The sharpened pencils Cramoisy had brought for him stood in a jar on the desk. He bent over the jar, dipping like an ungainly water-bird after its prey, trying to get one between his teeth.

At last he secured one and sat down over the stave paper. But the pencil was too long; it stabbed him in the palate, making him gag. A shorter one, then. Clamping the wood between his jaws, he tried to angle his head so that he could make the marks – any marks – on the stave lines.

Soon saliva began to dribble out between his teeth. It slid down the pencil and on to the paper, making slimy marks. The taste of the wood, graphite and saliva mingled, made his tongue burn. Disgusted, he spat the pencil out, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

Then he looked down at what he had achieved.

A few clumsy strokes, smeared with the saliva from his mouth, were all he had managed. They were almost illegible.

And in his head, he could hear the brazen splendour of the music dinning on. No one else would ever hear it.

Cramoisy had left the sedative tincture on the top of the table. The bitter liquid, blacker than a starless night, numbingly cold as the rivers of hell, promised a slow drowning descent into the dark.

Close now, almost close enough. If he reached out, he could hook the bottle with his elbow into his lap – and wrench the cork out with his teeth.

He reached out for the phial –

The bottle fell to the floor and smashed in a dark-smeared puddle of viscous medicine. Khassian began to laugh: hard, painful laughter that hurt his heaving ribcage, that sent tears streaming down his cheeks.

He could not even kill himself.

Orial was carrying a tray of linaments along the Sanatorium corridor when she caught sight of Amaru Khassian. Pale and unsteady on his feet, the composer was being ushered into a treatment cubicle. The cubicle next to the one where she was to treat her first client of the day.

His eyes, in that one brief glimpse, seemed so bleak, so riven with despair, that she stopped still in mid-corridor, shocked.

The patient she was helping to treat was an elderly dowager whose knees were misshapen with rheumatism. She, unlike some of Dr Magelonne’s more crotchety older patients, was indulgent with Orial’s relative lack of experience and seemed delighted to have the opportunity to gossip about a minor society scandal at last week’s Guildhall Ball.

‘And the Mareschale must be at least as old as I am…’