185 Anabaptist: a nonconformist Christian who rejects baptism of infants, and requires the baptism of adult professors of Christian faith. Along with Unitarians they are the sects most often rejected by the Established Church of England.

186 Erastians: a Protestant sect that asserts the superiority of the state over the Church.

187 webster: Scots for weaver.

188 scutcheon: heraldric shield, metaphor for the family reputation.

189 massacre of St Bartholomew: a notorious slaughter of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, during the French Wars of Religion.

190 the untiring pains of hell: Gideon Baxter is a Presbyterian minister with a strongly Calvinist approach to salvation.

191 Abraham’s bosom: Protestant metaphor for heaven.

192 whet: some flavour.

193 hemming and felling: needlework terms, evidently unknown in the Baxters’ unhandy household.

194 Urim and Thummim: objects mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, used by the High Priest for divination.

195 caudle: a sweetened alcoholic egg drink, reputed to be health-giving.

196 teind: Scots, a tithe, support in kind for the clergyman of the parish.

197 scrivener: the old profession of a fair copyist and scribe for those who could not write, which mutated into a supplier of writing materials. The backs of the law papers would have been worth something as blank parchment.

198 sheep walk: land where sheep were pastured.

199 peat hags: high formations of peat in moorland country, broken into miniature but still formidable gullies by watercourses.

200 It was its own hawk: an echo of T H White’s The Goshawk (1951). Warner wrote an acclaimed biography of White, published in 1967.

201 snake’s cast weed: a snakeskin.

202 piling Pelion on Ossa: from the Greek myth of Otus and Ephialtes, who desired to storm Mount Olympus and gain Artemis and Hera as their brides, so they stacked Mount Pelion on top of Mount Ossa.

203 his wig was pulled off: this sets this story in the eighteenth century.

204 their waists were under their arms: this places Mr Sutherland’s emergence into the world again in the early years of the nineteenth century.

It took him all the morning to be washed and shaved and dressed and combed and polished to his satisfaction. He watched the process with deepening gloom. However much his own appearance might do him credit, he would be disgraced by his deplorable tail. Young girls are quick to see the ridiculous. What would Queen Serafica think when she saw him advance, followed by the senior and junior secretary, the Court Geographer, and a page? Why hadn’t he thought of this before dismissing the politer part of his retinue? In the end, he decided to break with all protocol and go into the throne room unattended. Later on, he would mention that a coachload of his followers had fallen over a precipice.