She claps her hands mirthlessly, and even her palms meet with a dead sound.

Almost as though this noise were a summons the door opens and Steerpike moves rapidly across the room. There is a fresh piece of plaster across his cheek. The twins rise and edge towards him, their shoulders touching as they advance.

He runs his eyes over them, takes his pipe out of his pocket and strikes a light. For a moment he holds the flame in his hand, but only for a moment, for Cora has raised her arm with the slow gesture of a somnabulist and has let it fall upon the flame, extinguishing it.

‘What in plague’s name are you up to?’ shouts Steerpike, for once losing his control. Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.

‘No fire,’ says Cora. ‘We don’t have fires any more.’

‘We don’t like them any more. No. Not any more.’

‘Not after we –’

Steerpike breaks in, for he knows how their minds have turned, and this is no moment just before the Breakfast for them to start reminiscing. ‘You are awaited! Breakfast table is agog for you. They all want to know where you are. Come along, my lovely brace of ladies. Let me escort you some of the way, at least. You are looking most alluring – but what can have been keeping you? Are you ready?’

The twins nod their heads.

‘May I be so honoured as to give you my right arm, Lady Cora? And, Lady Clarice, my dear, if you will take my left …?’

Steerpike, bending his elbows, waits for the Aunts to split apart to take his either arm.

‘The right’s more important than the left,’ says Clarice. ‘Why should you have it?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because I’m as good as you.’

‘But not as clever, are you, dear?’

‘Yes, I am, only you’re favoured.’

‘That’s because I’m alluring, like he says I am.’

‘He said we both were.’

‘That was just to please you. Didn’t you know?’

‘Dear ladies,’ says Steerpike, breaking in, ‘will you please be quiet! Who is in control of your destinies? Who is it you promised you would trust and obey?’

‘You.’ They speak together.

‘I think of you as co-equals, and I want you to think of yourselves as of similar status, for when your thrones arrive they will be of equal glory. Now, will you take my arms, if you please?’

Cora and Clarice take an arm each. The door of their room had been left open and the three of them make their exit, the youth’s thin black figure walking between the stiff purple bodies of the Aunts, who are gazing over his head at each other, so that as they recede down the half-lit corridor and diminish in size as they move into the long perspective, the last that can be seen, long after Steerpike in his black and the purple of the twins has become swallowed in the depths, are the tiny, pallid pattern of the two identical profiles facing one another and floating, as it were, in the mid-air shadows, diminishing and diminishing as they drift away, until the last mote of light has crumbled from them.