The man was Adamus, her father. He must have come from the tower door, or else from the corridor which led to the kitchen, the direction from which the cat had come.

He wore black trousers, a black pullover, ordinary contemporary garments. No rings on the long hands. The blackness came in about his head, the hair a rim on the wide forehead, outlining the bones of the face.

‘He catches your supper, didn’t you know?’ he asked idly. ‘The Scarabae let him hunt for them, only then he hunts for himself. He disdains the mice. He kills them for a hobby.’

Rachaela’s body involuntarily relaxed, gave way. She almost dropped the lamp.

‘Careful,’ he said.

He left the cat and came across to her, and the flickering light cast giant shadows from his tall spare body. He took the lamp from her hand.

‘And I thought,’ he said, ‘you would accept all the surprises here with equanimity.’

The cat watched them, then it turned and padded noiselessly through into the drawing room.

Rachaela remembered all the opened doors. She saw the cat going in and out. She saw it leap upon the gull, the rabbits feeding in the twilight of dawn.

‘And you can’t speak,’ he said.

She said, ‘What am I supposed to say?’

‘Whatever you like.’

The lamp blazed on his face. The two black eyes were alive and burning, not like the eyes of the Scarabae, nor as she had seen them last, those leaden tarns in the white structure of face. Now she could see the roughness of the male jaw: the mark of normal masculine shaving; the hair-fine lines about the eyes and lips; the individual black strokes of the heavy brows; the lashes beaded by light. The face was thirty years old, no more.

‘Who are you?’ she said.

‘But I told you, Rachaela.’

‘And I told you. Too young.’

‘The family tends to look younger than it is. How old do you think Anna is? Stephan? Add another hundred years, you might be right.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. She believed him. Anna, one hundred and eighty years. And Sylvian, older. ‘But,’ she said, ‘there’s still a discrepancy. If you are sixty years old and the rest of them two hundred, why the gap between you?’

‘There were others,’ he said, ‘they failed. They died.’

‘Leaving only you.’

‘And now you,’ he said. He put a hand on her arm. Her nerves jumped violently at his touch. ‘Shall we go into the room there,’ he said.

She let him guide her.

In the drawing room a dull red lay dormant in the fireplace. He set her lamp on a table. They sat down facing each other in this oasis, the black all around no longer counting for anything. He was here. And the cat, like his symbol, had passed on into the night.