But why, feeling no obligation toward him, had they plucked him from the heather and added him to their establishment? And why, if he were to be added, did they hide from him, and keep him a prisoner—to make him desolate, then change his desolation to happiness? Such a motive, stern and sentimental, might obtain in Aberdeen, but not under Foxcastle. To be useful? But he was useless. To be informative? At the least breath of information they melted into air. To be a trophy? Of all his speculations, this was the only one he paused at. A despot of the Renaissance, his court swarming with poets and philosophers, experts on Plotinus, sumptuous harlots, bishops, boys, artists and artificers, inventors, assassins, dancers on the tightrope, had fixed his ambitions on owning a giraffe. He had forgotten which despot. The learning he had brought from the outer world was mouldering from disuse; only legends and trivia like the giraffe remained. What happened to his wig might well be happening to the compartmented order inside his skull. In his blessed condition of being nobody’s obligation he could spend his intellect as he pleased, sometimes thinking, sometimes observing, coming to conclusions and unripping them for the pleasure of knitting a new one from the same material, as the Queen did. It was as though he had always lived at Foxcastle, accepting his good fortune without surprise as the fairies accepted him, and endlessly fascinated by their unaccountableness. The more he studied them the more baffled he became. It was not that they were mysterious: they were as straightforward as the scent of a rose, as a wasp sting. It was impossible to love them: they were too inconsistent to be loved. It was unavoidable not to be drawn to them. And they defied conjecture by taking themselves for granted. Theologically identified as the scattered remnants of Satan’s host, rationally dismissed as superstition, they were a race of pragmatists. Just as they were content to know next to nothing of their own history because they were living in the present, they took Foxcastle for granted because it was their dwelling place. Yet how was it that living inside a solid, sizable hill he could hear the wind blowing and recognize from what quarter it blew? How could he know day from darkness, with all that bulk of earth between him and the sun? When he questioned his attendants they looked blankly at him, blankly at each other, and said the bayberry candles were regularly lit at sundown. When he asked the leading fiddler, who enjoyed conversation and had never made himself invisible, he was told ‘Rabbit holes.’ And by degrees he gave up the problem, and was grateful for the light that drifted in like a mist and need not be accounted for.