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loosened his robe, she saw him. In a panic she tried to bolt, but her wrists were bound and he held her by her legs. She fell back onto her bed. Behind her he pulled her hips toward him so she was on her knees, and took her long black hair in a knot in his fist. Before he buried her face in the pillow she had one last chance to gaze up at the crescent-moon window, to look for the STEVE E R I C K S O N • 25

    light of torches, to listen for the sounds of voices. The window was black and silent.

    He separated and entered her. Both of them could hear the rip of her, the wet broken plunder, a spray of blood across the tiny room. She screamed. She screamed so her brother James would hear, so the whole hotel would hear. She didn't care if he killed her for it, if he pulled the hair out of her head for it, she screamed so they'd all know that their secret had found her. It was their secret, she'd seen it in all their faces, in London and Paris. But he didn't strike or kill her, and then she knew it had been a secret to him too, and he couldn't bear to live with it anymore. She screamed as the tip of him emptied his secret far inside her.

    It thrilled him, the possession of her. He only wished she were so black as not to have a face at all. He only wished she was so black that his ejaculation might be the only white squiggle across the void of his heart. When he opened her, the smoke rushed out of her in a cloud and filled the room. It thrilled him, not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear, for once, the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn't he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other. This possession made him happy, until he came. Then he sank out of his own sight, refusing to look at himself or what he'd done. He fell asleep, half on the bed and half on the floor.

    For a long time she lay naked beside him, shuddering. Her face was turned away from him, but she could feel him there; if she could have moved she would have, but she could not. Nothing was more terrible to her than the silence, because she'd screamed so loud there was no way they couldn't have heard her; she knew they were all awake in their beds in the hotel, James and Patsy and Polly, all lying staring in the dark still hearing the screams to which they didn't respond. In these first moments she hated them and then she hated herself, for the way they would despise her now. So she lay shuddering, silently awake, and they all lay awake, except him.

    Finally Sally slept. When she woke, before dawn, it was he who awakened her.

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    It was, actually, the soothing coolness between her legs that awakened her. When she opened her eyes and saw him, she lurched. Then she didn't move.

    Her hands were untied, the blue ribbon back on the post where it had hung. Blood still streaked the bed. Beside the bed, he knelt on the floor. He held in his hands the cold rags she'd brought for his head the previous afternoon. Sitting on the bed beside her naked body was the peach-colored porcelain bowl. He touched the rags to Sally's thighs and wiped the blood from her, rinsing and squeezing the rags and putting them to the new wound between her legs, holding them there for a long time. He went on applying the damp rags until finally she stopped shuddering.

    When she heard him bury his face into the rags between her legs and sob, she went back to sleep.

    When the blood stopped, after he'd taken her many times over the weeks that followed, he didn't wash her with the rags anymore. It was the hemorrhaging of his conscience to which Thomas tended. If he couldn't quite forgive the way he fucked her, he accepted it as the dark thing that allowed him otherwise to be good.

    Toward the end of the year, when he thought Sally was strong enough, Thomas brought a doctor to the Hotel Langeac to inoculate her for the pox. For several days and nights Sally lay in bed with terror and pox coursing through