So I hope you will understand in advance that my later actions were spontaneous, perhaps even unplanned. I did not go to the party, as some claimed in muttering whispers afterward, to confront Mary. I had done my best to make sure she would not be there at all. (I believe you.)

Sonter opened his mouth to question me further, but I shut it with a well-aimed appetizer delivered on raised foot, the appetizer rescued from a passing waiter’s tray with an ease I almost never experience. Sonter turned away immediately.

There may have been an expression on my face that made him turn away. It may have had nothing to do with the appetizer. I would not rule it out if I were you.

For the next two hours, I attended to the artists, explaining their paintings to those who required an explanation. It was hard work. Some of the paintings came from the kind of obscure symbolism that either baffles me or brings out my inventiveness, but the old potent phrases from the past came back to me from the void of memory soon enough.

“Vibrant use of color.”

“Brave application of the oils.”

“The composition accentuates the face, for nicely subtle symbolic effect.”

This part I enjoyed, I admit. It made me feel free. For a brief time, while pointing out the detail of a sudden azure thrush in the dull emerald undergrowth at the bottom of one of Raffe’s paintings, I could pretend Lake was still my client, that my gallery still served as the nexus of the New Art. I even caught the eye of a former lover from across the room, and he smiled. You could say I was happy.

Then they pressed me into duty helping downstairs, in the banquet hall. David Frond’s idea of a menu included lark’s tongues and frog’s legs, fish eggs and lemon pie, squid soup and oliphaunt kidneys. It was quite an ambitious spread, worthy of the obese gastronome Manzikert III himself. It wasn’t hard to imagine another time, another place, in which this would have been a party for Duncan, had luck been on our side. A string of alternate scenarios in which we rose to the top and stayed there, instead of being diminished by time and our own enemies. (Would it have been so much better that way, Janice?)

Ill-suited for such work, I hobbled back and forth past the extravagantly costumed guests as they cavorted across the dance floor—half hunter, half flushed rabbit—escorting notables with polite conversation about the weather—there was quite a drumming of rain outside by then—or about the history of the fluted archways in the lobby that the Hoegbottons had stolen from some ruin down south.