s truth. That’s half of why I married her, and I’m not ashamed of it. Where does a man even find —” He gestured, lost, at the enormity of the vacancy. “Where do you even start, to replace a thing like that.”
“I have no idea, master,” said the girl, and turned the talk, deft, off the vacancy and toward easier ground: “What do the other officers say, master? Your friends. Were they kind, at the funeral?”
And he was off again, and did not notice he’d been steered off, away from the vacancy and toward easier ground; and he told her how good the men had been, how they’d closed round him, the club to a man at the graveside, Tarrin gripping his hand, old Voss in actual tears — and from the men at the graveside it was no distance at all to the men at the club, and the wine had loosened everything, and he simply talked, because she was there and the silence was unbearable and a girl was nobody to mind what was said in front of her.
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