The duke was transferred back to Canada, but not Vernon. Lying in a hospital room in Vancouver, dull with weak light strained through clouds, windows streaked with rain, his bones, which had always been prominent, were now the most substantial part of him. His skin draped over his figure, seeming as thin as the hospital sheets. “Because of his condition, Duke Caetani is being fed intravenously,” a doctor told us as we sat beside the outline of him on the bed.
It was December, and someone had hung strings of cranberries and popped corn over the railings around the mint-green halls. Near the nurse’s station there was a spindly little tree with shining jewel-toned decorations that I imagined must have been castoffs from a hospital patron’s household. Everything seemed strange – the glitteri
