‘I’ll bring you something, Miss Rachaela. Or you can breakfast with Mr Peter and Mr Dorian. They always take breakfast in the morning room.’

‘Bring me something here, please.’

It was a wonder they had not come en masse in the night to her room with knives and forks.

Toast it would seem was possible but not coffee. The family did not drink coffee. Tea, then.

‘How do you come by tea?’ Rachaela asked. ‘You don’t grow it?’

‘A van comes to the cottages, from the town. Carlo and I buy the groceries from the van.’

‘Are there cottages?’

Rachaela stumbled on an incoherent twist of hope, the world was not so far away. But the woman said, ‘Six miles off, Miss Rachaela. It’s a long rough walk, but we’re accustomed to it.’

Cheta’s eyes, if it were not inconceivable, would have assured Rachaela that the woman was blind. They were dark, like the eyes of all the people so far encountered in the house, but not sharp and bright; instead fixed, veiled-over, eyes that scarcely moved. Yet Cheta went from place to place with perfect precision. Coordinated, she manoeuvred through the panes of cracked syrupy window-light and went out.

The sound of the sea came and went in the house, vanishing at turns of the walls, behind pieces of furniture or long curtains. In places, conversely, the sea was suddenly loud, the crash of it on the rocks below. It was not to be seen from the house. Nothing was. Every window was of thick hectic glass. The panes were patterned, or they held still fifes: fruit, urns and trailing flowers and sides of crimson, saffron and salmon-pink, viridian and mauve like poisoned ivies, heaven-blue and smouldering red. The rooms were jigsawed with their interrupted reflections. Several of the larger windows contained pictures. Rachaela recognized uncanny and seemingly blasphemous parodies of the Bible: Cain killed by Abel perhaps, over his offering of grapes and wheat, and the slain deer hung around Abel’s hunter shoulders, the neck wound like cornelian. And other cornelians in a round window above the stairs where a prince at a wedding changed the yellow wine into blood.

Rachaela was coldly amused by the bad taste of these eccentric scenes, presumably designed to please the family at its inception in the house. Yet she longed for a chink, some square inch of clear ordinary glass, looking out. The house was a box, a church, shutting in. The awful colours submerged the rooms, making them liverish. Gems of fire hung in mid-air, rainbows caught on the dust.

There were carvings on all the wood.

The old woman Anna had assured Rachaela she must do as she wanted. Lacking anything better, Rachaela moved about the building, losing herself in its corridors, finding locked doors, and opening others which gave.