There was another Christmas, the twenty-fifth that had passed since the duke’s death. Every year, the holiday was far more melancholy than it was celebratory. We had both the birth of Christ and the death of the duke to observe, but only one of them had risen again, and so far he did not seem able to save us from our self-imposed exile. Nonetheless, I prayed for some kind of release from our situation, as I did every year, asked for signs, divine intervention. If they came, I was unqualified to recognize them. It seemed nothing changed, nothing would ever change, and we were stagnant as time moved through us. We were steeped in so many times, so many places and yet, as the rest of the world spun on, we remained in continuous retreat. Each year on Christmas morning we handed each other embo
