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“Does it help?” I say.

“One tapestry? No. It’s a start. You’d need nine.” She hammers something. “It’s better already, listen, say something.”

“Something.”

“Yes. Hear that? It came back a bit warmer.” She looks down at me from the ladder, delighted, and forgets for a whole second what she is looking at, and then remembers, and her smile goes, and she covers it by talking about hooks.

I have been looked at with that expression once before, in a room above a fish market, through a mask.

The linen press is at the end of the corridor on the bedroom floor.

Grey sheets on the middle shelves. The white ones are at the bottom, folded in threes, and they are for laying out the dead. Malo changes them every spring. Nobody in this house has ever needed one and he changes them anyway, and I have never asked him to stop.

The mask is behind them at the back, wrapped in a square of sailcloth.

Gilt over wood, fine as lace, lighter than it looks. It is the mask I wore to the ball. It is older than this house, and I did not make it.

It covers me from the brow to the cheekbones. What it changes is everything else. Anyone who looks at me while I wear it sees a gold mask on a living man.

I keep it for the work. Nobody answers the Ankou’s questions, and nobody stays in a room with him. When I have to walk among people, I wear it.

I wore it to Morlac so that I could buy the sale register without emptying the hall. I was standing by the north wall, waiting for the auctioneer, when I heard a woman telling a frightened girl to shake her arms out. Then she turned round and looked at me.

I take it out into the corridor where the window is. I keep no mirror in this house. I put the mask on and look at my reflection in the glass.

Gold across the eyes. Below it, a mouth with color in it, and a jaw the right length. Skin that would take the sun. Behind the gold, eyes with white in them. A man could walk into a market square with that face and nobody would find somewhere else to stand.

The voice does not change. My hands are still mine, and the cold is still the cold. Under it I am the same, holding a piece of wood against my face in a corridor.

What I am about to do is a lie, and I know it.

She wanted this face. She had it for one night and ran from it at four in the morning. Then she chose mine, in front of two hundred people. I want her too much to do the right thing with that.

Downstairs the hammering stops. Six hooks. She counted them out loud.

I wait until Malo is in bed. I wait until the tapestry has been up long enough for her to have talked to it twice more. I wait until the candle under her door has been out for an hour.

Then I go along the corridor with the burying linen folded away behind me and a lie on my face, and I knock.

ENORA

It is not Malo at my door. Malo knocks like a man announcing a fact.

I have been lying in the dark for an hour with the blanket still hung over the door and my ears working, because they go on working when the rest of me has given up.

I get up and light the candle so I can find the latch. The flags are cold. I open the door.

Gold mask. Grey coat. Filling the corridor.

“You did not sleep last night,” he says.

Four words, and then two more, and they come across two feet of air and stay where he puts them, and my whole body goes off like a bell somebody has kicked.

I know.

I know in less time than it takes to say it. I knew on the fish market floor with the auctioneer telling me to name him, and I knew in a stone room with a registrar pretending to sort a folio, and he stood in front of me and said no with his own mouth, and I said fine, and went to his house, and ate his eel.

And here he is at my door in a wooden face, come to be somebody else at me.