I took the bottle away with me. I did not trust her not to decide a large dose of it a pleasant way to keep from facing her troubles.

When I closed the door, her eyes had already slid closed, and her breathing was even.

I spent the rest of the night sitting in the wing chair she had vacated, my elbows on my knees, staring into the tiny flames of the fire.

I had laid her cloak and slippers before the fire to dry. The cloak was heavy velvet, the slippers mere wisps of cloth decorated with beads. They told me nothing about her except that she came from wealth and had fine taste in dress.

I still felt her kiss. She had flung herself at me scarcely knowing what she did. Her strange tale of murder could have been all invention, as she claimed, but her anguish had been real. Something had happened to her, something that had made her leave the safety of family and friends and venture to the unfinished bridge.

Her behavior reminded me of my own nearly fifteen years before when I had faced the worst night of my life. That night I had lost my wife and two-year-old daughter, not to battle or disease, but because of my own folly and blindness. I had not been able to see what I had done to the wisp of a young woman who had married me. She had hated life following the drum, and she had hated me. And so, one night, she had left me.

It amazed me even now that she had dredged up the courage to go. She had been like a little songbird, tiny and easily frightened. She must have truly loathed me to find the means to slip away from our rooms in Paris, where we had journeyed with the Brandons during the Peace of Amiens, alone and with a child. She had gone to her lover, a French officer of all people, and he had taken her away.