I hit Moorcus, I hit him with hate, with hate and with Cousin Gustrid’s skillet (Mr Gurney) and he hurt and he fell down, holding his own pretty head. And it felt good. I admit it freely. And I was glad of it. And with that hit just a little of the hate came out from me.

‘That,’ I said, ‘is for Tummis and for Hilary Evelyn Ward-Jackson. And it’s not enough, there’ll never be enough denting of you, Moorcus, not all the smashing of all the world, not all the bullying from every country on the globe brought down upon you would be enough.’

‘Please,’ wailed Moorcus, ‘my head! I’m bleeding. You’ll murder me.’

‘I think I will indeed if you don’t shut up this instant.’

‘Clod! Clod!’ cried Lucy from the fireplace.

I pulled Lucy free. What had they done to her? She’d been so scraped and bloodied and smeared with soot, what a sad sight she was, but it was her. Actually there before me. In truth. Lucy.

‘Lucy Pennant, at last! What a dance you’ve led me on.’

‘What, Clod, have I?’

‘In the Sitting Room, up and down the house, I should never have found you if you hadn’t found Granny, she made such a fuss even I heard it. All those servants to her and then you’d gone somehow, up the chimney, and I calculated what other chimneys should share that flue and figured Crosspin and Flippah, but I heard sleeping at that door, so I figured Moorcus, and what voices I heard here at this door. I heard Moorcus saying he was going out so I waited just close by until the door opened and then shoved my foot in and then the skillet, Mr Gurney, which I found, for some reason, in the Sitting Room. But so here I am, and there is Moorcus, and here are you, and there, somehow, is Bornobby’s Cecily Grant and Onjla’s Henrietta Nysmith, and Aunt Loussa’s Little Lil, all gathered here, collected somehow, but, then, who is he? I have never seen him before.’

‘Toastrack,’ snivelled Moorcus, ‘but please don’t tell anyone.’

‘He’s Rowland Collis, Clod,’ said Lucy.

‘I’m Rowland Collis, Clod,’ said the strange fellow.

‘He’s Moorcus’s birth object,’ said Lucy, ‘somehow made … flesh.’

‘Rowland Collis! But how can he be … how can they be … together! It doesn’t make sense.’