Stephen awoke. He was lying on the frozen ground in a narrow dale. The sunlight was gone. It was grey and cold. The dale was choked with a great wall of millstones and boulders and earth – an eerie tomb. The wall had dammed the beck, but a little water still seeped through and was now spreading across the ground. Stephen’s crown, sceptre and orb lay a little distance away in pools of dirty water. Wearily he stood up.

In the distance he could hear someone calling, “Stephen! Stephen!” He thought it was Lady Pole.

“I cast off the name of my captivity,” he said. “It is gone.” He picked up the crown, the sceptre and orb, and began to walk.

He had no notion of where he was going. He had killed the gentleman and he had allowed the gentleman to kill Vinculus. He could never go home – if home it had been in the first place. What would an English judge and jury say to a black man who was a murderer twice over? Stephen had done with England and England had done with him. He walked on.

After a while it seemed to him that the landscape was no longer as English as it had been. The trees that now surrounded him were immense, ancient things, their boughs twice the thickness of a man’s body and curved into strange, fantastical shapes. Though it was winter and the briars were bare, a few roses still bloomed here, blood-red and snow-white.

England lay behind him. He did not regret it. He did not look back. He walked on.

He came to a long, low hill, and in the middle of the hill was an opening. It was more like a mouth than a door, yet it did not have an evil look. Someone was standing there, just within the opening, waiting for him. “I know this place,” he thought. “It is Lost-hope! But how can that be?”

It was not simply that the house had become a hill, everything seemed to have undergone a revolution. The wood was suddenly possessed of a spirit of freshness, of innocence. The trees no longer threatened the traveller. Between their branches were glints of a serene winter sky of coldest blue. Here and there shone the pure light of a star – though whether they were stars of morning or stars of evening he could no longer remember. He looked around for the ancient bones and rusting armour – those ghastly emblems of the gentleman’s bloodthirsty nature. To his surprize he found that they were everywhere – beneath his feet, stuffed into hollows of the tree roots, tangled up with briars and brambles. But they were in a far more advanced state of decay than he remembered; they were moss-covered, rust-eaten and crumbling into dust. In a little while nothing would be left of them.

The figure within the opening was a familiar one; he had often attended the balls and processions at Lost-hope. But he too was changed; his features had become more fairy-like; his eyes more glittering; his eye-brows more extravagant. His hair curled tightly like the fleece of a young lamb or like young ferns in spring, and there was a light dusting of fur upon his face. He looked older, yet at the same time more innocent. “Welcome!” he cried.