I remember very well the feeling of Laurent's hands fluttering, touching my face, whispering, "You have to stop screaming. Dasius, people will hear, people will come. Don't you remember what happened in Paris when you were a young man? Please, please," begging me to be quiet. 

I took in a breath so as to scream again, pressed against the hardwood floor beneath him. He covered me with his body, as if he could subsume me, make me a part of him.

"Dasius, they came and took your brother, the people. If you don't stop screaming, stop screaming, people will come and take you from me. People will hear, Dasius. I won't be able to protect you, please," touching me, speaking of the time in 1501 when an angry mob had broken down our door in Paris, the indelicacy of Nicky's madness, which had laid a trail straight to our door, of retrieving my brother in a sorry state, and fleeing to the countryside. 

"It's not me you want," I sobbed, turning beneath him, pushing him away by the chin when he leaned toward my face. "It's not me you worry about."

"Why do you pretend that I don't love you?" he demanded, holding onto my protesting wrist. His hair was wild around his head, leonine curls pulled by a lover.

"I'm going," I told him. "You killed my brother. Everything is clear now. You've killed us all. We are all corpses. We are all dead. We are still dying. You won't have me. It's too late. You've killed the boy I loved. I am born again. I am new. I am born again. I am new," repeating it and repeating it.

"You won't go," he whispered. "Where will you go?"

"I want to go home."

He tried to put me to bed. We struggled. But he did not say much. Privately, he had been having this disagreement with me for months. He had already said what he meant to say. I buttoned my shirt, and he unbuttoned it. I put on my coat and he slipped it off me, threw it away. I tried to slap him and he grabbed my wrists, and when I went to scream again, he pushed me to the floor in my room, said, "You think I don't know how to undress a man? If you will go, take nothing I have given you," shouting at me, "Go to your Mother, to nature, naked," and when I tried to bite him, he headbutted me in the jaw, and I found that his forehead was very hard. 

He had said to me before, about that time, whenever he brought it up, laughing, "Am I laughing about it now? I am not laughing at you, Dasius, it is just that I am still a little hysterical from that time."

I was not able to see that he was hysterical. All that I could understand was that I wanted to go and he could not stop tearing at me with his hands, grabbing onto an arm, a hemline, my hair. He chased me into the scullery, where of course there was nothing sharp because I had removed any knives long ago. I had forgotten it, happily deluded, that in those long years of near penury, he had often tried to cut himself, or achieved it. I looked for a knife to threaten him with, though I knew there were none. He knew what I was after, and when I turned around from my searching, there he was, like a thin blond corpse, with his sword. There were blooming on his chin, his neck, his collarbones, his arms, bruises in the shape of my hands, and I tilted up my face against the creeping of shame. A wild wind blew in me, twisting my fingers into ready claws, my breath quivering like a reed.

"What?" I choked, throat tight from his palm briefly lighting there in our struggle. "Is this the end?"

But he was not speaking, head low on his neck, sword in one hand, as if it were a short knife he might stab me with. 

I took in a long breath, ready to talk to him about Jean Aureil, to say that he would have my head off, like he'd had my master's. Carve the flesh of this beast, I wanted to tell him, as though I were the devil in Holofernes, but he spoke before I could, his voice very soft and shaking as if cold.

"Je suis vous le donne. Prend cette vie. Je vais mourir de toute facon." I am giving it to you. Take this life. I will die anyway. 

"Do what you want to do," I told him. 

"Tell me where you are going," he said, very gently, enunciating his words. His throat opened and closed with the wetness of blood, of tears. "Will I follow you, no. Only, please tell me so that when I dream of you I can find you."

How I hated him. I can hardly believe it now. He gave me his swordbelt. I let him attach it, stilled by his cowed gentleness, pleased to rule him a moment through his grief. He showed me how to mount the sword properly, securely, and he kissed both of my cheeks good bye. I did this as if dreaming it, suddenly numb, in a depthful sadness that I could not understand at that age. It came from so deep in me that I did not recognize it as emotion, but rather a lack of it, an outpouring of a constant depression I had known for many years. 

"Please don't go?" he offered, one last time, stroking dust away from my coat, straightening my lapels. I could see that he loved me, in the tenderness of his features, in the shaking of his voice, but I thought that I felt disdain. I didn't know that it was desperation, distress at my not being able to see him if I went. I didn't speak and so he said, "Dasius, if you should encounter danger, cut them down. Please, do not hesitate. Your safety is more important than their lives. Do not throw away the sword for propriety. Please, dove." 

So I left him without a word, and him who cried out then, an inhuman, private wailing, which I could hear through the shut windows. I could hear it down the street, as I walked further on. Perhaps it was in my head, and perhaps no one could have heard it but me. Sometimes in my dreams, I hear it, and it causes me deeply felt distress, and in those times I fly out to California to see his body, and say hallo to it. Not for long, as if he might, dead, take comfort that I have come. What wailing -- it drops the brain into cold water, this wail of despair, of fearful dying.

I took a rented coach north, out of the city. Leis has told you that it was only a few days or so until he woke from bleeding, but I stayed out for the greater part of a week. As the fullness of the moment with Laurent emptied from my body, there was left only regret, and then a strange contentment. When I ran out of what little money I had on my person, I slept in haylofts. It was quite like when you were made, Mini. You asked me if I had a place to sleep in our house, there near Rouen. I did have, but Laurent was changeable then as you know, and so very often, to avoid a slap, I slept in the barn a little ways off, with the hay sticking me through my clothes. So sleeping above livestock felt a comfort to me, listening to the soft lowing of cows and watching the sun rise through small open windows. Living in this way, even for a short time, comforted me. 

