‘Ruth!’ Anna’s voice rose with a cold and hard authority, and Ruth’s skittishness faltered. ‘You are a naughty and ignorant little girl. You may leave your dinner, since you don’t like it, and go up to your room.’

‘I want to see Adamus!’ shouted Ruth. In her voice there was a raw shrill edge. Never had Rachaela heard a refusal bring Ruth so near hysteria, but then never had Rachaela refused Ruth anything she so much wanted.

‘When Adamus is ready, he will see you,’ said Anna, ‘but I doubt he would want to see such a nasty, foul-tongued little brat.’

‘Yes he would,’ Ruth said. ‘He likes me. He wants to marry me.’

‘Forget about that,’ said Anna, ‘I have told you, you’re too young for marriage and must wait. Tonight’s outburst has proved it.’

‘You’re bad,’ said Ruth, as she had said of the rabbit. Her face, like Anna’s, was steely now. ‘You stop him from seeing me.’

‘He doesn’t want to see you. He has his own affairs to attend to. You are a child, Ruth, and must act as one. Go to your room as I told you to.’

Ruth moved away from the table. She glanced once, without any emotion, at Rachaela. Rachaela might have been another furnishing. Ruth said, ‘I’ll go to my room, but you’re still bad. You’re wicked and you’ll go to hell.’

Anna rose like ice and darkness.

Ruth went out of the room.

Anna sat down and sipped from her water glass. She said to Rachaela, ‘You have never curbed her.’

‘Yes,’ said Rachaela, ‘but not her spirit. It’s that you’ll have to fight now.’

‘I shall have to fight no one. She’ll see sense.’

‘There is no sense,’ Rachaela said. ‘She wants her father, her lover-husband. You’ll have to produce him for her or you’ll have trouble.’

‘I’m not his keeper.’

‘Oh, but you are. You and Scarabae. You can make Adamus do what you want. But not Ruth.’

‘We shall see.’

Rachaela shrugged. She did not touch the rabbit-pie.

Anna ate in silence.

Should Rachaela take the opportunity, go to the blood bedroom and confront Ruth now? No, for Ruth was not yet ripe. Things were grim but not yet grim enough. Ruth must come to hate Adamus before Rachaela could get a grip on her, subtract her, whisk her away.

❖

In the morning Rachaela woke with a strange tension in her body, as if she had lain all night like a coiled spring, awaiting some event.