Conjugation

It was the afternoons he enjoyed the most at the Summer Palace. Spent doing grammar lessons on the lawn with a succession of tutors, always male, often English, occasionally consumptive.

He discarded his mistakes with the arrogance of a child who had never picked up anything in their life. Someone was always there to do that for him. Some times some thing. Here it was the ducks who swallowed those errors soft enough to digest. A groundsman with a captured Uhlan's helmet to which a handle had been attached gathered up what they left.

It was an unreal life. But that he only realized years later when the Revolution came along. A flash of insight in the darkness behind the blindfold, reality hitting him just before the bullets did. It was remarked that until then his pleas for mercy were endless, pointless, but grammatically precise. Just like his universally disliked decrees.