When the butcher wrote to Charles of Giorgio’s passing, Charles wrote back to inquire about Patricio’s health. He did not ask about mine. The household funds, nearly depleted by the quince-orchard burial, were not replenished, as the butcher had requested.

Geranium Leaves made the deliveries to the house again. The butcher added a sum of his own money to my weekly allotment from Charles. I would like to believe that the butcher did so out of compassion for the loss of my blessed one.

Desire is a moth, Sióra Gazi had said to me. Its life is frantic and short, and then it dies.

I am thirty years old, and my life with Charles, though mostly without him, as his truer companion is the British Army, has come to an end. During the past two years in Dublin, Charles was more often elsewhere with his regiment, first on Dominica and now in Crimea. I do not know where Crimea is. I know that it is not an island. The few months when we did live together under one roof as husband, wife, and son, I could not breathe, as if my husband brought with him into every room a swarm of gnats, clogging my mouth and throat. The only interest he took in me was at night, which, given the alternatives, I preferred, as no words were needed then.

Please leave that out, Elesa. Write this instead.

In Dublin, Charles’s Venetian was far worse than it had been on Cerigo and on Santa Maura. Even when I loved him, I had never loved this language coming from his mouth. It sounded stingy to me. There was a lack of fullness to his words. At the end of them, he never lingered. Every one of them was a dry peck on the cheek.

“This Ireland cannot be an island! You lied to me. You promised me an island,” I had shouted at Charles when he told me that he would be leaving for Crimea.

“Ignorant woman,” he said, as though he were observing that the Dublin sky was gray again that morning. He did not even look up from the newspaper. He took a sip of his tea and ate a bite of his toasted bread, but in his mouth, the whole of his body, there was nothing but the frigid waters of the Irish Sea. Charles never raised his voice to me. I wished that he had. I wanted to know that he felt the stabs of rage in his eyes that I felt in mine, that his heart was a fist breaking through his chest, that the Angels were howling in his ears. I threw my teacup against the wall, and it broke into pieces, leaving a stain of milky tea on the wallpaper.

“Wasteful woman,” Charles said.

I knew what my husband’s departure would mean for Patricio and me. We would have to reside again with Mrs. Brenane, Charles’s maternal aunt. While I did prefer the outskirts of Dublin to the city itself, I did not prefer Mrs. Brenane’s household in Rathmines to my own. Widows, especially those without children, had only their grief for company, so they nourished and indulged it, like a lapdog or a parrot. Mrs. Brenane’s grief inhabited all the rooms of her manor house and made it seem much smaller than it was. Her live-in servants took up room as well, the entire top floor, though I doubted any of them ever slept soundly up there, given what she expected of them during their waking hours.