“I know,” she said, “what I am going to wear tomorrow. I decided on it before we left the island.”

He nodded and looked down at the floor, at the knots in the boards that were, he thought, the tree’s hidden flowers. He had, during the last hours, been marshalling a short but compelling argument against the coming day. He had been waiting for the right moment to deliver it, but now the moment had come he felt no conviction.

“Emily,” he began. “Emily . . . ”

“No,” she answered. “You mean it well but it does not help me. Do you remember what I spoke to you of when we sat beside the sea that day? I am going tomorrow because I mean to keep hold of whatever independence I still possess. I intend to fight for it, my liberty. For that I will do anything at all. I will undergo anything. Can you understand that?”

He could. He thought he could.

“John?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Do you think I will bleed much?”

“No,” he said. He turned from her, found himself in the mirror, the not-entirely-plausible reflection. Then saw the smudges on the glass—the city drawn by a woman’s finger in the morning.

His own room was on the floor above and for the moment at least he had it to himself. The foreigner, the Spanish gentleman, had not yet retired, though there was a pack on the chair, and spread on one side of the bed, a horse-coat that looked to have seen a good deal of hard use.

On the near side, the door side of the bed, was his own bag, carried up by the landlord or one of the servants. There was not much in it. He had brought only what was essential—no writing case or pistol. Once his draft arrived at the Ship Bank—and please God it would, and soon, for he did not know how else they would manage—he intended to fill the bag with new things. Shirts, a new waistcoat, perhaps a pair of walking boots like the ones Cornelius had, with oil-silk cuffs above the ankles and sturdy back-straps for pulling them on.

He took out his toothbrush (it was one he had found in the house in Somerset and that he thought had probably belonged to one of his sisters; his own, tortoiseshell and badger bristle, was somewhere in old Castile). He poured water from the pitcher into the basin, splashed his face, rubbed away at his teeth, then carried the basin to the window, opened it, and emptied its contents over the roof tiles below.