There was a power cut on the ninth night.
The lights went out at half past ten with a deep, whole-house thunk that plunged the estate into total darkness. Jane, who had been reading in bed, sat up sharply and waited for emergency lighting that didn't come.
She felt her way to the desk, found the candle and matches Irina had put there — pragmatic woman — and got a light going. The flame threw long shadows up the walls and made the room feel smaller and older.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed with the candle on the nightstand, reading by its light with the focused adaptability of a literature student who had once written an entire essay by torchlight during a festival camping trip, when there was a knock at her door.
"It's a technical fault," Dimitri's voice said, through the door. "Should be restored within the hour. You have candles?"
"Yes. You can come in if you want — it's your house." She paused. "I mean, that, unlike your other entries, would technically be with permission."
A pause. Then the door opened.
He had a candle too. He looked, she thought, different by candlelight — not softer exactly, but the cold architecture of him was less prominent; the warmth of the flame caught angles she hadn't noticed before.
He crossed to the armchair in the corner without asking and sat, setting his candle on the side table. He was in a dark grey jumper and dark trousers, not the severe shirts he usually wore, and Jane had the inconvenient thought that he looked more human in it.
"Couldn't sleep?" she asked.
"I don't sleep much." He looked at her book. "What are you reading?"
"Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita. Seemed appropriate given the location and the general surrealism of my life."
The corner of his mouth moved. "The devil visits Moscow and turns everything upside down."
"I'm choosing not to dwell on the metaphor." Jane set the book down. "Since you're here — tell me something true. Something that isn't about strategy or plans or the people on your map."
He looked at her in the candlelight. "What kind of something?"
"Anything." She shrugged. "I've been here ten days. I know you speak four languages, you're good at chess, you think pity is contemptible, and you take your coffee without anything in it because you apparently believe comfort is a weakness. But I don't know anything real."
He was quiet for a long moment. The candle between them made the silence feel different than silence usually did — closer, warmer.
"My mother," he said finally, "used to read to me in this library. Every night when I was small. Russian fairy tales, mostly. The ones where the hero has to do impossible things and everyone around him thinks he will fail." He paused. "She told me once that the point of those stories wasn't that heroes never failed. The point was that they got up."
Jane listened. She didn't fill the silence when it came; she'd learned that about him, in their evenings over the chessboard — he thought in long pauses and appreciated not being talked over them.
"After she died," he said, "my father stopped reading entirely. He said books were for people who needed to escape. He believed the only real world was the one you built with force." A pause. "He was wrong about a great many things."
"Is he still alive?" Jane asked.
"No."
She didn't ask how. Some answers were visible in the shape of a silence.
"My grandfather," Jane said, after a moment, "used to say that the most dangerous thing in the world was a person who'd never been loved properly. He said it made them either a monster or a saint, and the difference between those two was often just luck."
Dimitri looked at her across the candlelight.
"Which do you think I am?" he asked. Quietly. Without the usual armour in it.
Jane looked at him — really looked, the way she'd been looking at him in increments over ten days, assembling a picture piece by careful piece.
"I think," she said, "that the jury is still out."
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then something in him loosened, by the smallest possible increment.
"That's fair," he said.