But I simmered, you see. I felt that sense of contentment, as if I had spent these days in coming to a peace with the prospect of my own death. A breeze on my face, as I walked along a low sheep fence, whispered to me, "This is your last breeze. That is why it is so perfect." And I did not think "yes" at all, or anything. I thought, "I cannot go on" and it seemed alright. I thought, who has prevented you from living a good life, the one God made you to lead? Thinking of killing him, Leis, produced a pleasurable burning in my belly, between my hip bones, a bubbling in my head. If he is dead, I shall be relieved of his presence, of the disturbance to my equilibrium. I thought, if he is dead, surely, Laurent will kill me as well for murdering handsome, sainted chouchou. Pet. And it would be good, or it wouldn't be good. It would be nothing at all, which would be everything there is. 

The image of Leis's face, of his staring doll eyes on the floor filled me with longing, and with dread, and with fear. Surely, no one had ever been this lonely before, I thought, surely no one could stand this. I said, "God, if I kill myself, will you forgive me?" and I knew He wouldn't. "God, I am already a murderer. If I kill him, it won't be for me only. I promise," I told God, lying half-asleep in hay. 

There was no home for me to go home to. Perhaps, more than anything, that is why I decided to do it. I thought, before, at least, I had been content with my fate, to feel that I deserved nothing better, wanted nothing better. Surely, this is an unbearable hurt, I cried to myself, when I dreamed of his face, of his gentle touch, and woke in physical pain at the loss of the dream. 

And I thought, I will go back to Paris. I must needs reset my head upon my shoulders, to be among people. Let me clear my head and be rid of these thoughts which come only when I am so very alone and wretched. But did I choose to go where I would not be known? No, you will know that I chose to go to Valentin's. And soon enough, I found myself in his room, and naked, and letting him touch me.

It had been only ten days or so since I had seen him, but he was much changed. When he came close, I sighed, and he was bigger than me, taller, broader, so when he laid me back on his coverlet, to be in his ailing arms felt primordially safe. When I say he was changed, I mean that he was dying, and that he was aware of it. 

To be pale in that time was the mode, and if make up alone were not enough, a small dab of arsenic on the tongue would produce a luminous whiteness. But he had become pale to the point of obvious illness, and he said, "Am I handsome to you?" appealing to me with his dark eyes, and I said, "Yes," because death was my paramour then, and I loved it for being so near to me. The idea of its looming enchanted me, and being in Valentin's arms I felt in the embrace of the reaper's silks.

"Do you think that it will be alright?" lovely death said to me, Valentin.

"I think that you will die, and that you ought to."

"Oh, what should I do?" 

For just a moment, I wanted him. The infection had heated him, and he smelled of sweat and the sweetness of rot. Who he was revolted me, but I wanted his practiced intimacy, and felt weak to the atmosphere. But he whispered to me that he could not please me as a man, that his body had been failing him, and he began to weep. 

"It is all you have to offer," I whispered to him, "the pleasures of your body."

"God, that young devil did not tell me you were cruel. You have a soft voice but you are so hard."

"Devil?" I asked, bent over his body, breathing deeply of his chest, my nose pressed against his skin. Those delicate scents of rose and powder were gone, and he was only Valentin, not yet thirty. I felt a trembling in my body which I didn't understand, a delicate quivering of the throat, of tears, brought near by the revelation of desire. How I did not understand then what I wanted, oh soul. I thought, "He is only a man," and dying, and yet of such good form. How I did not know what I wanted from young men, and haunted myself with thoughts of their ability to give me grace rather than that greater thing, that rarer, love. How I thought I wanted them sainted, rather than flesh.

"You're not like them. You're different. Please," he whispered. 

"Please?"

"I want to die. I have nothing to give you. I'm very afraid."

"Why do you call him 'devil'?"

There were the signs of a struggle in his dark room. I could see the outline of a broken chair, and curtains weakly torn from the windows. He was no longer strong enough to be violent, but there are ways the body suffers under deeply felt emotion. How intimately I know it. His muscles tensed against my skin.

I swallowed and closed my eyes, listening to the blood churning in his belly. 

"There is a fete at salon de robins tomorrow, that old magistrate's house. Do you think that he will go there? Oh it is a grand bash spitting directly in the face of austerity. That old man is always overdoing things. But La Perle has always liked him better than me. Oh, do you think he will go?" He had become restive under my hand. He told me that he wanted to write Laurent a letter. "Beautiful one, maybe he will go to the fete. Help me." 

"Are you not angry with him? For abandoning you?"

"The devil keeps him. Surely, that is the only reason he will not come. You see, because I am dying, and he knows," Valentin gasped, lucid though seeming to dream, "because he knows everything. Every thought in my head, he sees it. Dasius, he promised me when I was a boy that he would stay with me until I died. I am dying, I will see him. He said that he would give me a glorious death. Surely, the boy has a hold on him. Surely, you can help me. I am only asking for what has been promised. Do you think of releasing La Perle? Do you? What do you think of? Why are you here? If he has turned from me, help me die in his service. Get me my glory." 

I did not speak with Valentin much after that. At first, I didn't know what I would do, and then I did, and knew that it had been in me all along. And I was not mad when I decided it. I felt almost as if to make a decision were not necessary, because I had seen the face of it in the hayloft, and its comfort had lulled me to sleep. And because it is written, it is unconscionable that I should lie to you, because I have lied to Leis in the past, in service of my pride. When I decided to poison Leis, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had become capable of wanting him dead, and filled with the determination to see it through.

And for the first time in months, having decided it, knowing it and embracing it as if it were a body, I slept in a state of complete bliss.