Lexy wasn’t listening properly. For the first time in her life, she felt sick with fear, not just in the sense of being “very afraid,” but that she might really, literally, vomit. She wanted to tell her parents not to go, but they looked so happy, and they’d clearly put a lot of effort into getting dressed for the night. She’d ruin it all if she said something. And what could JP really do? He was hardly going to kill her. A few more bruises wouldn’t be so bad, would they? Lexy had plenty of arnica balm after all.

“Please, Dad,” said Effie again.

Orwell was sitting in his favorite armchair by the fire, reading Galloglass by the light of a single candle. Effie was almost sure he was doing it to wind her up, and it was working. Nothing normally held his attention for this long.

“Aha!” he kept saying. And then, mysteriously, “Hmmm,” before scribbling something in one of his yellow notebooks. There were many of these notebooks lying around the house. They were from the stationary cupboard in the Linguistics Faculty office. No one knew where they had originated, but they were faded, slightly water-damaged and smelled of mold. At some point they had probably been a job lot. Orwell Bookend didn’t usually get beyond the first page of a notebook. But he’d already written three pages in this one.

“Come on,” said Effie. “Please? You’ve been reading it for ages. Let me have a go.”

“Isn’t it your bedtime?” said Orwell to his daughter.

“Don’t be so mean,” said Cait. “We haven’t even had dinner yet.”

“Why not?” said Orwell.

“Because you said you’d go out for french fries ages ago and you haven’t,” said Cait.

“Can’t you go?” said Orwell. “I’m reading. This is very gripping.”

“How can a poem be gripping?” said Effie.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” said Orwell, narrowing his eyes.

“All right,” said Cait. “But tomorrow I’m going shopping for real food. I’ll take Effie to the Winter Fair Market. We need vitamins, iron, nutrients. It’s a wonder we’re not all dead from scurvy in this house.”

At least Cait was almost back to her old self. She’d spent quite a few months recently under a strong but subtle enchantment that meant she was obsessed with diets and thin romance novels.