Someone caught my arm. I looked up to see Marcus, as sober as I’d ever seen him.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

‘I—’

‘No, Alexsander.’ He all but lifted me back over the wall. ‘That’s no way to help her.’

‘How?’ I said, and then something cracked in me. I pitched forward. My knees went. But he caught me. I sobbed there, my face buried in his shoulder. I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried.

Marcus didn’t rush me. We stood there for some time. None of the passers-by bothered us; perhaps such a scene wasn’t so unusual that day – a man overcome by grief or drink, or both. When I was done, I stood back and wiped ineffectually at the mark I’d left on my friend.

‘Let’s get a drink,’ he said.

I surprised us both and said no. ‘You were right. This isn’t something to run from.’

Instead, I took us back to the constable’s office. The parade of costumes had long since moved on and the street outside the office was largely empty, though detritus littered the ground: greasy paper that held all manners of food; abandoned bottles of ale and wine; and other, less usual cast-offs. One golden masquerade mask lay in the street, catching the last of the fading light. Marcus and I sat on the steps of the office, in some silent agreement that neither of us were ready to see her, not yet. We spoke of many things that were both inconsequential and important. Marcus told me of his parents, both of whom were born, and then died, in Drekenford. How he never married, but came close once with a tanner – she could never rid herself of the smell of the shop, but that wasn’t the reason they broke the engagement. He was thinking of giving up painting. He couldn’t say why.

I listened, enjoying a kind of respite that came from someone else’s concerns. I had been necessarily caught up in my own, but that hour or so was a relief.

When the time came, I stood, my back and legs aching, and opened the office door. But Marcus shook his head.

‘You’re her friend,’ I said. ‘She would want to see you.’

‘It’s selfish, I know, but I don’t want to remember her that way. In there.’

It was hard to argue when, in many ways, I felt the same.

‘Thank you, for today,’ I said. We embraced and for the second time that day I felt the goodbye of something – a goodbye I didn’t want, but couldn’t escape.

‘Impossible. Simply impossible. It cannot be tonight,’ the magistrate said, from the perceived safety of the doorway. He had refused to enter the office and refused to see Mrs Eder again until he absolutely had to. All those years of friendship, all those dinners as a guest at her table, the hunts with her husband. Years that counted little, in the end.