To begin with he needed to get out of the house. Once he was out of the house he could think of what came next. There would be momentum. He pulled the fiddle case from under the bed, picked up his remaining bag, made it to the door. It would not have amazed him to find it was locked and that he was a prisoner. There had, in the night, been some miraculous communication with his colonel, with others too, news from Spain. But the door was open, there was no one outside it, and he shuffled towards the top of the stairs, went down them like a man of eighty crippled with the ague.

The hall at the bottom had shallows of silvery light on bare grey stone. He had no idea whether or not he had paid for his room.

“Hello?” he said.

There was a door hidden behind a piece of faded tapestry. A woman pushed past it, stared at Lacroix, disappeared, then came back with a cloth in her hand.

“You need to wipe yiself,” she said.

The cloth was damp. He pressed it against his face then worked it around the back of his head, his neck.

He gave her back the cloth. She frowned at it. He asked for a drink.

“Wha?”

He mimed drinking. She nodded, returned behind the tapestry, and reappeared with a tumbler. He assumed she would bring him water but it was whisky, and after struggling to get down the first sip, the liquor finding out all the broken places of his mouth, he was grateful for it and showed with a slow blink, a tilt of his head, that he was.

It was the same woman as the night before, he recognised her now, but her displeasure at him, his existence, seemed to have passed.

“You’ve nae boots,” she said. She pointed. He grimaced. It was a moment when either one of them might have laughed but neither did. She fetched her shawl, a thing like a fishing net, black and loosely knotted. “Follow me,” she said.

They went out into the morning. The rain was over but it was hard to avoid puddles and after a while he gave up trying. Several times people stopped the woman to ask what she was doing and who he was, this poor wee man with his swollen face and wet feet. And each time (arms crossed over her bosom) the woman patiently explained while the strangers observed him, shaking their heads, as if sudden misfortune, the mad descent of the wheel, was a truth they understood perfectly well. Then he was off again, the captain of hussars in trust to a woman who led him as she might a child or a dancing bear. Had the circumstances been described to him twenty-four hours earlier they would have sounded absurd, insupportable, yet they turned out to be not quite either.