She took him into the woodshed, and there, beneath a cloth, was the dead cat.

‘Under God, you wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for her,’ said Ailie with another outbreak of weeping.

He looked at the body. He felt in his pocket. There was the knife; and there, where the teats protruded from the shabby fur, was the place where he would make the first incision.

‘I must have her,’ he said. ‘Fetch me a bowl of water and some rags.’ And he turned back his sleeves.

When Ailie came back, he had already laid the body on the chopping block and cut open the belly. Ailie said no word. She had two things in the world to love: one was the boy, the other the old cat. In an hour, she had lost them both.

It was the custom of Elfhame that when the Queen tired of a lover she sent him a willow leaf. The Willow Leaf was conveyed privily by her confidential woman, and within an hour everyone at court knew about it. Tiffany’s tenure of the Queen’s love lasted so long that people gave up speculating when the Willow Leaf would be delivered. A year, two years, four years, seven years: even in a timeless society such a span of love causes remark. The aspiring Green Ribbon wearers began to grow impatient at their protracted virginity and to despair of ever getting into any bed. The livelier court ladies felt their Queen’s fidelity (one would not, of course, call it infatuation) slightly scandalous. The nurse who had purloined him from the bakery said she had foreseen it from the moment Tiphaine set eyes on him and exclaimed that he was just what she wanted. Even the malcontents admitted that Tiffany was fit to set before a Queen. His black eyes glanced and danced in his ruddy face like black cherries bobbing in claret cup. He was large of limb, light of foot, sweet-breathed. He had a baritone voice, and his large red fingers were light as butterflies on the strings of a lute. He was also a brilliant mimic and could make Tiphaine laugh. He was perfectly good-natured and just stupid enough to be delightful. His demeanour, his unaffected enjoyment of a rewarded sensuality, made him as popular as a song.

For thirteen years, Tiffany was the Queen’s love.

Shortly before the Willow Leaf dismissed him, a girl baby was born to one of the handsomest ladies at court. Fertility is rare among the Elfin aristocracy, though common enough among working fairies. Some speculative thinkers put this down to the fact that working fairies use their wings, pointing out that wrens, tits, sparrows, etc, are notoriously fertile, whereas the pedestrian dodo is extinct. Be this as it may, aristocratic fairies are passionately fond of children and a birth in court circles is an occasion for much rejoicing. Titania (so this baby was named) was on show daily from two to four. At her naming ceremony she was attended by ninety­nine sponsors, headed by Tiphaine and Tiffany hand in hand. Her parents were given a pension and the Order of the Pomegranate, Tiphaine made her a cowslip ball and the working fairies, who were quite as much excited about her as if they had no babies of their own, clubbed together and presented a Noah’s ark, imported at great expense from the outer world.