Chapter 55

He had not answered.

I sat with that all through the first afternoon, in the narrow sitting room with the door locked, and I made myself look at it plainly, the way I had once made myself look at Gareth’s draft with Tam’s name on the eleventh line.

I had asked. Once, before witnesses, in the words of the Hearth, exactly as I had promised myself on a hospital pillow. He had opened his mouth to answer, and a grey cloak had crossed the floor, and the breath had gone out of him unspent. But it was Sunday now, and he had had a night and a morning to finish the sentence, and he had used them to send two courts over his border in another man’s voice, and a clerk’s order up my stairs with his initial pressed through the paper.

He had said two words to me since the toast. Of course. Neither of them was an answer to anything I had asked. They were the answer to some other question, one that had been put to him in a black study long before I came down the stairs, and I