When the meal was over they pushed back their chairs. They talked. The poetry of John Clare. The paws of otters. Napoleon’s wife. The heat. Cornelius consulted his watch. It was ten already, or it was probably ten. It was a long time since he had been able to set his watch by anything larger and more reliable. There had been many small adjustments, some guesswork when he forgot to wind it.

“It might be midnight,” he said, and laughed excitedly.

“I want to sleep outside tonight,” said Jane. “My room will be unbearable.”

“And what if it rains?” asked Emily. “We are all outside with our bedding and it starts to rain? You know very well how the weather can change here.”

Jane shrugged. “There will be air. I will be able to breathe. It is not the same for you.”

“It is an exquisite idea,” said Cornelius. “And I believe Lovall knows all about sleeping in the open. He will build a type of igloo. Or something like an owl’s nest. Anyway, it will be lined with moss. Don’t you wish to see that, dear Basemath? Don’t you? Lovall’s ingenious nest?”

They carried their bedding outside, walking through the shadowy house with armfuls of sheets and blankets. Jane’s mattress was the largest and it was not thought practical to bring it down. She would have Cornelius’s mattress and he would have a bed made up from the cushions of the ottoman.

They built their camp on the level ground at the front of the house. Lacroix, unsure of the etiquette, placed his own bed at a distance from the others that he thought replicated the distance he slept from them inside the house.

“Why are you there?” asked Emily.

He dragged his bed closer. Now it lay at the outer edge of the camp, slightly nearer to Cornelius’s bed than to that of either sister. The whole camp was confusing. It was not even clear which end of the mattresses people intended to have their heads.

Jane went into the house and came out in her night clothes. They were not very different to what she had been wearing in the day but her hair was down and she had a dark-coloured shawl around her shoulders. Emily went next. When she reappeared, also with a shawl, there was a softness to her movements, a fluidity, that may have been a trick of the moonlight or else the absence of those garments that disciplined a woman’s body and could not, even on a hot day, be set aside. Certainly neither of his own sisters did. Or Nell. Or any of the women he knew.

For himself, he had got no further than taking off his boots. He did not have a nightshirt and hoped no one suggested he borrow one of Thorpe’s.