he lay fully awake but motionless and silent, as if reality were a tigress who might overlook him if he was sufficiently quiet. He could no longer escape the brusque, morose-looking man with a black leather bag who came to check his temperature and change the bandaging wrapping his skull. He could ignore his questions, though, and lock his jaw against the steaming bowls of broth set on the bedside table. He could also ignore the squat little woman who trundled in sometimes to badger him about his daughter—was he the father? Why had he taken her up that mountain, alone? Where was her mother?—by the crude but effective means of pressing his injured skull into the mattress until the pain and darkness swallowed him up again.
(Among the many things that haunt me about my own cowardice, perhaps the worst is the knowledge of what your mother would’ve said if she’d seen me then. I took a bitter satisfaction in the thought that she was gone, and I could not therefore disappoint her.)
Yule woke some days or weeks later to find a stranger sitting at his bedside—a wealthy-looking man in a black suit, blurred slightly in his squinting vision.
“Good morning, sir,” the man said pleasantly. “Tea? Coffee? Some of this rather vicious bourbon these mountain savages drink?”
He closed his eyes.
“No? Wise choice, my friend, there’s a whiff of rat poison about it.” Yule heard a tinkle and splash as the stranger poured himself a measure. “The proprietor here tells me you were addled in the accident, that you haven’t said two words together since they dragged you in here. He adds that you’re stinking up his best room, though I find the word ‘best’ to be highly flexible in this case.”
Yule did not answer.
“He went through your things, of course, or at least such things as could be fished from the strange wreckage on the mountaintop. Rope, canvas, salted fish, rather odd clothing. And bundles and bundles of pages written in some kind of gibberish, apparently, or code. The town is neatly divided into those who believe you’re a foreign spy sending missives back to the French—except who ever heard of a colored spy?—and those who think you were perfectly mad prior to your head injury. Personally, I suspect neither.”
Yule began pressing his head against the straw-stuffed mattress. Small, fizzing constellations burst against his eyelids.
“Enough, boy.” The man’s voice changed, shedding its unctuous skin as if dropping a fur coat to the floor. “Has it occurred to you to wonder why you are sleeping in a nice warm room, benefiting from the dubious skills of the local doctor, rather than dying slowly in the street? Did you think it was the goodwill of the natives?” He laughed, short and sneering. “Goodwill doesn’t extend to penniless, tattooed Negroes—or whatever you are. I’m afraid it’s entirely my will—and my money—that keeps you so comfortable. So I think”—and Yule felt an ungentle grip turn his chin toward the stranger—“you owe me your fullest attention.”
But Yule found himself far past any of the usual bounds of social convention and reciprocation, and his primary thought was that his path toward the perfect darkness of death would be much faster without this man’s intervention. He kept his eyes closed.
There was a pause. “I am also making weekly payments to a certain Mrs. Cutley. Should I cease to do so, your daughter would be tossed on a train to Denver and stuck in a state orphanage. She’d either grow up lice-ridden and mean, or die young of consumption and loneliness, and no one in this world would care which.”
That pottery-shard feeling stabbed his chest again, accompanied by a kind of silent shout in his skull that sounded very much like Adelaide’s voice saying Over my dead body.
Yule’s eyes opened. The dim setting-sun light felt like several hundred needles inserted into his skull, and at first all he could do was blink and gasp. The room came slowly into focus: small, grubby, furnished in rough-cut pinewood. His bed was a knot of stained sheets. His own limbs, emerging from the tangle at careless, random angles like debris from a flood, looked thin and wasted.
The stranger was watching him, eyes pale as dawn, jade-glass tumbler in one hand. Yule licked his cracked lips. “Why?” he asked. His voice was lower and rougher than it had been before, as if he’d replaced his lungs with rusting iron bellows.
“Why have I acted so magnanimously on your behalf? Because I happened to