Having bathed nicely and rubbed Geo. F. Trumper’s West Indian Extract of Lime into my skin, having slipped into my exquisite, freshly ironed linen after sprinkling it with a few drops of Knize Polo, and having donned my plum-blue gold-frogged-and-braided operetta-hero uniform, I will go downstairs. Uncle Ferdinand will be waiting for me in the drawing room. He will be wearing pumps and black trousers, a starched shirt with a tuxedo tie, and a velvet jacket, in prince-of-the-Church violet, that is no less imaginatively frogged than my uniform. His Russian greyhounds will be lying next to him on the sofa, and when I enter, they will raise their bored lady-in-waiting heads and graciously bang their tails twice. On the low Chinese enamel table in front of him, there will be a large silver tray with a battery of bottles and carafes and all sorts of high and low, smooth and bellied, stemmed and flat-bottomed glasses. And he will brusquely tell me to have a drink, for he will be impatient to talk about his Middle Kingdom, against which the iron men have taken up arms.

Outside, the world is at war. Two hours ago, we were having tea in the library (Indian tea, not Chinese, like Mama), and for a few minutes it looked as if a huge, soundless battle were being fought in the west. The acanthus jungle of frost flowers on the windowpanes was blossoming as if on fire. The ribs of the leaf plumage were going up in yellow flames. But it was only the sun in a flawless heaven, at sixteen degrees below zero Celsius, gliding into its molten-iron bed.

Now, it has long been dark behind the frosted windows. A cold, heavy, ruthless darkness, such as one learned to fear in childhood when hearing about death and graves and tombs in horror stories. (Miss Fern didn’t want these servants’ stories told to me, and it was all the more sinister when the servants whispered them into my ear when she wasn’t around; I was scared numb, and yet happy to belong with them by sharing their terrors.)

The cold, heavy darkness must be in people’s hearts, for the night is pure. Surely the sky is filled with high stars. The knotty acacias by the courtyard gates are throwing their naked branches up to them. The village lies hunched in the blue snow. The yellow squares of windows are carved out of a few of the houses’ black walls under their snowy bonnets, pricked by icicles hanging from the edges of roofs. It is so cold that all the dogs have crept away, silent. And perhaps, from the dark thicket of sloe bushes along the cemetery wall, where the three birches loom, a slim figure swathed from head to toe in a black cape will now emerge and come up the village road without visibly moving its feet and float to the pond in the park, where it will vanish. . .