At the seventh cell, his knuckles feeble against the dark oak, he knocks. The lock, remotely, electrically commanded, slams open with an edge of echo trailing. He enters, and closes the door behind him. The cell is in semidarkness, with only a scented candle burning back in a corner that seems miles away. She waits for him in a tall Adam chair, white body and black uniform-of-the-night. He drops to his knees.

“Domina Nocturna… shining mother and last love… your servant Ernest Pudding, reporting as ordered.”

In these war years, the focus of a woman’s face is her mouth. Lipstick, among these tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood. Eyes have been left to weather and to tears: these days, with so much death hidden in the sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and smears of recco photographs, most women’s eyes are only functional. But Pudding comes out of a different time, and Pointsman has considered this detail too. The Brigadier’s lady has spent an hour at her vanity mirror with mascara, liner, shadow, and pencil, lotions and rouges, brushes and tweezers, consulting from time to time a looseleaf album filled with photographs of the reigning beauties of thirty and forty years ago, so that her reign these nights may be authentic if not—it is for her state of mind as well as his—legitimate. Her blonde hair is tucked and pinned beneath a thick black wig. When she sits with her head down, forgetting the regal posture, the hair comes forward, over her shoulders, below her breasts. She is naked now, except for a long sable cape and black boots with court heels. Her only jewelry is a silver ring with an artificial ruby not cut to facets but still in the original boule, an arrogant gout of blood, extended now, waiting his kiss.

His clipped mustache bristles, trembling, across her fingers. She has filed her nails to long points and polished them the same red as her ruby. Their ruby. In this light the nails are almost black. “That’s enough. Get ready.”

She watches him undress, medals faintly jingling, starch shirt rattling. She wants a cigarette desperately, but her instructions are not to smoke. She tries to keep her hands still. “What are you thinking, Pudding?”

“Of the night we first met.” The mud stank. The Archies were chugging in the darkness. His men, his poor sheep, had taken gas that morning. He was alone. Through the periscope, underneath a star shell that hung in the sky, he saw her… and though he was hidden, she saw Pudding. Her face was pale, she was dressed all in black, she stood in No-man’s Land, the machine guns raked their patterns all around her, but she needed no protection. “They knew you, Mistress. They were your own.”

“And so were you.”

“You called to me, you said, ‘I shall never leave you. You belong to me. We shall be together, again and again, though it may be years between. And you will always be at my service.’”