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Her hands remembered. Her heart was another matter. It kept going back to her opening her door to find him looming above her. And his mouth. And his skin under her palms. The seams of him like rope over silk. Then his hands setting her aside as if she were porcelain he had already cracked.

Unclean.

He had said it the way men say things at gravesides. Then he had walked out of the house into the worst weather of the year. She had heard the footsteps receding, and somewhere a door hung open. At least it sounded like one did.

She dealt.

Thunder broke directly overhead, causing her hands to flinch in surprise. It was so near it went through the floor and into her knees. The candle-flame lay down flat. Under the thunder, inside it, something went in with a bright small sound, a footstep out in the hall.

The door opened and a stranger came into the room.

He came out of the rain like something the lightning had left behind. Soaked through and skeletal, black hair pasted to a white forehead. A greatcoat hanging off him as off a chairback. A face burning from the inside with a thing that was not health.

He was not old. Under the gauntness he was a man of perhaps five-and-thirty, and he was burning. His eyes went around the room glittering, too bright, too quick. His lips were moving before he had fully crossed the threshold. A mutter, up and down, wordless at this distance. The sound of a man saying his prayers.

She looked at his hands before she looked longer at his face. Faces are paint, her father said. Hands keep the ledger. The left hand trailed along the doorframe, long-fingered. The cuff above it was stained. Old marks, brown gone to shadow, scrubbed at and never erased. His right hand held a pistol.

Behind him a second man stepped in and pulled the door to against the draft. Broad, dark, with a servant’s bearing. Water ran off his shoulders in streams and dripped from the hem of his coat onto her floor. He glanced at the furniture, at the storm flashing in the night, at his own feet. He did not glance at her, which told her his presence was reluctant.

She should scream, she supposed. The thought arrived and stood there, useless. The house was full of sleep. The storm was louder than any voice she owned. The pistol was fifteen feet away. Her mother was upstairs along with Lady Archer, and what would they do if they came running?

Her hand wanted to go to her waist, to hover protectively over her belly. She made it lie flat on the baize instead.

Never show the table where you keep your stake.

“Sir,” she said. She was glad her voice came out level. “You have not been invited into my home.”

The stranger stopped. His head came round to her the way an owl’s does, all at once. The muttering ceased. He stared at her. No. He stared at the part of the room with her in it. A housebreaker looks at the plate, at the candlesticks, at the rings on your fingers. This man looked at the walls, the chairs, the pianoforte, the burnt-out fire.

“So,” he said. “It lives here.”

His English was careful and clipped and came through an accent she could not place at once. French, but not France, somehow. French with more to it. He began to move along the edge of the room. Not toward her. Around her, and past the sofa. Those long fingers trailed over the furniture as he went. The mutter started up again beneath his breath. Now she could hear that half of it was not English at all.

“Carpets,” he said. “A pianoforte. Armchairs.” He touched the wing chair by the hearth. Damian’s chair. The one he sat in buttoned to the throat with the newspapers he did not read. The long fingers moved on the leather almost tenderly. “It sits here, I think. Yes. It sits in a chair, by a fire, like a squire.” He laughed, one dry note, and looked at her sidelong across the candlelight. “Madame. You will forgive the intrusion. I have crossed a sea and I could not wait upon morning.”

“You are speaking,” she replied, “of my husband.”

“Husband.” He said the word as if he had tasted something spoiled. Then again, softer, marveling, worse. “Husband. It has got itself a wife.”

He took up his circling, quicker now. The pistol swung loose at the end of his arm, forgotten as an umbrella. The words began to pour.

“Madame, you misapprehend. You could not do otherwise. You have been given false coin. There is no husband. There is my work. Opus meum. Mine. I made it in a cellar with these hands.”

The free hand spread itself, white and stained, into the candlelight.

“I closed what the guns opened. I stitched every stitch. I called it back across the river Styx, and while my back was turned it climbed off my slab and put on a coat and walked away. Walked off my slab, madame … and into a barony.”

Ophelia frowned, trying to make sense of his mutterings.

“Dead,” the madman said, to the window, to the storm, as if they were two men at a club. “You must understand this part, madame, or the rest is nothing. We brought them in carts from the great battle. Meat. He was under the others, quite dead. None deader. I chose him for the shoulders. Mortuus. Mortuus erat. And there was a storm.” He turned. The lightning took him and whitened the room, and his black eyes were fixed on her, exalted, streaming demonic light.

She had no Latin to speak of. Some words announce themselves. Dead is dead in any tongue.

He crossed the room to her then, fast, and folded himself down over the card table so suddenly that she gripped the edge of it. The wood bit her palms. He folded down until his face hung above her candle, lit from beneath, the eye-sockets pooled with shadow, the too-bright eyes floating in them. Rain dripped off his hair and hissed on the flame. Wax jumped. She smelled wet wool and something sweet underneath it that did not belong in a drawing room.

“The eye,” he said.

She said nothing.