Silas

Silas was a poet of the Velvet Veil who had never finished a poem. He said he was saving the endings for an occasion. He was perhaps twenty-eight, fair and fine-boned and beautiful in a tired, careless way, as though he had been very handsome once and stopped bothering and it had made no difference, with ink on his fingers and a loosened silk scarf at his throat. He kept high, cold rooms over a bookbinder’s on the river terraces, with books against every wall and a bed heaped with furs, and fed the stove with pages of his own unfinished verse when the wood ran out.

He was one of Carisse’s people, and attention was his trade. He listened to a person as if nobody else had ever listened to them, and then told them, gently, what they had always secretly believed. It was usually very nearly true. That was what made him dangerous, and what made him easy to love.

He met Zarina, still calling herself Sera, at the end of one of Carisse’s salons, and in a quarter of an hour said aloud the thing she had never once said even to herself: that a man who always asks what you want, so that he can be the one to give it, has never let you find out. She stayed away from him for months because of it. After Sabra died she went home with him, and left a kinder man for him without having to choose, and after that the little enamelled box under her window seat was never empty, because Silas filled it.

Whether he loved her is a question nobody who knew him could answer. He may have done. He may not have known the difference.

He read her an old poem from the southern coast, the first night, about a woman who builds a boat out of the doors of her father’s house. He never told her how it ended.