In a mortal court, apparitions are unobjectionable—even picturesque, and creditable. The occupiers of Grace and Favour apartments at Hampton Court are not disturbed when Queen Katherine Howard runs screaming down a corridor with her hands about her neck. An appearance of the White Lady was little more than a postman’s knock at Herrenhausen. But Rings was an Elfin Court, where Sir Glamie was now, as the current Lord Chamberlain put it, persona non grata. For one thing, his reappearances proved that he had not been so well-bred as he should have been. Elfins have no souls: when they die, they are dead: it is as simple as that. Therefore, at some point or other of Sir Glamie’s pedigree an Elfin lady must have yielded to a mortal lover, and immortality, like the pox, has run in the family ever since. This was painful enough. More painful was the thought of the scandal which would ensue if the facts became known. Most painful of all was the threat to the calm negation on which all Elfindom reposes. Once this was undermined by Sir Glamie’s reappearances, libertine speculations and surmises would widen the breach, superstition, proselytizing, fear of an awaiting life after death, would rush in, and Elfins sink to the level of mortals.

In these flying circles of Elfhame, Tiphaine’s dying was discussed as openly and with as much animation as if the swans were outriders of a circus. A kitchen boy, flying out with a bucket of swill for the palace pigs, had been the first to see them. On his report, there was a swirl of servants, streaming like a flock of starlings from the back door to see for themselves. The head gardener, a venerable fairy, swore he could distinguish Queen Maharit in the swan with the long bridling neck: Maharit had just such a neck. Tiphaine’s servants were on easier terms with death than her courtiers were. They had plucked geese, drawn grouse and blackcock, skinned eels. They had more contact with the outer world where they picked up ballads and folk stories, flew over battlefields, and observed pestilences. The mortals among them, stolen from their cradles to be court pets and play­things, and who, failing in this, had drifted into kitchen society, seldom lived into their second century, even though on their importation they were injected with an elixir of longevity, as tom kittens are gelded for domestication. Thus death was at once more real to them and less imposing. Every day their loyalty grew more fervent. They said there would never again be such a queen as Tiphaine, and had a sweep-stake as to which lady (Elfindom inverts Salic law) would be the next.

The Sub-Archivist had entered the bedchamber, seated himself, wrapped a foxskin rug over his knees, taken the virgin parchment, the day’s quill pen. The monkey sat hunched before the fire. Dwindled, mute, a dirty white like old snow, Tiphaine lay among her snow-white pillows, and did not notice the replacement. She was remembering Thomas of Ercildoune.