“Rebecca dressed Richard,” Skinner says, “and led him outside to her carriage,” and they both are, he guesses, at this moment probably, on the train back to London, discussing the new pair of prosthetic eyes which he, Harold Skinner, will, when he himself returns to London, design and craft.

Skinner only withholds from Downing the sorry picture he guesses the taxidermist himself can imagine: how, once Rebecca had loaded her husband into the carriage, he made no apologies, nor told her he loved her, but conveyed, in his way, what was expected of her from here on out. How Skinner had watched Rebecca cradling Richard’s bandaged head in one of her arms, telling him something like All will be well, dear, don’t worry about a thing and Shush, dear, don’t worry, but what Skinner cannot know, and therefore cannot withhold, is that Rebecca Ostlet attended, on her own without Downing, the John Turtle Wood lecture at the Royal Institution on the remains of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

There, she met a young, unattractive-but-funny civil engineer, and she and the unattractive-but-funny civil engineer, they have been seeing each other regularly, they have plans for marriage, and Rebecca is, in fact, newly pregnant—but now that’s all gone to rot. England’s divorce laws, though better than before, are still bad for women, and it is so not lost on Rebecca Ostlet that men have spent centuries arguing over the souls of the beasts while paying no heed to the souls of women, and Rebecca can only divorce Richard if she can prove his adultery, but his adultery, it must be said, is not of the common kind—any public revelation would be, she knows, universally ruinous—so it is quite clear to Rebecca as she departs Leamington Spa with her blind husband and the Brontës how her remaining years must be spent:

There are herbs, the botanist knows, such as barberry, ergot, coltsfoot and calomel. There is aloe and celery, black cohosh and hellebore, there is snakeweed, but the best course, she surmises, is likely the pennyroyal, the tansy or savin, abortifacients which can be procured at the pharmacist’s, surreptitiously packaged as Beecham’s Pills, as Farrer’s Catholic Pills, as Hardy’s Woman’s Friend or Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, and there are Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills, Old Dr. Gordon’s “Pearls of Health,” and if none of those work—Skinner cannot know that Rebecca Ostlet is thinking—she could risk arrest, in search of a “flushing” for fifty guineas. Or she could just take a controlled fall down the stairs—

“I see,” Titus Downing says, and reaches quietly for his wallet. He pays Harold Skinner. He thanks him for his time and collects the German’s pitiful receipt.

Skinner looks at his old friend and pauses at the front door. “I can stay the night if you wish,” he says.

Downing assures him he’s fine. That he prefers to be alone, but says again, “Thank you,” as Skinner departs. Then Downing pays the theater troupe, tips them the wicker basket he carried home from The Green Otter. The duck and beans have congealed, but the bottles of Malbec are received with glee, and Downing lingers for a moment on his stoop, watching the boys rip off their costumes, once again link their arms, and take turns tugging from the bottles as they skip toward the Leam.