Chapter 15: A Choice He No Longer Had

The nights had a shape to them now, and the shape was his, and he had grown fond of it. He would come in off the street with the day still on him and she would have it ready — the food, the warmth, the wine at his elbow — and he would eat and talk himself empty of the day; and while he sat over the last of the wine she would go up and set the bath going, the long slow business of it, the carrying and the heating that took the better part of an hour, and when it was hot she would call down and he would go up to her, and she would kneel and do his leg, and then there was the bed, and then she would put the house to sleep around him while he lay easy. It ran like a clock. He had told her to keep it as her mistress had kept it and she had, to the minute, and he found he could lay the whole weight of an evening down on the rhythm of it and let it carry him. A man wanted that, after a day like his days had become. A man wanted somewhere the floor did not move.

Because the floor had been moving, lately, at the club.

She came in from the day’s last errand in her dress — she kept the dress for the street, he’d let her keep that, there was no call to have the neighbours’ tongues going — and at the start of the meal she remembered it and took it off, the way she always did now, and folded it by, and served him bare; and he ate and watched her move about the table while he talked, and found that pleasant too, the sight of her there, part of the ease of the evening, a thing a man could rest his eye on while he emptied his day out into the room.

He told her about it over the food, the way he told her everything now — not because he wanted her counsel, God knew, but because the words wanted out of him and she was there and a girl was a safe wall to say a thing at. It had come to a head. After all the weeks of round-and-round, the wms and the buts, the cousin saying gently-gently and old Voss saying we cannot sit on our hands forever — it had finally taken a shape, and the shape was not what he had thought he was joining, and it frightened him.

“They mean to do it at the spring market,” he heard himself saying. “When the square’s full. The whole quarter packed in for the fair, and the — “ he lowered his voice from its own accord, though there was no one but the girl “ — and the prince will be there, he opens it every year, stands up on the steps and says the same three things he says every year. And they mean to — there’s a thing the benefactor has, I don’t even rightly understand how it works, some engine of his, and they mean to set it off in the square with the prince on the steps and the crowd all round, and then go straight on to the palace while the city’s still — “ He stopped. He had gone too far; he felt the edge of it under him like a stair missed in the dark. “You didn’t hear that,” he said. “Girl. You hear me. You didn’t hear a word of that.” And she said “Hear what, master,” in the flat way she had, and he was grateful for it, and he did not say the rest of it aloud — the part about the prince dead in the square and the crowd dead around him and the king brought to answer for himself with the heir cold on the cobbles, the part that was not agitation any more and not principle any more whatever he told the others, the part that had a rope at the end of it. He said that part only to himself, where it had lived for a week now and would not be got out.