However, perhaps I should be grateful for his presence. It helps me guard against complacency. Each evening I sit down after my prayers and examine my feelings. The visitors — Charlie Cooper; his presence at my father’s bedside — have enriched my life and I find myself, for once, content. But I am pleased to report that there is no joy in me when I rise in the morning to attend to my work. Joy is not a sin. But it is always better to act from duty. What one does from inclination one may do thoughtlessly. Inclination is fickle. More than that: it may lead you astray. One day, you might find yourself smoking, thinking you are doing good.

Mother says that I am obsessed; that far from dismissing Smoke, I have made it my idol. Indeed I am grateful for the Smoke. It tells us when we err. Imagine a world in which we err and nobody notices. Not even oneself. Until one goes to seed by increments and slides into the madness of villainy. Smoke eats our reason with a charcoal spoon. We measure our humanity against its darkness. It is good it leaves a mark.

On the second day of Christmas, Mother sits up late with our guests, lecturing on history. The day the Smoke came. She has sent the servants to bed. Her heresy is not for them.

Smoke, I remind her, comes from God.

So, she says, does cancer.

There is a lesson, I say, in cancer, too, and Mr. Argyle glares at me with such an intensity of anger that it makes me want to quit the room. I had forgotten his mother succumbed to that disease. Once again it is Mr. Cooper who saves the evening by suggesting a game of whist. During the game, he draws out Mother into telling stories from her time in Paris and Vienna. It is years since I have heard a laugh and, against my better judgement, I am happy.

For five whole days we are content in this manner, from Christmas Eve to the Feast of the Holy Innocents. I mark each day with a candle in the chapel. Five candles, each a foot long, wrist thick, burning at the altar of the Virgin. Then my half brother arrives. He comes on horseback, unannounced, his manservant in tow, and the next thing we know the whole house seems to be thick with him, his voice, his boisterous laughter, the chink of his spurs. He came to warn us about marauding Gypsies, he says. He brags and skulks and monopolises Mother.

I wish he had sent a letter instead.

SPARRING

SPARRING