I explained, in detail. They agreed: there was nothing else for it. So we set off, in our different directions—and in as much haste as we could manage to summon. The affair was more serious now. Previously, it had been a matter of two lost children; now it was a matter of life and death. There was no time to lose.

Lucy’s Narrative continued

I suppose that if you fell from a mighty cliff and had the good fortune to land on a ledge a little way down, shaken but unhurt, you would feel your Despair give way to relief; and I suppose that if that ledge were to crumble beneath you and precipitate you further into the abyss, your first Despair might well be redoubled; and if that were to happen yet again, you might well wonder whether some evil power were taking a personal interest in your affairs. Thus I felt, when I ran out of the police station after Doctor Cadaverezzi’s arrest.

Fleeing from Castle Karlstein, we had foolishly left the mountain hut and lost each other. Charlotte had been captured straight away, by that maggot in human form, Arturo Snivelwurst; but I had found Doctor Cadaverezzi, and safety. (And I had enjoyed being a Princess, too. I think it is a role that I might be good in: that of actress, I mean, or strolling player, or mountebankess.) Then came the danger again—Count Karlstein spotted me in the tavern. Then came safety—Hildi, raising the false alarm of fire, enabled us to get away. Then, yet again, danger—and poor Doctor Cadaverezzi was arrested. (Although, if I knew him, he would not stay arrested for long. I had known him only a short time—merely a matter of hours—but in that time he had impressed me with the force of his Genius in a way that no one, not even Miss Davenport, had done before. I felt as if his mind inhabited a larger, freer, more glorious Universe than this one, and though I tried to reproach him for his misdeeds, I knew that they were nothing beside the glory of his Imagination and the unbounded radiance of his spirit. Ah, well. I had heard—as Charlotte, for instance, had not—the most intoxicating of all sounds: the applause of the public….)

But we were cruelly disappointed now. It was not difficult for us to decide what we should do; we reached the mountain guide’s hut in less than an hour, but there was no point in staying there, since Hildi, we knew, would be captured by the count and tortured to reveal all she knew. She would hold out as long as she could, but eventually the rack and the thumbscrews would overcome her and, fainting, in the last extremity of Anguish she would gasp out that this had been our hiding place. Then the count would hasten, snarling, to the kennels, unleash the ferocious hounds, and…