From a window at the long end of the Bramhall Library, she saw the Duke splayed out on the bricks of Pollard Square, calling to her with his eyes. My girl, he seemed to say, my end is here and I wish to die with an acceptable view. She meant to ignore his plaintive face, and continue reading, but her book began to wrinkle and pull itself away the way water shrinks and bends a paper sheaf.

And so she thought she would.

His hand was rough like cracked clay and he fell into her weight. They walked together and she brought him up the marble steps into the Library’s potent scent and down some halls to the Winston Room. “Here,” he said, “bring me to the window with the dull bright glow. I want to die gazing out into the middle distance,” and the middle distance grew until it was almost everywhere, stretching into a tinted glaze that spread his feeble body like a zeroed thing.