She can’t hear him, and he realises, again, he hasn’t said anything. These words will be trapped in me forever, unspoken. My body has stopped, only the sweat moves. This is the last of me.

There is a knocking on the door, and it is open. Áoife is standing up, walking towards it. There is no one outside.

‘He’s dead,’ Genevieve is saying to her at the threshold.

She has timber under her arms.

‘No, he’s still alive,’ Áoife is saying.

‘Not Joseph; the man with the fine horse, that one who incited the men. He is dead. We are alone, without masters.’

And then that woman is gone, vanished, and Joseph understands that he is drifting in and out of consciousness. His throat has closed and he can only breathe through his nose; but his breathing is something he cannot control any more, it is just something that happens to his chest. There are two doors in his vision, two wives standing before him. One of his eyes sags closed by itself, and he still sees two of her.

‘I am leaving,’ she says. ‘You are too cruel. Your body terrifies me. It is disgusting. I can’t watch it any more.’

So she is abandoning him. This feels too abrupt to be real; she was always abrupt, though; but perhaps he fell unconscious again, and is only given brief flickers of lucidity. Even with all his senses intact, though, nothing could ever have prepared him for the depth of this solitude. She feels no obligation to him, and he needs her company. The door is closed and she is gone. My wife is gone; he wants to shout it. Everything is dark, and I am alone.

Soon he goes blind. Nothing moves any more. Everything is paralysed, and it is too hard to breathe all the time. He imagines the children they would have had, what their faces would have looked like. You cannot have children with such a woman, though. It is for the best what has happened. Even still, he would have lived with her forever, just the two of them together. There is no shame in that; if he had had pride he would have given her up, and that would have been giving up his happiness. She was always his happiness; and she has left him as he was dying. This pain will never stop.

I want to walk in the fields, he thinks.