He looks at them for a moment, and then Harold shrugs. ‘God,’ he says.

‘What?’ Ambrosio says.

‘God will replace us all; that is the authority you sought but could not find earlier, because you yourself are lost. We will go into God, or we will be pushed away from him. There are only two places. Within his love, or without it.’

‘But the king is divinely appointed,’ Ambrosio says, ‘or at least his money is universally accepted, which is some kind of divinity. Leave God to God. I speak of the waking world, that glimmering, earthly space between two winks of an eye; his blessed plaything so briefly inhabited, which is this heavy world; a world so much fuller of things than his one. I speak of that, for nowadays when I pray that is all that speaks back to me.’

‘God is all I will say,’ Harold Tuite says. ‘All I will say till I die.’

Ambrosio spits on the floor and crosses himself. ‘You are taking my words into places I would not have them gone,’ he says. ‘I spoke of the world, which is the king’s, and there are only two groupings that could decompose the king’s estate; but they will not; the estate will not fall, it will flounder yet remain.’

De Flunkl puts his hands up in the air, as though calling for a truce. ‘May we leave this discussion till luncheon?’ he asks, sounding flustered. ‘I feel like I have been in this stuffy room an age and I want my properties.’

‘Tell me these two groupings,’ Harold says.

Harold is holding for time, hoping something new will happen; but it is only instinct driving him now. He does not know why, but, somehow, he feels, this transaction must be delayed. I would not be the man, he thinks, who has overseen a formal transaction with dead bodies by his feet.

‘You intrigue me,’ Harold continues. ‘Hell-bound lunatics have always done so, though it is a weakness I have only recently begun to permit myself, and you may look to my travelling master for the proof of it.’

He gestures towards de Flunkl, who sighs with the fatigue of this constant conflict he cannot remember which of them first broached.

‘I will happily tell you,’ Ambrosio says, his eyes widening. ‘You know I have always wanted to write it down in a little treatise, my ideas on the overcoming of the king’s estate; but I would be burnt for it as a treason-man or some Italianate heretic, though I think such a work would be surely in the service of the king; but I would not that I was burnt. If I had a protector I could perhaps venture – but I will never have a protector.’