Before he announced himself, she said his name softly, and then turned round. Her face was cast in shadow, and Tisamenos thought she looked old. Her skin was wrinkled and sagging, her eyes surrounded by darkened skin. She wore black, as she had done for as long as Tisamenos could remember, like a peasant woman from the outlying villages. Her hands, though, were unblemished by work. Faced with her staring eyes, Tisamenos blushed.

Electra never quite looked anyone in the eye. Even now she stared slightly over his shoulder, as if waiting for someone. Someone who would never come. Tisamenos stuttered a greeting.

‘Be … be glad, my lady Electra …’

‘The kinghouse can never rest,’ she said, ignoring his politeness and feeling the stone walls with her long, pale fingers. ‘I listen to her breathing. She has seen so much. There was never a family that has suffered as ours has. Every day I relive it all …’ She gasped and coughed, and held a hand to her throat. Tisamenos ran to help her, but she pushed him away, instead gripping onto the window sill for support.

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ said Tisamenos. ‘About …’ He steeled himself. ‘Revenge.’

Electra let out a cry. ‘I knew it would happen! I knew it, I knew it!’ She spoke with cold fervour. ‘You don’t understand what it was like, to watch that vile Aegisthos with my mother … You don’t know how long I had to wait for Orestes to come … Always looking for him; every stranger that came into the palace, I wondered if it was him. And then he came! Revenge. They call it revenge. It wasn’t revenge, it was natural!’ She went to the table and picked up the wax tablet. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I set it all down, all of our bloody history. You must learn it, Tisamenos, you must learn it and know that we did the right thing.’ She seemed infused with a strange inner light, like a beacon, and she pressed the tablet upon him, her hands forming into claws, the sinews in them straining.

There was a sound at the door, and Electra looked up sharply. ‘Orestes? Orestes, is that you?’

The door opened, and a flurry of Electra’s women entered. They tutted at Tisamenos and ushered him towards the door. ‘Can’t you see you’ve upset her?’

‘But I need to know. I need to know! Electra!’ He called again. ‘Electra! Is it worth it? Is revenge worth it?’

She caught his gaze then, and it was like looking into the eyes of a spirited horse. She smiled, slowly. And then she began to laugh, a hollow, mad laugh.

Tisamenos dropped the tablet and fled. Even the closing of the stone door did not muffle the laughter, and it rang in his mind until he found a quiet corner near the kitchens, where he paused, breathing in the smell of roasting boars.