His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof: 

—­Don’t mope over it all day, he said.  I’m inconsequent.  Give up the moody brooding.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead: 

    And no more turn aside and brood
   upon love’s bitter mystery
   for Fergus rules the brazen cars.

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed.  Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet.  White breast of the dim sea.  The twining stresses, two by two.  A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords.  Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green.  It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters.  Fergus’ song:  I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords.  Her door was open:  she wanted to hear my music.  Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside.  She was crying in her wretched bed.  For those words, Stephen:  love’s bitter mystery.

Where now?

Her secrets:  old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer.  A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl.  She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the terrible and laughed with others when he sang: 

    I am the boy
    that can enjoy
    invisibility.

Phantasmal mirth, folded away:  muskperfumed.

    And no more turn aside and brood.

Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.  Memories beset his brooding brain.  Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament.  A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening.  Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul.  On me alone.  The ghostcandle to light her agony.  Ghostly light on the tortured face.  Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees.  Her eyes on me to strike me down.  Liliata rutilantium te confessorum TURMA CIRCUMDET:  Iubilantium te virginum chorus EXCIPIAT.

Ghoul!  Chewer of corpses!