For a summer Lady Margaret had cut a swathe of death through the castle’s chicken population, yet no matter how she practiced, the stuffed chickens had become malodorous and alarmingly misshapen. The long gallery had become almost uninhabitable, so overpowering was the smell, yet still Lady Margaret scooped at hen cadavers and replaced their organs with her own mixture of sawdust and plaster. Every table in the gallery, Toby remembered, had been inhabited by strange, ghoulish chickens; creatures that resembled sagging, lumpen, be-feathered bladders with dangling heads. They had all, finally, been burned, all except one prize specimen that Toby kept in a locked cupboard in the keep.

The gilded, panelled door of the long gallery opened. Toby stood there, smiling, but his face gave no message of what had transpired in his half-hour talk with his mother. “Mrs. Swan? I’m going to settle you comfortably. We’ll find some food.” He grinned at Campion. “You’re summoned to the presence.” He gestured her inside.

“Now?”

“This second. Don’t be nervous.”

The order was impossible to obey. Her nervousness increased as she went past Toby, as he closed the door behind her and she found herself in a room of sumptuous magnificence. It ran the length of the New House, wide windows opening south on to the Lazen valley, with their white curtains billowing inward in the slight breeze. Campion had an impression of rich tables and chairs, settles and chests, of a carpet laid the full length of the two hundred-foot room, of paintings on the white wall opposite the windows, and of more plasterwork on the ceiling. It was all a quick, overwhelming impression, for then she saw Toby’s mother, half way down the room, watching her.

“Do I call you Miss Slythe, Mrs. Scammell, Dorcas, or Campion? You seem to have a plethora of names for a simple girl. Come here.”

Campion walked along the rich carpet, feeling as she had imagined she might feel when, on the Day of Judgment, she would have to walk the crystal floor beneath the throne of thrones.

“Closer, girl, closer! I don’t intend to eat you!”

Campion stopped close to Lady Margaret, bobbed an ungainly curtsey, and kept quiet. She looked once at Toby’s mother, then avoided her eyes. She had a swift glimpse of a tall, gray haired lady with an imperious, commanding face.

Lady Margaret looked at her for a few seconds. “So you’re the girl my son burned down half of London for?”

An answer was required. “Yes, ma’am.”

“My name is Lady Margaret. We have still not established what yours is, but doubtless we will agree on something.” Lady Margaret sniffed in evident disapproval. “Three businesses destroyed, twelve houses burned to ashes and two men dead. Did you know that?”

“Yes, ma’am, Lady Margaret.” The news-sheets had overtaken Toby and Campion a day from Lazen. Lady Margaret sniffed again.

“It seems that in addition to the man my son killed, a priest also died. A strangely named man called Sobriety Bollsbie. I assume he officiated at your wedding?”