“I should warn you that I have made many attempts to tell people of my misery and I have never yet succeeded.”

As Lady Pole said this something happened which Arabella did not quite understand. It was as if something in one of the paintings had moved, or someone had passed behind one of the mirrors, and the conviction came over her once again that this room was no room at all, that the walls had no real solidity but instead the room were only a sort of crossroads where strange winds blew upon Lady Pole from faraway places.

“In 1607,” began Lady Pole, “a gentleman named Redeshawe in Halifax, West Yorkshire inherited £10 from his aunt. He used the money to buy a Turkish carpet, which he then brought home and spread over the stone flags of his parlour. Then he drank some beer and fell asleep in a chair by the fire. He awoke at two in the morning to find the carpet covered with three or four hundred people, each about two or three inches high. Mr Redeshawe observed that the most important individuals among them, both men and women, were gorgeously attired in gold and silver armour and that they rode white rabbits – which were to them as elephants are to us. When he asked what they were doing, one brave soul among them climbed up to his shoulder and bellowed in his ear that they intended to fight a battle according to the rules of Honoreé Bonet and Mr Redeshawe’s carpet was exactly suited to their purpose because the regularity of the patterns helped the heralds determine that each army was positioned correctly and took no unfair advantage over the other. However Mr Redeshawe did not chuse that a battle should be fought upon his new carpet and so he took a broom and … No, wait!” Lady Pole stopt and suddenly covered her face with her hands. “That is not what I wished to say!”

She began again. This time she told a story of a man who had gone hunting in a wood. He had become separated from his friends. His horse had caught its hoof in a rabbit-hole and he had tumbled off. As he fell he had had the strangest impression that he was somehow falling into the rabbit-hole. When he picked himself up he found he was in a strange country lit by its own sun and nurtured by its own rain. In a wood very like the one he had just left, he found a mansion where a party of gentlemen – some of them rather odd – were all playing cards together.

Lady Pole had just got to the part where the gentlemen invited the lost huntsman to join them, when a slight sound – scarcely more than an indrawn breath – made Arabella turn. She discovered that Sir Walter had entered the room and was gazing down at his wife in dismay.

“You are tired,” he said to her.