“Hush, my lady, all is well,” John said.

She was so startled, she could not move. And then she became aware she could not move because she was held in the circle of his arms, her head pillowed on one, the other wrapped around her. She held his hand in hers, clasped against her breast, their fingers laced together. It was a lovers’ embrace, one she had never shared with her husband, nor any man. He was alive and though warm, his fever had dropped and the hand that she held was steady.

“You are better,” she said. “The Lord has brought you through your crisis.”

“…though I shall go in the midst of shadow of death; I shall not dread evils, for thou art with me,” he said, the Portuguese slower than usual. He was trying to give her the feeling of the English words, how they rang in his mind. “Thou, Mariko, hast brought me through—”

“That is blasphemy,” she said. Aghast, she could not yet ignore the spark of joy within herself to be arguing with him again. The overwhelming sense of peace that came from lying with him and knowing him to be alive, to be still inviolably, himself.

“You already knew me to be a heretic,” he said. “I can’t see how this should trouble you any more than any other transgressions of mine.”

Mariko was silent.

Beneath her, she felt John’s arm become tense.

“You are not truly wroth, are you, Mariko-sama? I intended only to express my gratitude for what you have done for me. How much it meant to me to hear your voice through the pain and the terror. To feel your hands upon me, so gentle, when everything else hurt so greatly,” he said. She had never heard him sound shy before, never beseeching, vulnerable. She did not believe any man of her acquaintance would allow himself such openness with a woman who was not a courtesan, paid for pleasure and even more, discretion.

“I am not angry. I am not even as surprised as I ought to be,” she said. Their hands were still clasped, pressed against her bare skin as her robe had loosened in the night. She looked within herself for shame or dismay, could find nothing but relief. Gladness. 

There was a tremendous comfort in being close to him and she would have to give it up.

Soon enough.

“Sugi will come in shortly, with a meal and tea,” she said. It was a warning, rendered in the most delicate fashion.

“And we should not be found thus,” he said, blunt and bold as before he’d fallen ill. Himself.

“No,” she said. “But a few moments remain.” 

A few, little enough to satisfy. To live on.