A little after midnight the General packed what little he thought he couldn’t live without into a mottled knapsack: the insignia-emblazoned knife he’d always carried as a commander on the field, a few books of physics and philosophy and an English newspaper dated the previous month, a pocket-watch, a set of reliable pens and a water-scarred notebook, some letters, a small retractable brass telescope, and of course the box of Ptolemy playing cards from the study, although to be honest he couldn’t imagine playing patience aboard a ship, the slick cards shifting around with the motion of the waves. Just to be sure, he packed the old, tattered deck as well. He thought a long time about whether to wear his regalia. It’s hard to break a habit, after all, and how would the people receive him without it?
Throughout the evening the General had tried unsuccessfully to recall a sense of excitement or relief, and at first he thought it was the nerves getting to him, that he was just so anxious about the process of escape that he had no room for the prospect itself to sink in, that once he was through the second kitchen door it would be smooth sailing. But something was off-center in him. He was thinking more and more about Deluca having been cut as a child, and the traitor’s body hanging in the wind, and what was forming instead of excitement was a vast pit. It was his tenderness for Deluca, however, the gesture with the Ptolemy playing cards, that made the General keep to the instructions laid out by the note, to don his regalia and make his way quietly out of the study and down the hall.
The kitchen had three doors—one at the terminus of the hall adjacent to the foyer, one around the side, just down the stairs from the study, and one around the back which his attendants primarily used. Even at this hour there were guards, though he and they had been on the island so long without incident that complacency was the general rule, meaning there might be a couple at most posted in the foyer. Even so, he made sure to step light, and carried the hickory cane at his side instead of supporting himself with it. As a consequence he limped down the hall from the study, then down the side-stair leading to the kitchen door. He took small steps and shuffled with his bad foot to avoid setting off the floorboards and to prevent his regalia from making noise. Now he regretted having worn it. He felt silly and self-important and small.
Partway down the stair he stopped, letting his eyes adjust to the moonbeams bathing the hall below. You could just see the kitchen door from this angle. No one was there. He checked his pocket- watch, having to tilt it downward to catch the light through the windows, and saw he was right on time. Of course, the note hadn’t specified which side of the door he needed to be on, and he suspected they’d leave from the kitchen anyway. There was an entrance to the storm-cellar there, and tunnels you might take to retrieve grain or travel surreptitiously to different parts of the grounds. He went on, forgetting to skip the fifth step up.
The moment his weight came down the wood caterwauled like an infant, shrieking each way down the hall; it was a miracle the whole of Breton House didn’t come alive then, soldiers descending on him like he was carrion. Heart thrashing, the General flicked through every possibility—that Deluca would burst through the kitchen door and pull him dramatically to safety, that one of his attendants would come out to see what all the noise was about, that a pair of gaolers would rush around the corner behind the stairs and spot him trying to make a break for it, in which case he’d have to come up with a story—sleepwalking, the early onset of senility, something like that. But nobody came, and his heartbeat evened, and then it was so quiet you could hear his pocket-watch ticking away. The next step didn’t creak, nor did the last few.
At the kitchen door, the General paused. It was the wrong shape.
He wouldn’t have been able to explain why this thought occurred to him; it was the same door it had always been, deep brown and rectangular and embossed with four smaller rectangles, themselves embossed with twisting floral patterns, and sported a heavy brass knob that was dented on the left side and shone with dull moonlight. All the same, it was wrong. He wouldn’t be able to fit through. Yes, but not because the door was the wrong shape. It was only him, tilted and out-of-proportion. Maybe a year ago he might have been able to go through, maybe two years. It was hard to say when the change had occurred, or when he’d become aware of it. Maybe it wasn’t a singular change, but the culmination of ten thousand different changes all stacked on top of one another, and maybe his noticing had been just as gradual, the disease of the shape which wouldn’t allow him through the door. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it, just to grasp the knob, to turn and push and vanish. But then what? Would the people welcome him cheering, arms wide? Or like an old lover, having moved on without him? The world hadn’t stopped turning in his exile and neither had he. Maybe it didn’t matter whether the door was the wrong shape or he was. Deluca was waiting on the other side of it, somewhere, and everyone who loved him and owed him nothing, and who loathed him with good reason, and every indifferent eye, and the vast ocean.