“Then why—”

“Please, Arabella, as you love me believe me there’s nothing … I must be …” I stepped out onto the terrace—and vomited suddenly in one hot gush and splatter. The sound was a gash on the still afternoon.

“Jacob, for pity’s sake come in. You’re sick. ” Some relief, naturally, at the recurrence of a physical symptom: Better my guts than my soul, than me .

“I’m all right,” I said, straightening, searching for my handkerchief. “That helped. Disgusting. Forgive me. Please, just let me be awhile. Let me walk over to Charles’s. I’ll stay there tonight and tomorrow everything will be different, I promise. Just give me this one night to clear my head.” I could hear the precise degree by which my voice didn’t sound right. My body laboured under invisible soft weights. With a superhuman effort I hauled the version of myself she needed to the surface, turned to her, saw hope ignite in her eyes, took her hands in mine. “Don’t think what you’ve been thinking,” I said. “You wrong both of us in thinking it. Something is troubling me, something … On my life, Arabella, I can’t stay here tonight. You must let me go. Tomorrow everything—I swear everything will be different. Please. Let me go.”

For days I’d been unable to meet her eye. Now I did and saw she was still warm and open to me. Her look was of steady entreaty, to return to collusion, to renew the silent vows, to recognise her. Summer had brought out a sprinkle of freckles under her dark lower lashes. In Lausanne we’d lain stunned on the bed after first lovemaking. She’d said, Goodness me, that was nice. “Whatever it is, Jake,” she said, “you know I’m equal to it. I’m not asking you this, I’m telling you something you already know.”

For a moment I felt completely normal. It was her. It was me. We shared an outrageous exemption. The distance between us burned away. These last days had been an absurd inversion.

“I know,” I said—but the blood rushed hardening up from the soles of my feet and I saw the girl’s thigh like a disgorged treasure of rubies and felt already though it was barely three in the afternoon the moon’s slow-ascending joy. I turned and walked away across the lawn.

11

THEY’VE KILLED THE foxes.

I heard something outside and went to look. The severed heads had been left on the back porch facing the door, two with eyes closed, one—the youngest, ears too big for his head, like a bat—with eyes open. A single set of footprints in the snow from the tree line twenty feet away. We can come all the way up to the house without you hearing . I stood in the doorway and looked out into the woods. Nothing visible, but the darkness full of consciousness. I assumed Ellis. To stave off boredom and impress the juniors. To refer to Wolfgang. To advertise the product. I’m supposed to be the leering villain, he’d said back at the Zetter. If this was his work it would’ve been done with affectless efficiency. The man’s centre of self is remote. I imagine Grainer watching his protégé in action and conceding with a sad fracture inside that the torch has passed to a strange new bearer.

I’ll bury the heads in the morning. It’s too cold now, and it won’t make any difference to the foxes.•

It was six miles cross-country to Charles’s, and I stopped—doubled-up, glazed, queasy, for periods bereft of any kind of will—many times en route. When I lay down on it the land was a continuation of my skin, full of frantic whispering life. The WEREWULF engraving shivered from the grass, from the boles of trees, from the air’s buzzing atoms. In a wood on the edge of Charles’s estate I got down on all fours and cooled my hot face in a shallow stream of water-polished pebbles. The wolf’s shoulders flirted with mine, his haunches, the scroll of his tongue. For all this there were interludes of sanity. Enough religion remained so that I went into and out of the belief that this was a punishment, superficially for carnal excess but really for living in a love that rendered God negligible, optional, obsolete. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Yahweh’s First Commandment and one he wasn’t shy of fleshing out—Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God … He had every right to be jealous of Arabella. It wasn’t the fucking, the licking, the sucking, but that with her these acts livened the soul instead of deadening it, elevated being instead of degrading it. Lest ye become as gods yourselves. The serpent’s reading of the Edenic proscription was correct. We were our own divine images, not graven but flesh and blood, and God shrank in the light of our divinity. Christ was born of a virgin and died one himself. What did he know? The truths of the body were ours, not his. Human love didn’t eradicate God, but it put Him into His proper distant second place.

And for this, for thy wretched arrogance, I have turned thee into a monster. At times I half-convinced myself I could hear—in the trees’ susurrations, in the chuckle of water, in the soft clamour of thin air—the Almighty’s condemnation. But the feeling was always displaced by a worse feeling: that where should have been God’s booming petulance was in fact a slab of silence the size of the universe. This intimation, of the night sky like an abandoned warehouse of stars, of the earth heaving up flora and fauna in epic meaninglessness, was a horror so unexpectedly huge I turned back to the conviction of God’s wrath with a kind of relief. Did He who made the lamb make thee?

It was dark when I reached Archer Grange, the two-hundred-year-old pile Charles shared with his mother, older sister, deaf uncle, three bull mastiffs and a staff of twenty-four. Mother and sister were summering in Bath. (A mercy: Lady Brooke disapproved of my mercantile origins and Miss Brooke disapproved of my wife.) I had a struggle with Charles. My story was that Arabella and I had had our first fight, that I’d said absurd hot things and stormed out, that what I needed was a bottle from the Brooke cellar and a bed for the night, that the walk over here had given me time enough to realise I’d been a fool, that tomorrow would see me return in conciliatory penitence. All well and good, but my friend wasn’t blind. I was wet with sweat and shaking. For God’s sake, I looked as if I’d been brawling with a bear. We must have Dr. Giles. A servant would be despatched … I argued him out of it, but the effort nearly killed me. Only the artfully sheepish admission that I’d slipped and fallen in the stream and bruised my knee and the concession that I’d take warm brandy and one of the housekeeper’s legendary herbal compresses to an early bed kept the doctor out of it. Even then Charles insisted on ministering to me himself. Soon to be married, he wanted details of the fictional domestic spat, and while he bound on Mrs. Collingwood’s malodorous poultice I in disbelief bordering hilarity concocted nonsense about my wife’s madcap tastes in interior décor and my irrational reluctance to alter any of Herne House’s furnishings. It was quite a performance. I was in the largest guest bedroom, overlooking the Grange’s ornate front gardens and fountained lawn. The moon would come up over the line of poplars at its edge. Less than an hour. Twice the urge to rip Charles’s face off with my hands nearly got the better of me. Only the brandy—of which I’d drunk half a bottle by the time he left me to my rest—saved him.