‘What else can it be called? Some ritualistic thing ending in the sexual act.’

‘Eventually,’ he said, ‘presumably.’

‘You’re her father.’

‘And her grandfather,’ he said. He stood up and came back across the room to the fireplace. He stood facing her, the lamp unbearably lighting his face. ‘Let’s not mince words.’

‘Yes, let’s not. How can you contemplate such a filthy, disgusting, ludicrous act?’

‘I don’t contemplate it. It will simply happen sometime.’

‘As it did with us. At least I was a grown woman.’

‘Ruth will be a grown woman. They’ll wait until she’s fourteen or fifteen.’

‘They. What are you, Adamus, their robot? Don’t you have any say in it? Or are you just a machine?’

Tart of the mechanism of the Scarabae,’ he said.

‘I don’t believe you accept that.’

‘Of course I accept it,’ he said. ‘I’m here.’

Rachaela stood up also. At her feet the cat growled softly in its sleep.

‘I shall take Ruth away,’ Rachaela said.

‘You’re not strong enough,’ he said, ‘physically or spiritually. Ruth is part of their collective soul for good or ill.’

‘You think I’ll sit by and allow it?’

‘You’ll have no choice,’ he said. ‘You had power over your own life, that was all.’

‘Did I? Did I, when you saddled me with that thing—that baby—I meant to abort it, flush it away.’

‘But you didn’t,’ he said. ‘Did you?’

Rachaela closed her eyes. Her weakness, her bad luck, had they truly been Scarabae reaching out to hold her to their course?

She said, ‘If I’d stayed, what would have happened?’

‘They would have feted you. You’d have been the Madonna. You’d have had every care.’

‘And no doctors,’ said Rachaela.

‘Unice and Miriam have delivered at least twenty children successfully.’

Rachaela laughed. ‘Locked up in the tomb-womb of this house with two old women hauling Ruth out of me.’ She thought of her hallucination in the hospital, Camillo on the beach. ‘And what else? Some sort of ceremonial marriage to you, and you coming to my bedroom once every two years?’

‘Something like that. They would have used us to renew the family. Very simple.’

‘Very. And this is what they plan now for you and Ruth.’

‘While I’m serviceable.’

‘And while Ruth is able. Until it kills her.’

‘It won’t kill her. The family is very strong. Even you are, Rachaela.’

‘Even me. The outsider. The one unincestuous birth.’

He said nothing and a wall of soundlessness rose between them.

She wanted to strike it away with her hands.

She said, ‘I shall talk to Ruth. I’m going to make her understand what all this really means. Then we’ll see.’

‘Good luck,’ he said.