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Winge lies waiting for death on the floorboards of his grim and dusty room. He missed his footing while making his way to the bed and fell awkwardly, shattering his tuberculosis-riddled hip.

He welcomes death. The business with Daniel Devall was finished a week ago, and his few affairs – such as they were – are in order. All the same, he would very much have liked to make it to the bed. The feel and smell of fresh, crisp linen are two of very few pleasures left to him. He thinks then of Epictetus, who said that wealth consists not in many possessions, but in having few wants, and tries vainly to cease wanting.

He had tried calling for help, but all that came out was a cough. There are many hours left until morning, when the maid will return to make up his fire, but with luck he will be dead before then.

He needs to piss. The humdrum pain in his bladder – surprisingly – holds its own against that in his hip and in his lungs, which are screaming that his death is near. He could piss into his breeches, or with some additional pain, he could open them and piss on the floor. Perhaps he could crawl to the chamber pot – frustratingly out of reach – and find a way to use it from one of the limited number of lying positions he is able to maintain. Or he could hold it in. He is aware that this is the last choice he will ever make, and so for now he chooses to hold it - both the piss and the decision - because if he chooses not to, he will be done with choice forever.

When death comes to him, it comes not as before, as a vast, black abyss, but in the dark skirts of a stout woman. She picks him up easily, and walks with him down an endless grey tunnel. Much time seems to pass, and the pain does not abate. Winge fears that this is his eternity. He feels his bladder loosen and the piss, momentarily warm, then cold and clammy against his thighs.

Winge slides from unconsciousness to semi-consciousness. The angel of death has taken the face of his wife, and she is wiping the sweat from his face.

'Cecil?' she says. 'Are you awake?'

The realisation that he is alive creeps over him with horror. So he must go through all that again, then. He coughs, once, and the pain shatters through his body and into his hip, so that for a few moments he can think of nothing else. He holds his breath so as not to cough again.

'Do you need more opium?'

More? Ah yes. He recognises that fog dulling his mind and senses. He breathes and coughs, and after the initial explosion of agony, is able to nod his head that yes, he does need more opium.

After some time, he manages to speak, expressing an indignation he does not feel that Maria should have come to him, against his wishes and direct request.

'I'm in trouble,' she says quietly, and takes his silence as an invitation to go on. 'The corporal has tired of me and taken another mistress, leaving me … well … as you see me.'

That is a pity. Winge had thought him a good man. Still, it is no reason for her to have plucked him out of the grave. She will be a widow of means. Despite the child that grows in her belly, there will be no shortage of suitors, and it will be easier for her now she had tasted a man other than him. He feels his lip twist in disgust at the turn of phrase his mind had chosen. Still he does not speak.

'And the house …' She bites her lip, looking down at her hands. 'He persuaded me to mortgage it before he … before he left. And he took the money.'

Despair wells up in his chest. She never used to be so foolish.

'I have nothing, Cecil. I am staying with a cousin – I've been there for a fortnight now – but she is not rich, and she has another baby on the way. Besides, her husband …'

He does not want to know what that meant. At last he speaks. 'And you think that I'm in a position to help you?' He would perhaps have laughed if it wouldn't have made him start coughing again. A hopeless laugh.

She looks up from her lap, straight at him, and her eyes brighten a little. 'You can,' she says. 'Before she married, my cousin was a schoolteacher. She can put in a word for me with the headmistress, and there will be a position for me. For … a respectable widow, rather. Not for such as I am at present.'

'And so you wish to pretend a reconciliation?'

'No.' She speaks with vehemence. 'I wish a true reconciliation.'

'It has been a long time since I have been able to be a husband to you, Maria.'

'So you kept telling me,' she says, bitterness in her voice. 'It may be true now, but it was not true then, not in the sense you meant it.'

'But–'

'I watched your deft hands day after day as you took that watch of yours apart and put it back together, and I longed to feel those hands on my body. You had it in you to bring a woman to pleasure, but instead you withdrew your touch. And far worse, you withdrew your mind from me, your conversation, your confidences, and your love.'

'Never that, Maria. All I did, I did to spare you.'

She snorts. 'And look where it got me.'

He starts coughing again, and she brings the clean chamber pot to his chin. He holds it while she gently lifts him and adds two more pillows so can sit half upright. The coughing eases. He notices then he has a new nightshirt on and warm stockings, that his body is clean and that the stench of his death is partly masked by the scent of expensive soap. The nightshirt is not one of his. It is longer, and it is better ironed, with the cuffs turned up in a fancy style: the work of the corporal's housekeeper.

When he is done coughing, she takes the chamber pot from him, not flinching at the mess of blood and mucus and dead grey flesh that he had coughed up.

With a clean, damp handkerchief, she wipes his lips.

'So,' she says. 'May I stay and nurse you? Will you allow me and our … well, what may be our child – will you allow us a chance to avoid the workhouse?

'I have no choice.'

No more choices. No more. He has given up on choices. Given up pride and dignity. And as he feels her kiss, her cool hand on his brow, he does not regret the bargain. So. He has also given up remaining himself, has transmuted to something softer, yielding, but perhaps stronger, in a way. He accepts the pain just as he accepts the tenderness he so long resisted. He no longer craves the end of suffering, no longer wants anything, and he thinks of Epictetus as he drifts into unconsciousness.

The next time he opens his eyes, she is unlacing her bodice. The cuffs of her shift are turned up the same way as those of his nightshirt. Perhaps Maria ironed them both herself, having learned how in the corporal's household. Perhaps.

The opium is wearing off again. He knows it from a new spasm of pain in his hip, and from an increasing clarity of mind. It was not possible for her to have mortgaged their house without his signature. Has she forged it then? No. As her petticoats and skirts slip to the floor, he sees half-a-dozen other little holes in her story, and recognises it as a lie. As a last kindness.

Warm contentment fills him to think that she will have a comfortable life after he is gone.

She slides into bed beside him.

'Tell me,' he says. 'Who do you love? Him or me?' He had not entirely meant to say it out loud.

She does not answer for a long time. Then: 'Say it is not one but two children I carry,' she said. 'If that is so, will you ask me which of them I love? Even which one I love best?'

He does not reply, but slips his hand between her thighs. It is not too late to be a husband to her.