‘And he lives in the tower. Does he prowl the house in the darkness?’

‘What a perceptive question. Once he did. He is more rested now.’

Rachaela stared into the fire.

Had it been a dream, then? Had it been real? Or could it be—some vision, precognition, of the facts. The man in the dream was too young. Her father had ‘made her in the world’ when he was her age now. He would be almost sixty. Touched by age, by the markers of Stephan and Sylvian, Peter and Camillo.

Rachaela felt unable to ask anything more. The flurry of defiance had gone dead. The new flame burned in her. Adamus. The name of some saint or demon in a mystery play.

Walled up in the locked dark tower.

‘I’ll go to bed, Anna,’ Rachaela said.

Anna smiled again, and picking up her embroidery stitched in a flower like drops of blood.

In the night, Rachaela sat in the chair, where he had sat, sat in reality not dream. Her thoughts would not keep still. She saw him over and over. He was her father.

There was so much she wanted to say to him, cry out at him. She would in his presence be dumb, surely, gagged by all these sentences and accusations.

Her fire burned low and she put more wood on to it from the brass scuttle. All day long Scarabae’s servants came in and out of this room, dusting it so the dust flew up off one surface and resettled on another, seeing to the bed, the lamps and candles, the fire, the supply of little logs.

But at night he had come and used a key, for the door was locked.

If she had not woken would he only have sat here a while, watching her? She would never have realized he had been in the room. Had he come back and she not known?

The far-away clock struck. Rachaela looked at the black clock on the mantel. Two—it was one in the morning.

Rachaela stood up. She took the oil lamp with the green base, and opened her door.

As she had foreseen it would be, the lamp in the passage was extinguished. The corridor was black and her own light swung across it, startling things, the pictures, the carved wood of grapes and apples, into glimpsing life.

The Scarabae patrolled the house after midnight, she had heard them often enough.

And he too, despite Anna’s denial, for Anna’s denials sometimes meant the truth had been hit upon.

The lamp shook a little in her hand. She steadied it. After all, he was what she had feared all along. Not the house, the family, but him.

Where to start... why not at the tower door, where he himself would emerge.