“But you were going somewhere?”

“Why, yes, certainly. And you?”

“I always have specific destinations.”

“Then where, very specifically, are you going, my lady?”

“You’re playing a game. Let’s say I was on my way to Monmouth.”

“This isn’t a game. I too am on my way, very specifically, to Monmouth. It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“What will be strange,” she answered, “is when you agree to tell me, without lying, why you took the carriage from Gray’s Inn on a Tuesday.”

“I can sense,” he said, “that we’ve come to the very heart of the matter. I never lie, but if I did, I certainly wouldn’t lie about anything this important. I took the carriage from Gray’s Inn because it was going in the direction I was headed.”

“No, sir, you very specifically took the one that was not going where you were headed. On Tuesdays, the mail coach going directly to Bristol leaves from Hatton Garden. That’s the day when the one from Gray’s Inn makes a detour through Four Fields. What do you say to that?”

“I have to say that they failed to inform the United States of this, my dear lady. Always this disdain and indifference on the part of Europe toward us poor Americans. We knew nothing about it in Massachusetts. Imagine that.”

“It’s easy for you to act smart, but what should I say? I take this coach on Tuesdays to be alone. And here I am, very specifically, with a Redskin on my hands! You were neither a merchant, a farmer, nor a regular at the inn . . . not even a normal man. I smiled at you last night, and you sat there like a block of wood.”

“When?”

“And you have to ask? Admit it, poets do the most outrageous things without batting an eye.”

“In that case, you must be a kind of great poet,” said Herman. “But come on, they’re calling us. We have to get back to our perch.”

They’d reached a mournful, treeless plateau. They started to drop passengers off here and there: in villages, on farms, at cottages. Even out in the open country, the carriage would stop, and the person would get down and make their way, alone. There were no dwellings in sight for miles around, either in one direction or in the other. Little by little, the carriage got lighter. Though the roads were bad in this high country, they were empty, so they launched onto them at full gallop. The ground was soft. Now the carriage’s wheels and the horses’ shoes made only muffled sounds.

In the distant, motionless reaches, Herman saw an extraordinary light. It transformed the misty crepe of the far-flung woods into lamb’s fleece. Rust-colored pasturelands covered the earth like wool carpets. So now Herman started to talk about the world that lay before them. He rolled up the sky, from one edge to the other, as though it were made out of colored silk. And, for a brief moment, there was no more sky. Then, after an interval of four hoofbeats at a gallop, he rolled the sky open again, but now it had turned into a huge skin, tightly enclosing earth’s arteries and veins.