Later, Jean slept. I did not. With my fingers, I traced the shape of the hole and thought about the voice behind it.
The hole was small, barely a crack in the stones, low down to the floor. I could have run my fingers along it and not noticed, and yet now it could bring me comfort in this darkness.
I rolled away and onto my back, shifting in the patches of damp straw. High above my head, the thin slit of window still showed moon. I held my hands up, and was just able to make out their shape in the faint light.
A voice in the dark. A voice as lost as my own. Whoever was behind that wall could be shifted to my purposes, if I willed it. He had only my voice to follow. He could not tell if I told lies or truth.
He said he had killed a man. Did I believe him? His voice seemed so slight, so faint. And yet men do kill each other sometimes, in cold and calculated ways. That is what a soldier does. I wondered if I feared him. I had known men who seemed weak and gentle, and yet could be terrible in their anger. The fiercest soldier in my father’s regiment had seemed a lisping slip of a thing, but no one crossed him, having seen him in a rage, for he had neither sense nor mercy when pushed too far. Perhaps this boy was such a one.
A voice in the dark—someone to talk to, someone to tell my story to before I died. Because death was to be the end of it, one time or another. So, thinking the matter over carefully, I saw I had no need to fear him, or anything ever again, because I knew the end.
Suddenly I sat straight up, Madame Pommereau’s voice in my head.
A woman who is condemned to death by hanging may escape death by marrying the hangman, or, if there is no hangman, by persuading a man to become the hangman and marry her.
And this, together with the warden’s voice saying, “You’ll not die yet, my girl,” and the vacant hangman’s post.
I paced the floor of my cell, my hands shaking, my feet rustling the straw and here and there grinding on a fragment of broken mirror. If I could make this voice, this soldier, this boy no older than myself, become the hangman and marry me, then I would live. I had thought so long to stay here in my cell until they took me out to die that the possibility of my life given back almost choked me. I steadied myself against the wall, pressing my forehead against the stones. I found I had tears in my eyes, and yet also that I was laughing.
Letting myself slump down to sitting, I hugged my knees against my chest, rocking back and forth. It seemed so easy. I would persuade him to marry me and be the hangman, and they would let me out. I would escape, far from anywhere my mistress or anyone else could find me. I would be free.
Yet married to the hangman. Not only to the hangman, but to a stranger. Was he fearsome, violent, a monstrous creature? Was he timid, afraid of the world, afraid to live? Would he be kind? I saw myself, twenty years from now, in some grim life somewhere, worse even than my mother’s, thinking with longing of the rope that I had missed.
No. Whatever happened, whatever he was, it was better to live. I knew that much.
Yet how could I persuade? I had nothing but my voice to convince him that I was what he wanted, that I could be the life he wanted. And I would have to convince him that it was worth giving up his occupation, his sword, his honor, to have me. I must make him trade in his soldier’s jacket for a mask and a noose, a life reviled and disgraced, for no one is lower than the hangman.
The difficulty of it broke in on me then: I must make this stranger love me, and need me, and I had no way at all of doing it save through words. In his shoes, I would not take such an offer. Yet that was my task.
Words. Words could do much. I knew this. I must have faith in this. When there is only one hope left, when there is only one way out, it does no good to think anything impossible.
I buried my face in the straw and shut my eyes. I must be ready for the morning.
When I slept at last, I dreamed of rope, of keys, and of open doors.