1645

There her mistress lies in the bed, gasping like a fish. Sucking at the
air of the world with those dried-up lips, dragging it in, trying to fill
her rusty lungs. It never gets down deep enough to satisfy before she
has to release it, the air escaping through her open mouth in a crackled
wheeze, so that she can try again. She sounds like a pair of
ancient bellows making a final desperate effort to be serviceable.
Nothing to be done to help her. Only she can breathe or not breathe.
Nicole Jamyn sits, hands in her lap, on a stool beside the bed,
not looking, because she doesn’t have to, but also because it hurts
to twist her neck. Her head is heavy. It pains her to let it drop. It
pains her to hold it up. For the most part she sits looking straight
ahead towards the small window opposite, above the desk, trying
to keep her head painlessly balanced on her neck, waiting, and listening
because she can’t help but listen. Nevertheless from time
to time, Jamyn turns – she feels and hears the bones in her neck
crunch unwillingly at the disturbance – and sees the loose skin
around her mistress’s closed eyes tense up with discomfort when
she breathes in. The cold air scours her desiccated lips as though
she were inhaling sand. It must be an automatic response from
the unconscious old woman, but even so Jamyn leans over
painfully, takes up the cloth in the bowl of water, squeezes it out
a little, and dabs at her mistress’s parched mouth in the hope it
will bring some relief. She has no idea whether it helps or not.

It is not as hard sitting at this deathbed as she had imagined.
The few who come to pay their respects call her loyal. A paid servant
is not required to hold a death-watch over the final earthly
struggles of her mistress.
‘She is fortunate to have you, Jamyn,’ they whisper as they
leave.
They call her loyal, but she can see they pity her, supposing
her here because she has nowhere else she could be. A sad creature
sitting with a sad creature. It seems they think that if she had
a choice, another place to go, a family, she would certainly do no
more than what is necessary for her mistress. Only the pathetically
lonely would sit day and night, waiting, keeping vigil with
the depleting soul and skeletal body expiring on the old woollen
mattress beside her stool. They are wrong. Not about her having
nowhere else to be. It is true she has nowhere else, no one else,
but she is here, sleepless and useless, for the same reason that
Piaillon lies curled at the foot of the bed. They both belong with
her. She is their home. They will wait until the end, and after that
they will wait some more. Then Jamyn and Piaillon will remain
together until one or other dies, and at last the last of them will be
alone as neither of them has ever been. The chances are it will be
Jamyn. Piaillon is already blind and her teeth no longer serve. All
she does now is sleep, hardly more quietly than her mistress. She
licks at her food when Jamyn puts a platter with a few soft scraps
beside her on the coverlet. When she needs to relieve herself she
yowls, and Jamyn raises herself slowly from the stool and takes
the cat from the bed and carries her all the way down the four
precipitous flights of stairs to the street. After she has finished,
Piaillon comes back into the house and Jamyn closes the door
behind her, letting the cat follow her back up the stairs while she
hauls herself up to the topmost floor, hand over hand on the rope
that does for a banister. Piaillon climbs as stiff and painfully after
her.
‘Come on, come on, you,’ Jamyn calls in an uninflected trailing
voice to the trailing cat. ‘We’ll get there. Or we won’t.’
She hears occasional creaks behind her. Either a stair suffering
from age as they all are, or the cat feebly complaining at not being
carried. But Jamyn tires on the upward climb, and they arrive at
the door of their dying mistress together. It’s a little exercise for
both of them.
Jamyn also does a bit of shopping. They have to have food, she
and the cat. Although she could now afford to pay a sou to the lad
downstairs to get it for her, she risks the journey away from her
mistress’s side every other morning, perhaps to feel a sour gratification
that the world really is going about its business without
any concern for the predicament of her mistress and herself.
Otherwise she sits next to her failing mistress, her lady, with her
stiff hands in her lap, slowly and slightly raising or lowering her
head occasionally as if it might relieve the pain.
The attic room, with its sloping roof, is sparsely furnished.
Her mistress’s small iron bed with the slight hump of her tiny,
diminishing body under a rough blanket and a grubby but pretty
embroidered coverlet; across the room her work table, once quite
a good piece of furniture but now untouched by polish for years
and scratched and stained with ink. Jamyn is not allowed to disturb
the chaotic jumble of papers and books to keep it looking
nice; plain floorboards, the planks knotted and uneven, what
could be seen of them under the labyrinthine piles of books and
papers that seem to have spilled over and spread from the overburdened
table. It is only possible to cross the room by walking
sideways and around the unorganised stacks of printed and inked
words. The walls are bare except for a crucifix over the bed. In
any case, they don’t offer enough space to get half the stuff off
the floor, even if they had been shelved. Jamyn’s stool is next to
the bed, and in one corner there is a small chest. Opposite the bed
and stool, above the table, set into the sloping roof, there is the
small window through which, when it is open and the uneven
glass does not distort the world, Jamyn can watch clouds move
across a rectangle of sky, or the rain slant across the driving
winter wind. She lets the light come and go as it will unless,
rarely, she has some task to do at night for her mistress that
requires her to light a candle. Her eyes are no good now for
sewing or reading – not that she ever reads in the presence of her
lady. But she does not find the waiting tedious. There is, after all,
a life to consider, the life coming to its end beside her. A difficult
life. Difficult enough to live, but just as difficult for Jamyn to
grasp properly the reason for so much going so wrong. What was
it that made her lady’s impossible necessity so necessary? What
made it impossible? Jamyn was not trained to think by scholars
and professors as he was, but she knows the dying woman’s life
through and through, better even than her mistress, better even
than her own. At least she sees it more clearly than her lady ever
did, and Jamyn, the faithful servant, works very hard to understand
how it was for her mistress. It is the only way she can hope
to understand her own disappointments. So boredom is not a
problem, she has enough to do with the time while she waits.