Chapter 72

He said nothing else that day.

I knelt at the grate with the cup in my hand until the light had gone off the flags, and nothing more came down the shaft but what the yard had always sent: hooves on cobbles, a bucket set down hard, a sergeant shouting about a girth. I put my forehead against the iron and shut my eyes. At the evening count the day man came along the row with his lamp and called “Seventeen” without looking up, and I stood, as I always stood, and sat down again when he had gone.

I understood the silence. A man who whistles down a hole in a garrison yard in the middle of an afternoon wants to be taken for a fool. A man who talks down to it wants to be hanged.

So I waited for the dark. I had become very good at waiting for the dark.

***

The shaft had been cut long ago by someone who wanted the lower row to have air and did not much mind whether it had light. In two years I had never seen anything come down on purpose.

At the third bell,