Such things were very different from before. There had been no television in the first house. But here there were several. The greater one crouched in the drawing room. Eric, Sasha, and Miranda had each a set in their bedroom. A set had been presented to Michael and Cheta, and one installed in Rachaela's room. They had given her a music center too, and her own video, which she never used. She seldom watched her TV either. But one or all of the other sets were always on the go.

There were electric lights now.

In the kitchen, with its cream and black tiles and the collector's piece, an old, rusted, green mangle, standing by the wall, were now the mod cons: a washing machine, a dishwasher, an electric cooker, food processors, fridge. In the pantry stood a huge chest freezer where the servants inserted enormous joints of meat and the frozen swords of vast fish.

The house was not so large as the first house.

There were more bathrooms, adjoining all the bedchambers and sitting ready on each floor. The bathrooms were white and collectible, like the mangle, having claw-foot baths and brass Edwardian showers. They had green tarot glass windows. Rachaela had found that her bathroom window would open, and also the window in her room. This must have been especially arranged for her. She had a view out across the common. The undulating, heavily treed slopes, like a wilderness, a glade; where only occasionally some solitary walker might go by (staring up). At night, sometimes, an owl called.

The scarred table was in the drawing room.

Rachaela sat down at it. She did not touch the scratches.

Was she trying to understand them at last, the Scarabae, or only herself?

Rachaela, seated on the ground, her back against a tree, had watched the surviving Scarabae, as the house burned to the earth. They stood in a little loose group, at a safe, silent distance. Their clothes were scorched half-off. Bare, skinny witch arms, old, hard, naked legs, holes that showed antique sooty camisoles, withered lace.

In the house, burned, all the rest: Livia, Anita, Unice, Jack, George, Teresa, Stephan, Carlo and Maria. And with them, the already dead, Anna, Alice, Dorian and Peter, stunned by Ruth's hammer and impaled through the heart by hammered knitting needles. The staking of vampires. And, of course, Adamus, Ruth's father, and grandfather.

Beautiful, black-haired Adamus, cold as ice, now warmed through by fire. Hanged from a rope. Suicide.

And Ruth, murderess and arsonist, leaving the house ablaze from her handy candle, had fled across the heath. She had had the mark of Cain on her too. The bruise on her face where Adamus had struck her.

It was hard to dismiss this image of the fleeing Ruth. As it was hard to curtail the other image of her in the blood-colored dress, when the Scarabae betrothed her to Adamus, father, grandfather, and their names were written in the book.