Perhaps it aided time to slip away so peacefully that all their queens were called Morgan. There was the notorious Morgan le Fay. There was Morgan Philosophy, whose long scholarly amour with Taliesin taught him to be a salmon and acquainted him with Alexander the Great. There was Morgan Breastknot of Music, whose page, grown old, wept on his death bed because all living memory of her singing would perish with him. The reign of her successor, Morgan Spider (so titled because of her exquisite fine spinning), saw a new manifestation of Castle Ash Grove’s devotion to music. Ignoring the traditional Elfin aloofness from mankind, a party of music lovers democratically disguised themselves as mortals and went to Worcester Cathedral, masked and in riding mantles, to hear Thomas Tomkins play on the organ; and later, wearing bonnets and top hats, attended a performance of the Messiah at the Three Choirs’ Festival.

There were always some children at the manse, though their number fluctuated with mortalities. At this time, there were two, Ezekiel and Margaret. Ezekiel was undersized and rickety, but thought to be promising: at the age of five, he had mastered three alphabets—European, Greek, and Hebrew. Ellin had practised on changelings, so mortal children came easy. She soon discarded Margaret, whose thoughts dwelt on food and arithmetic. Ezekiel, the younger of the two, was more rewarding. By listening to his thoughts, and clearing away what his father had taught him, she discovered that he lived in a world of words—turning them over in his mind, repeating them to himself, fitting them with new meanings or deepening the meanings he knew. Ellin put new words into his mind, choosing them carefully and observing what he did with them. She got some of her best results with simple technical terms which he could not relate to anything in his experience. “Hemming and felling” absorbed him for days. In the end, they became a ceremonial leaping from pew to pew. In the course of listening to his thoughts she picked up several words unknown to her, such as Urim and Thummim, which according to Ezekiel were blue lamb’s-wool mittens; but she was content to leave them a mystery.

‘Well, she’s just taking her time. But it’s an awful house for mislaying things. There’s three eggs I can’t put my hand on, and the sugar I beat small for making the caudle, half of it has clean vanished.’