The Fall of Light Read Online Free

saw the bridge named Wellesley with its elegant arches. The
     high steeple of the ancient cathedral appeared above the rooftops, and across the river were the neat plantations and well-made
     fences of the land of the marquis of Lansdowne. He tied his horse and brushed the dirt off his clothes and walked into the
     night town. The smells of the outer streets were the smells of stout and whiskey and urine and cow dung. Cats and ragged dogs
     ran and stopped and sniffed at dark, muddied pieces of nothing. He passed on into the town. From rooms above him he heard
     men’s laughter and music of the piano. He was not sure where he was going. He was walking in the world for the first time
     without the shadow of his father. He let his hand rub along the fine stone of the buildings. He stood against one of them
     to let his back feel its perpendicularity and then looked upward to see the straight line it cut in the dark sky. He paused
     there and gathered himself and thought for the first time that they did not have to follow now their father’s plans. They
     could go anywhere. It would be up to him. We could come here, he thought. We could go anywhere. The country was suddenly big
     with possibility. He moved out of the shadows and walked the full length of the street that ran parallel to the wide river.
     At the far end of the town when he was about to cross and walk back the far side of the street, he saw the woman in the yellow
     dress.
    She had bare arms in the cold night and a bracelet that glittered.
    She was lovely. Her hair was high and pinned.
    “Here I am,” she said. Her mouth was small and red, her eyes shining.
    Tomas Foley had not known the company of women. He looked behind him in the street when the woman spoke, and when he saw there
     was no other imagined that the woman had spoken to him out of some distress.
    “What is it?” he said.
    And she laughed and covered her laugh.
    “You’re a sweet one,” she said, and she moved to him and smiled.
    “Are you all right?” he asked her.
    She touched his face with fingers cool and soft, and his head spun.
    “Kiss me,” she said. Then her arms were around him and she was kissing and biting at his lips. She ran her hands along his
     chest. His eyes rolled. His head swirled within the cloud of cheap honeysuckle water that was her scent. She ate at his neck
     and then said, “Come on, love,” and led him up the worn boards of a stairs to a room that was not far away. In that same astonishment,
     the same dumb innocence with which he later interpreted that simple act of economics to be the rare and absolute majesty of
     Love itself, Tomas found his clothes taken off and his body admired in the yellow candlelight.
    The woman reversed the world he had imagined and told him he was a beauty. He stood there and she looked at him and saw the
     innocence that had once been hers and she asked him had he ever been with a woman.
    “I have not,” he said.
    She caught her lower lip in her teeth. Though she was not much older than he was, her eyes showed an aging sorrow as if she
     knew that she was always doomed to be the fakery of love, its manner and appearance, but not its heart.
    “You have a true love?” she asked him. Then quickly said, “No, don’t answer me, come here.”
    And he did then. And she reached and touched him, and in an instant he forgot everything but her. She drew him down on the
     narrow bed and caressed him with such a ferocity that her movements could not be called caresses and the air in the room grew
     damp and white sweat might have dripped from the walls and the cracked ceiling. She loved him for two hours, then collapsed
     back on the bed, where suddenly she turned her head to the side and wept. It was an ancient if underused strategem and came
     from her own need to see him again. She did not know such performance was unnecessary with him. Tomas said nothing. Then,
     at the time when she feared he would be rising and pulling on his