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.