He looked around the room, thought of things, rejected them. Then his gaze settled on the linen press by the window. Nell had told him what she put in there, what had remained there, untouched, for all the weeks he had been back. He raised the lid, reached down and lifted the pack, recoiling a little at the smell of it. There was only one thing he needed from it and he tugged the straps through the buckles, drew out the oilskin package and sat with it on top of the press, unwinding the oilskin until the pistol was in plain view. He moved his fingers about it in a kind of ghosting of the actions necessary for making it ready. Then he wrapped it in the cloth again and packed it in the smaller of the bags, next to Lovall’s writing case. The day now was well advanced, the room swimming with late-afternoon light, and warm—warm for the first time without a fire. He sat on the bed. After a minute he lay back and stretched himself out. He did not dare to question what he was doing. Start to question it and he might find himself gazing through a tear in the skin of the world. There was no other plan. He shut his eyes, opened them. He stared up at the blue shadow of the ceiling, longing for his own boyhood until the longing shamed him.

2

Earlier, when the witnesses arrived, there had been a commotion. The gate of the courtyard unbarred, the witnesses—two men and a woman carrying a child—prodded towards a bench that was in the partial shade of a creeper that had grown thickly up the wall and was studded with blue flowers. Then the gate was closed and barred again, shutting out the ragged, curious children and returning the courtyard to its former stillness.

As always in this city, it was sun or shade, each as intense as the other. In one, your whole skull was packed with light, in the other you seemed only half born, a spirit or ghost whose real form was uncertain.

Close to where the witnesses were sitting—close enough to share the flies—four horses were tethered to rings in the wall. Three were English horses with docked tails; the fourth, a palomino, was smaller and fatter, and looked as if its main work in life was carrying its master out to supper and back. The horse that interested Calley was one of the English horses, a stallion of obvious beauty and strength, tethered where the shade was deepest. He was no horseman himself, did not care for the way horses looked at men and seemed to know them, but the stallion was something remarkable and he knew you would not find more than two or three such horses in the whole of the British army.