Rachaela remembered the double doors of the hallway. She visualized Cheta and Carlo on their journey to the village, muffled as if against a storm.

Night creatures then, nocturnal like their cat.

‘And you expect me to live like this?’ Rachaela said.

‘You will come to find it comfortable,’ said Anna.

In their places, Dorian and Peter abruptly laughed, as one.

Rachaela said, ‘Aren’t I allowed to go out?’

‘Of course. Of course, Rachaela. By night or day. Oh, let me show you the garden. Come.’

Stephan hurried before Anna to widen the door, already ajar, which Rachaela had seen revealed the previous night. It led into a conservatory of gigantic plants. Ferns towered to the glass roof. Ribbed and ornately paned, the glass was clear.

A stone lion’s head stood among the cups of flowers.

‘Here is the way,’ said Anna, and thrust wide a second door on to the open night.

Rachaela gasped with instinctive relief.

There was the smell of leaves and frost, the night breath of great trees.

A moon hung over the land, an unbroken chandelier. It showed with its blue-white shine the garden of a fantasy, rampant and overgrown. A yew tree, a poplar, a cedar spreading tremendous boughs, and oaks like columns to uphold the sky. A roof of bare stitchwork which in summer would be a parasol of foliage. Ivy mounted the trees, and the rose briars had climbed upon the cedar.

The sea raced and boomed, tireless, on the wall of night.

‘At the end there is a little gate. A path leads along the cliff. Quite safe if you are careful,’ said Anna. She raised her face of wrinkles and fissures into the balm of the moon. ‘Smell the pines,’ she said. ‘Such terrible trees, they overgrow everything if they can. Carlo weeds them out from the garden, and cuts the lawn in summer.’ She flitted forward like an aged fairy. The others ventured after Rachaela, murmuring and susurrating, into the garden. Stephan pushed in among the shrubs to inspect the briars, Dorian and Peter posed grotesquely on the rough grass, Sylvian in the doorway.

There was a moon-dial, the moon’s crescent face also a skull. The dial could not tell time, there were no numerals.

Rachaela pushed through the briars towards the gate. She tried it. It was not locked. Outside she saw the free night, the cliff with its clumps of wild flowers, the terrace of pines. The sea beyond the cliff was smooth as silver cigarette paper. Ozone, salt, carbon dioxide.

Behind her the elders stood, pleased at her pleasure, looking on, their sewn faces placid round their hungry eyes.

She woke, and the shock of the window burned her, made her start. The tower clock told her it was ten o’clock.