"No."

"It is a great favor you offer, Mac." My heart was wrung to see how he picked up his book-assuredly a Bible-and carried it to that place where the light from the deep embrasure made a lopsided oblong on the floor. As he tilted the open pages I asked him what he read.

"The first and the best," said he. His whole manner, as he hunched over his holy book, was of a poor pecked thing. Yet when I finally understood which part of Genesis he was taken with, I did not know what to do with the knowledge. For the place he went to for his comfort was violent and bloody-those alleged events I had once been forced to illustrate. It was the ghastly story of Abraham. "Take your son," he read from his Bible, "your only son-yes, Isaac, whom you love so much-and go into the land of Moriah. Sacrifice him there." He grinned at me.

He closed his book and held it against his chest in some awful imitation of a priest.

"I will pay you plenty," he said.

I thought Abraham a craven fool, his god a Lord or worse.

The condemned man came close and he had a very nasty breath to him, an effluvium like sick, sour milk, the spirit of a dying child. From his moon-bright eyes I saw the truth-he wished a stranger to kill his son.

"Five hundred dollars," said he.

I had no proper word of answer, just a black bag full of air.

"Five hundred, sir. Not paper. No Bank of Zion. There'll be no discount here."

"He was a witness," I cried. "You devil."

"I am a devil," he said, "and a rich devil too."

I slapped at him, but he was swift as a frog.

"Oh, no need to rush," he said, now crouched like a wrestler, hands on his wide knees. "You've got a long night to think about it." He dared to smile, flicked his tongue, and I pulled myself back into the dark, as far as I could with my white nubbly spine hard against the stones. I could feel the mad creature slithering around the cell below, hear his tiny voice reading his damned Bible. I would not spend the night here. I would be murdered in my sleep.

I slipped down from the bunk, and he placed his Bible on the table and stepped back toward the light to give me the clear benefit of his smile.

"You murdered his mother," I said. "And your little boy was the witness."

He shook himself at me like a dog.

"That's why they'll hang you."

He purred, but surely not. In any case, too strange.

"You think I will murder him for money?"

"Oh, I never said murder," said the fellow, throwing up his big white washer maid's hands. "Good heavens. I never said that. You must only contrive to take the little chap away from here. He's a good-looking little fellow. You ask the warders. They never stop talking about him."

He cocked his head and looked at me with one eye, as stupid as a leghorn hen. "Oh there is no need to murder him," said he, "just take him with you when you go." He gave his pale feathered head a little shake.

I could not look at him. He tapped something metal against the bunk.

"I have the money, some of it. The rest I will have brought. They'll turn a blind eye so you can visit the lad-so to speak," he said. "Don't you think?" He insisted, but weakly, as if somehow waking and not knowing where he was.

God might have pitied him but he was vile and I wished to stop forever the bad milk smell of him, and I launched myself at him with my large strong hands around his neck, not guessing at his own strength until he near broke my wrists and got me in a hold around my chest and set to crush the life from me. No sound escaped me. My lungs were filled with dirty milk.

"Take him away from me," he shouted as he killed me. "Take the fool away."

And then he dropped me on the floor and set at me with his fists and all the time he begged to be prevented from murdering me and he wept and struck me repeatedly around the head and neck.

I was unconscious when the warders came to drag me farther down into the darkness of the Piranesi pit.

THEY THREW me in the "crying room," so called because its door was bound with hay and hooper's steel, the lowest level of the Tombs, reserved for Negroes and that one small boy who had been a witness to his mother's death. I plucked and pulled at the hard-bound straw so it fell and floated, requiring only a flint to set the black and leaden air afire.

My beloved Mathilde was asleep in her bed, the sweet haze of moonlight on her hair. I had loved her and hated her and loved her once again, so now I wept for that boardinghouse on Broadway as if it were my childhood home. How many such homes had I invented-inns, church porches, printeries, crofters' cottages, stone beehives built by men in ancient time? I thought of the boy in his nearby cell, of Ganymede in the engraving after Rembrandt, the eagle's talons gripping the peeing baby's arms, and all below the terror of the eternal abyss and, in my mind, black-eyed Rembrandt with his eagle in the studio, dead of death and threaded through with cold cruel wire to make a living likeness, to bear false witness, to hold the dead wings high.

Such a child had I once been, a rabbit rug around my shoulders, tramping behind the Frenchman, down past Mist Tor, Over Tor, Sweet Tor, Yelverton where it began to rain, and all the low gray sky bled into the horizon and folded itself in the direction of my aching feet, me with my cloak, him with his one arm and his face scraped close so the bones of his cheeks shone through his living skin. In drear drizzle rabbit stink we arrived at Roborough Inn where my master spied a diligence waiting in the yard.

Monsieur walked into the yard and became a mute, rolling his eyes, poking in his mouth, raising his eyebrows at me.

"Comprends-tu?" he whispered. And thrust me stumbling forward.

I comprehended he dare not speak the language of our enemies, the French. And also that he wished the diligence to take us into Plymouth and so he steered me, claw on shoulder until he winkled out the coachman sitting in the stables puffing on his pipe.

The Frenchman stamped his feet to express frustration at his own dumb mouth.

To the driver I said, "My da would like you to drive us down to Plymouth."

"I've got them," the driver said, meaning that he had a party come from Plymouth to lunch at the inn.

Monsieur produced a gold coin from his mouth and dried it on my shoulder. The coachman watched him, squinting all the while. He could not have understood the grunts and gestures, but he knew a sov when it was offered.

Very well, he could take us while the gentlemen had their lunch.

I had not known what war might mean until we got to Plymouth. Just past the Guild Hall in Wimple Street I heard the constant bugle calls and the tramp of soldiers, sailors shouting in the alleys of the Pool. Everybody looked as if they would kill everybody else. Poor tattered French prisoners of war shuffled beside our diligence, so close I could have stolen a hat if I had no heart. My giant companion boasted an idiot's smile which he used to persuade the driver to take us right into Sutton Pool where the great battleships pushed their noses into the crowded center of the town. The driver was then under the impression he had honored his contract, but no, he must up to that eminence they call the Hoe. This Hoe was green and hard and naked of all trees and faced the open ocean from which blew a cold hard salty wind.

Very well, but fair is fair. The driver had an important member of the corporation abandoned in the inn, but Monsieur withheld his coin. Leaving the coachman to sulk, he strode to and fro on those windblown gravel paths atop the Hoe, and I was held hard beside him.

"What's he up to?" shouted the driver of the diligence. "What's his game?"

Monsieur was surveying Plymouth, Devonport, Stonehouse, StokeTemples, and those magnificent floating castles which had so recently set his fellow countrymen afire. If he was not a spy, he looked like one. I watched him wipe his watery eyes as he slowly took in the churches, towers, steeples, colonnades, porticoes, terraces, gardens, groves, orchards, meadows, and the green fields cut by estuaries. He fitted his claw around my neck. He shifted his attention to the gibbets on the lower path below the Hoe, on one of which there hung a man or what had been a man. I thought I could smell the gibbet but it was more likely the foul air blowing from the Hulks. I did not know these ships were prisons yet, but would see them later-floating hellholes draped with bedding, clothes, weed and rotting rigging-but this was the odor of the king's prisons. God save him. I will not.