Twelve:

Oh. Her voice in the room. A shudder in the hanging meat of his face, his eyes behind their closed lids like he was trying to squeeze something delicate and large through a very small gap – but only if he could find it. It was in there somewhere, in the centre of his head, and she wanted to kiss him; help him gather it up. A man he saw once, dragged by a horse; the bones sticking out of his ruined back. The man looking at him as though bored by it all, he said. Then slightly distracted. Then dead.

She was writhing away from him now, her eyes fixed.

Thirteen:

They were still there. They had left their traces inside her.

The man who failed, and failed again, and slapped her to keep himself going, and wore her out with trying. The man who wiped his mouth afterwards – picked up a corner of her dress and wiped his mouth – and chucked her on each breast before he put the sapphires down. The dressmaker, with his clever eyes shut, straining against her, his head full of something that kept slipping out of his grasp. And Misha who left – the bills not paid, the sheets still rumpled on the bed. Misha in his Hussar jacket, who loved her better than his horse, he said, who loved her enough to die – who said, open your eyes, open your eyes and kill me, and she opened them to see him staring down at her, with a look so ordinary and hard his eyes might have been made of wood. Before Misha, Quatrefages, his wet stomach sucking against her back, who said on their wedding night that if she kept her chemise on, she might do; Quatrefages just a cover for Raspail, who twisted her every which way, and all she could remember of Raspail were his hands. Raspail a friend of Bennett who was the first. Bennett the doctor administering a cure; Bennett who said, 'Do not be frightened, my dear, and if you are frightened, shout.' Mr Bennett smiling thinly, until he rolled his eyes back to show the whites.