‘Did you like the mouse? It was perfect.’

‘Yes it was. Someone cleared it away, Cheta or Michael.’

‘Probably put it in the stew,’ said Camillo. He gave his high pitched madman’s giggle, as if he had left it too long.

They were in the daylight. Camillo did not bother with it any more than he bothered with the fine rain. His skin was like thin paper, the bones like a framework of hard sticks. He did not look frail.

‘Why does the family avoid daylight?’ said Rachaela.

‘It doesn’t agree with them.’

‘And you?’

‘Nothing agrees with me. I like the colours by day. Once I couldn’t bear them. I remember a night ride that ended in the dawn and I hid my head and wept.’

‘Somewhere else,’ she said.

‘Far away.’ He spoke very fast in another language. It might have been Russian or some Serbian tongue. He cackled. He said, ‘Shan’t tell you the family history. It’s all muddled up in my head. I remember a cathedral on Christmas Eve and a dunghill and two hundred women and all the dogs, but I forget where or when. Why should I care? I’m not interested. Not even in you. Just a brief glimmer at first. But you’re so predictable, girl. Exactly what I would have guessed. Wandering about in your black clothes and your white skin. You’ll run away too, but you’ll come back. You’re the one. Like him.’

‘Adamus.’

‘The boy.’

‘Is he my father?’

‘If he says so,’ said Camillo. He crouched on a rock like a gargoyle and his long white hair fluttered in the wet wind. The sea burst and sank, like hopeless anger.

‘Why am I important?’

‘A gene,’ said Camillo. ‘We all carry it. It comes out in some. Adamus. You.’

‘What do you mean?’ She felt a stab of fear.

‘There were others,’ he said, ‘but they died. Only the two of you left. The rest of us would have liked to have had it. Glamorous and wicked. At first the family drove out the black sheep. Then it harboured them. The family revels in its differences.’

Suddenly Camillo sprang up. He executed a little gallop round and round on the strand. He used a whip. He neighed and the cove echoed with the equine human sound. The madness was his garment but he had put it on so often it claimed him. The mask had become the skin.

Rachaela frowned impatiently, waiting for the horse dance to end. But part of her wanted to gallop with him, make believe. She had never had a childhood. At eleven years the one doll she had had, a hard ungiving model child, was taken from her and deposited at a local charity shop. There Rachaela saw her in the window for a week; then someone bought her.

Camillo the sea horse rested.