So even as he sat scribbling outside the prince’s door, Thanakar was happy. He sent messages and funny notes, which were delivered with the prince’s food. He drew cartoons of mutual acquaintances and patients—Starbridge officers whose hopeless faces and pitiable wounds he could make grotesque with a few deft slashes of his pencil; widows and spinsters past the legal age of childbirth, scared to death of dying, trying to delay with makeup and vitamins the moment when the bishop would send apothecaries to put them all to sleep; and a whole vicious series featuring Charity Starbridge, the prince’s sister, the commissar’s wife. These drawings were as cruel as he could make them, because his new happiness was half on her account.

Long before, Prince Abu had tried to kill himself, or tried to try. Even that, for ordinary people, was a desperate crime, the spiritual equivalent of breaking jail. In a Starbridge it was considered madness, cowardice, dereliction of duty. Thanakar thought that perhaps he should fear a second attempt, but he didn’t. It was part of his new optimism. He thought that eventually, if he sat outside long enough, the door would open and Abu would stumble out, vague, apologetic, and very thirsty. In the meantime, after he had folded up his drawings and slipped them under the door, Thanakar would limp down the hallway almost every day to visit Charity Starbridge. She was afflicted with a kind of melancholia common among young women of her class—a combination of idleness, loneliness, and drugs. The personality relaxers prescribed for married women by the bishop’s council had certain side effects. She complained of stiffness in her neck. She was still too shy to look Thanakar in the face, so he would stand behind her chair to talk to her. She would loosen the strings of her bodice and pull the cloth down over the hump of her thin shoulder, and he would stand behind her with his hands around her neck, rubbing and caressing so gently at first, and then harder until he felt her muscles loosen, and her head fell forward of its own weight, and her black hair fell around her face.

In those days, too, he had another patient. At first he had gone secretly. But as time went on he became careless, and visited in plain daylight, and brought his car. It was more convenient, so that he didn’t have to carry the gifts he brought—fruits and vegetables, blankets and warm clothes. And always things for the little girl: sweets, dresses, picture books. His father had had a dictum: “Stroke them and they bite you, whip them and they lick your hand.” As usual, his father had been half right. Her teethmarks still showed on his thumb from the first night he had washed her and changed her bandages, so at first he was careful not to touch her again, but sat and gave directions to her mother. Even so, the first few times, Jenny’s little body was stiff and frightened, her eyes full of suspicion when she saw him. But Thanakar was clever enough to be patient. He would dump the presents he had brought her carelessly onto the floor, and the next time they would show signs of her touch. And one day he brought her a doll with a white porcelain head, and she took it gravely from his hands.