The lights turned out to belong to a fair-sized house whose buildings enclosed a courtyard. The house itself, two storeys high, made one wall of the yard, which was bounded on the other three sides by single-storey buildings—baths, servants’ quarters, stables, bakehouse—the whole enclosure high-walled and showing only a few slit windows well beyond my reach. There was an arched gateway, and beside this in an iron bracket set at the height of a man’s reach, a torch spluttered, sulky with damp pitch. There were more lights inside the yard, but I could hear no movement or voices. The gate, of course, was shut fast.

Not that I would have dared go in that way, to meet some summary fate at the porter’s hands. I skirted the wall, looking hopefully for a way to climb in. The third window was the bakehouse; the smells were hours old, and cold, but still would have sent me swarming up the wall, save that the window was a bare slit which would not have admitted even me.

The next was a stable, and the next also . . . I could smell the horse-smells and beast-smells mingling, and the sweetness of dried grass. Then the house, with no windows at all facing outwards. The bath-house, the same. And back to the gate.

A chain clanged suddenly, and within a few feet of me, just inside the gate, a big dog gave tongue like a bell. I believe I jumped back a full pace, then flattened myself against the wall as I heard a door open somewhere close. There was a pause, while the dog growled and someone listened, then a man’s voice said something curt, and the door shut. The dog grumbled to itself for a bit, snuffling at the foot of the gate, then dragged its chain back to the kennel, and I heard it settling again into its straw.

There was obviously no way in to find shelter. I stood for a while, trying to think, with my back pressed to the cold wall that still seemed warmer than the icy air. I was shaking now with the cold so violently that I felt as if my very bones were chattering. I was sure I had been right to leave the ship, and not to trust myself to the troops’ mercy, but now I began to wonder if I dared knock at the gate and beg for shelter. I would get rough shrift as a beggar, I knew, but if I stayed out here I might well die of cold before morning.