He knew it was the beginning of the end – after all these years. He began to say silently an act of contrition, while they picked the brandy bottle out of his pocket, but he couldn’t give his mind to it. That was the fallacy of the deathbed repentance – penitence was the fruit of long training and discipline: fear wasn’t enough. He tried to think of his child with shame, but he could only think of her with a kind of famished love – what would become of her? And the sin itself was so old that like an ancient picture the deformity had faded and left a kind of grace. The Red Shirt smashed the
...more
