The harp was large and beautiful and sheathed in dust, the piano also. No one had played it for several years. Rachaela scooped the dust away and touched the keys. Their notes were surprisingly unsullied. She herself could not play. She was an audience not a creator. She longed for music in that moment, and thought of her radio brought from her case that morning. She had only one spare battery for the radio. When it was done, what then? She had seen no evidence here of radios let alone a record player.

How far away was the town? Was any transport credible? Would they let her hire a car and go to the town, or was she, fellow inmate, also now a prisoner?

She found the library too, during the afternoon, a massive room with high bookshelves, everything powdered by dust, but for a round table, polished from use. Here a pile of books was stacked ready, and an ebony ruler, inkwell and pen.

Rachaela went to the shelf and took a book at random, smoothing off the dust.

Opening it, she found that every line in the book was neatly crossed through.

She tried another book, with the same result. Another and another from different parts of the shelves. All the same.

Sylvian... busy in the library.

Nothing astonished her. She made one rotation of a defaced globe on the table, and left the library. She negotiated a way towards her room. At the intersection of two corridors, mistaking her direction, she came on a high window with a scene of a baby apparently being drowned among the bullrushes. Below stood a great taxidermist’s triumph of a stuffed horse with a man on its back in pieces of armour. The man shook a sword at her and giggled in a thin soprano.

Rachaela stopped.

‘Giddy-up,’ insisted the rider, kicking the sides of the stuffed animal so clouds of dust were released.

When she had passed him and gone on, she sensed his stealthy presence at her heels. It was this one, presumably, who had followed her, and this one who brought gifts of mice. Maybe he caught them himself. He was not exactly like the others, his hair worn very long under the helmet of the armour. He must have discarded that or she would have heard him clanking through the corridors.

Reaching her room at last she had a weakening sense of relief. She locked her door and lay down on her bed, conscious of the pure face of the Devil reflected on to her own. She slept almost at once, as if a spell had been put on her.

The window was dark and the black clock said seven-thirty. Firelight made the room clandestine.

There were matches by the bed, tapers on the mantelpiece, and she lit the candles, the lamps.