They had a fennel salad, and then a bourride singing with garlic. With this had come a bottle of water-clear Macon.

When they had finished the bourride, the girl cleared their plates. The restaurant had filled up quietly and was now full of murmurs and the muted clink of glass and knives behind the screen.

An old woman arrived next, with two thimbles of some golden liqueur. She set these down, and then she spoke to Althene in a strange rounded French. Althene answered her.

Rachaela drank her liqueur, which tasted of the smell of roses. God knew what it was made from. Cyanide, perhaps.

The old woman took Althene's hand, and then she went away.

"Forgive our speaking in another language," said Althene. "Her English isn't good. It should be. She's been here since before the war."

"Which war was that," Rachaela inquired archly, "the one with Napoleon?"

"Oh, no." Althene behaved as if the question were unprovocative, ordinary. "The last."

"But you knew her then."

"Yes. She was younger. She was pretty. She still is."

"The meal was wonderful," said Rachaela grimly.

"There's just one tiny dessert which you must eat."

"I can't, I'm afraid."

"A mouthful," said Althene. She drained her liqueur in a single immaculate gulp. Her eyes were on Rachaela, intensely dark, depth under depth. The eyes of the seducer. Is that what she wants?

Rachaela recalled Michael and Kei in the garden. Michael had not looked elderly anymore. Was homosex-ual love, then, permissible among the Scarabae, with their obsessions of continuance?

Rachaela realized that Althene did make her feel beautiful in turn. And was this too the root of her unease? Even her annoyance?

An image of Jonquil barged into Rachaela's mind, her employer of earlier years, mannish and earringed in steel or bone. Jonquil had been rather fond of her, but very careful. Althene was the antithesis of Jonquil. And Althene's aura, sexual, exquisite, alarmingly unflawed, had no caution to it at all.

When she wants, she will ask me, that's all. She'll ask and I'll say no. And that will be that.

The dessert came, borne by the owner, who had seated them. Miniature tarts amber with apricots.

Rachaela tried hers, and finished it.

She was becoming greedy, like all her kind.

They had coffee in painted white cups, and Calvados in curious squat wooden goblets.

"Don't hurry," said Althene. "There's plenty of time. I hope you'll like the film. Not all of it, perhaps. But there are marvelous things. The ancient past seen through the lens of the early 1900s. Glimpses of authenticity that astound, and moments of utter abandon impossible before, or since."

She refilled Rachaela's cup from the coffeepot.