He had had time, perhaps, to recover from his shock. At last she found a chance to take him aside and say how sorry she was, and he grasped her shoulders and said, “No, no, it’s my fault, it’s I who ask pardon of you,” and he hugged her tightly, and the humanity of that embrace washed over them both. Though nothing could be as before, yet they could go on. For the first time in weeks she had no nightmares. But John Fisher sent her letters. She balked to read them, felt the old shadows slamming around her. He was in France. He said she was still his wife. And she was. He claimed he had no wish to see her again. He only wanted money. Even the penmanship made her ill. She gave the letters to Lidia to file away. Then she decided she must witness the execution of Franz Zahlheim. Franz Zahlheim had murdered his young wife with such brutality that he had been sentenced to the kind of torturous public death not seen in Vienna in forty years. His wife had been so beautiful and the murder so gruesome, so entirely without cause, that the public clamored for suffering.
