In due course Dame Habonde’s pupil would charge him with her compliments to Queen Melior and a quid pro quo for the fan. He would return to Brocéliande. Meanwhile, his encounter with the cat had endeared him to the Trolls. They consulted his opinion about dogs and heraldic bearings, told him anecdotes, and slapped him on the back. Several swore an eternal friendship. He was entertained with ceremonial fireworks, bonfires on the mountains, excursions by sleigh. He sat beside the Queen at banquets, rode in the same sleigh with her. Learning that he had never seen an eagle owl, she took him to her aviary. The owl came strutting out of its grotto at her call. Its eyes were red as a furnace, its feet were covered with a close-fitting plumage of nutmeg-brown feathers, as though it wore spats. She fed it through the bars with gobbets of raw meat. It snatched them, and would have snatched her hand as greedily. It was difficult not to think of her as a child. ‘Take care!’ he exclaimed. But the shrew who had snapped the fan (so suitable with its daisies for a child sovereign) reappeared and froze him.

With so many teachers hovering over them like vultures, Castor and Pollux made steady progress. When further pupils were enrolled in Caraway College, the twins naturally fell back a little. But they always did well in examinations. Castor whisked through his papers and then replaced Pollux and did his. Neck and neck, they finished the course and were ordained deacons on the same happy day. All this time, they never gave Hamlet a moment’s uneasiness. They were unfailingly serious and unfailingly absurd. Visibly or invisible, he was a regular visitor to the college, where he gave lectures on Gothic architecture and instituted the custom of Disputations. Neck and neck, Castor and Pollux climbed the Establishment. Only one incident jarred their smooth ascent. In their gaiters and aprons (by then they were deans) they visited the God-fearing circus manager to thank him for his part in directing them to the religious life. He called them backsliders, hirelings, and truckling Erastians: he was a Nonconformist. As time went on they became bishops—Castor admired for his eloquence and known as The Saintly Bishop, Pollux venerated as an administrator and known as The Manly Bishop. Hamlet designed their mitres, hung on their antics, and read their Pastorals with squeals of delight. At the death of the Archbishop of York he was in agonies of indecision as to which of his two Bishops to back, but was speedily released by the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He tweaked a few last strings. He had filled two Archbishoprics; Caraway College was flourishing; he would now look round for a new source of entertainment. He enjoyed Castor and Pollux longer than he expected; they had inherited a certain amount of Elfin longevity and lived on to the ripe old age of a hundred or so.