Alleyn said: ‘That’s illuminating, isn’t it?’

‘But it’s one thing to feel like that and another to … No!’ Richard exclaimed. ‘It’s a nightmare. You can’t reduce it to that size. It’s irreducible. Monstrous!’

‘It’s happened,’ Warrender said flatly.

‘Mr Alleyn,’ Anelida suggested, ‘would you tell us what you think? Would you take the things that led up to it out of their background and put them in order for us? Might that help, do you think, Richard?’

‘I think it might, darling. If anything can.’

‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘shall I try? First of all, then, there’s her personal history. There are the bouts of temperament that have increased in severity and frequency: to such a degree that they have begun to suggest a serious mental condition. You’re all agreed about that, aren’t you? Colonel Warrender?’

‘I suppose so. Yes.’

‘What was she like thirty years ago, when he married her?’

Warrender looked at Richard. ‘Enchanting. Law unto herself. Gay. Lovely.’ He raised his hand and let it fall. ‘Ah, well! There it is. Never mind.’

‘Different? From these days?’ Alleyn pursued.

‘My God, yes!’

‘So the musician’s lute was broken? The perfect had become imperfect?’

‘Very well. Go on.’

‘May we think back to yesterday, the day of the party? You must tell me if I’m all to blazes but this is how I see it. My reading, by the way, is pieced together from the statements Fox and I have collected from all of you and from the servants who, true to form, knew more than any of you might suppose. Things began to go wrong quite early, didn’t they? Wasn’t it in the morning that she learnt for the first time that her …’ He hesitated for a moment.

‘It’s all right,’ Richard said. ‘Anelida knows. Everything. She says she doesn’t mind.’

‘Why on earth should I?’ Anelida asked of the world at large. ‘We’re not living in the reign of King Lear. In any case, Mr Alleyn’s talking about Husbandry in Heaven and me and how your mamma didn’t much fancy the idea that you’d taken up with me and still less the idea of my reading for the part.’

‘Which she’d assumed was written for her. That’s it,’ Alleyn said. ‘That exacerbated a sense of being the victim of a conspiracy, which was set up by the scene in which she learnt that Miss Cavendish was to play the lead in another comedy and that Gantry and Saracen were in the “plot.” She was a jealous, ageing actress, abnormally possessive.’

‘But not always,’ Richard protested. ‘Not anything like always.’

‘Getting more so,’ Warrender muttered.

‘Exactly. And perhaps because of that her husband, the perfectionist, may have transferred his ruling preoccupation from her to the young man whom he believed to be his son and on whom she was loath to relinquish her hold.’