Last of all was the object that gave the pack what weight it had. A parcel wrapped in the same dull red oilskin that had been used to patch his trousers. She set it on her lap and carefully unwound the oilskin until it hung in red pleats down to her slippers. She guessed what it was before she saw it. Smooth wood, steel, a fold of scratched brass at the base of the handle. This alone, it seemed, had returned much as it had gone, the wood gleaming like the wood of the tables downstairs she circled beeswax into (did so still, despite no one ever sitting at them). Was it the oil in the cloth? Was that why he had chosen it? An oily swaddling that would feed what it held?

On the mechanism, below the hammer, was the stamp of a crown, and below the crown a G and another letter she was less sure of. There was no flint in the jaws of the hammer. She turned it, this way and that. She raised it. It weighed in her hand like a skillet. She had never fired a gun in her life and had only touched them to tidy them away, those mornings they came back from duck shooting mad for their breakfasts and propped the fowling pieces in the hall like walking sticks. But this was not a hunting gun. Its character was entirely different.

She saw then—a little thrill of horror—that she was pointing the pistol at the bed, at the man in the bed, and she quickly lowered it and laid it across her knees again, shook her head. What would it be to shoot this at someone? To put a ball the size of a quail’s egg through another man’s chest or head? Was that what the beautiful clothes were for? The boots, the fur collars? And she found herself hoping that he had not done it. That he had ridden and drilled and paraded with his men but had never shattered some poor stranger with this thing.

She wrapped it again in the cloth, settled it in the bottom of the pack, put back the mug and the comb and the candle, then stood, opened the lid of the press and settled the pack inside. One darkness swallowing another.

* * *