During the interval required for its renovation, Hamlet divided himself between the Sacred and Profane. He sat up all night reading polemical divines of the Church of England and spent the day equipping the seminary with everything a theological college should have, from a laundry to a teaching staff. In the course of his reading he developed a passion for Christian niceties, and was exquisite in his selection of the staff, detecting an Anabaptist at a glance.

From Vienna, where they stayed at a cheap inn in the suburbs, they followed the course of the Danube, alighting whenever the landscape below looked promising. Sometimes the landscape was obliterated by smoke and they heard cannon fire. Once, alighting in a park, they found a burned-out mansion and a row of impaled cadavers tottering on a fence. Still following the Danube, they flew on and saw the country-side grow calm, well tilled, prosperous, coloured by the blue-green of poppy fields. To the south, they saw a mountain range. Among the foothills at its base was a small white building, too tall for a farm, too plain and unencumbered to be a church or castle. Descending, they saw it had pillars and a pediment. In place of their disused chapel they had found a forsaken temple. As they mounted the steps, a large snake reared its head and looked at them with a flat glittering eye, but did not move away. ‘A temple to Aesculapius!’ said Tinkel. Even Tinkel’s clever voice was awed.

The priest wiped the sweat from his tonsure, took a piece of chalk from the pocket of his soutane and drew a pentagram on the floor. Standing within it, he began to command and conjure Satan and his demons to go away.

Everyone pitied her. Attempts were made to procure an abortion with the renowned decoction from the bark and leaves of the savin tree—a species of juniper. Her burden could not be dislodged. She went her full term—growing unrecognizably hideous, her face peaked, her legs swollen, her existence reduced to an appurtenance of her enormous womb. The birth of the first child rent her in pieces; she was already dying when a second child was born. They were both boys, wingless, and plainly mortal. Washed and swaddled, they were carried to Hamlet to be named. ‘Gog and Magog!’ he exclaimed. Looking out of his misery, he saw the midwife was affronted. ‘Call them Castor and Pollux,’ he said, and signed for them to be taken away.