The doctor turned to Mrs. Cassimer. “Did you hear? Eight days—almost a week. She must be starving.”

“Oh, sir. Fishes, she says.”

“I have brought a guest here,” continued Thanakar. “Perhaps he and the princess have tastes in common.

It sounds like it. As for me, can you make me a fruit salad? I was up all night.”

“Beloved Angkhdt. Fishes, she wants.”

“Please, Mrs. Cassimer.”

“But sir, she killed a man.”

“Yes,” whispered the princess. “What’s done is done.” She turned her eyes to the housekeeper, and the woman fled.

“Well, Mother,” said the doctor, coming forward into the room. “You’ve made rather a mess.” He walked towards her, kicking through books and broken vases.

“Yes,” breathed the princess. “Not too close, my son. That’s close enough.” He stopped uncertainly, and she continued. “Why, you’re a man now, Thanakar. Are you married?”

“No.”

“No. No need. Does your leg give you much trouble?”

“Not much.”

“No.” She looked almost young. Her hair was glossy and her face unlined, but her dead white pallor and her changing eyes made her a creature out of nightmares and sick dreams, trapped between worlds. She looked around the room. “How long?” she asked. “What is the date?”

“October 46th, in the eighth phase of spring. It’s raining.”

“So. More than fifty months, then. More than five thousand days. Are you religious, Thanakar?”

“No.”

“Good boy. They stole my life from me. I want it back. I want it.” Her eyes caught her reflection in the shards of a broken mirror on the wall; she turned away with an expression of disgust. “Not like this. Why did you wake me? It was the heroin solution. I could feel it pulling me upward as soon as you had shot it in, but I took such a long time to reach the surface, I was down so far. Look—your father looks as young as when I married him.”

The doctor picked up a chair from off its side. “Tell me,” he said.

His mother turned, and he watched her eyes fade from pink to white. “No,” she whispered. “Not now. A world of dreams, my son. Not now. I’m thirsty now. Bring me pear whiskey in a crystal glass. Bring me clusters of white grapes. I want them.”

Thanakar rubbed his nose. A sound came from somewhere else in the apartment. The antinomial blew into his flute to clear it, and then started to play a small tune. The princess heard it. She tilted her head curiously, and Thanakar watched a stain of yellow spread and darken in her eyes. “What is that?” she asked.

* * *

He went to find Jenny Pentecost, but she was gone. The house was burned—charred timber, nothing.

The police at the local station were obsequious and useless, because the mud and the ashes where the house had been still stank with perfume, and a blackened post was daubed with a cross and circle in red paint. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the policeman, picking at a pimple underneath his lip. “I wouldn’t have touched them, knowing your lordship to be interested, and a friend of the poor commissar’s too. We knew they were runaways, a girl marked like that. But who isn’t, nowadays? The whole district is clearing out. Evil times, sir, evil times. But look here.” He pointed out the red mark on the post, though no one could have missed it or failed to understand it. “See that? Not our jurisdiction. That’s the purge.