Jo is also self-employed, an artist, a citizen serf. Technically and officially, according to the paperwork that turns up sometimes, we are both in fief to the Lords Seignioral of the Antient and Allodial Demesne of Sallaye, but as serfs we hand over our insignificant tithes every year to the villeins in the local administration office and remain effectively invisible to the system. In some of the past years, when earnings had been thin, my own tithes have been calculated as being no more than a couple of free copies of one of my books, to be donated to the local lending library. In those years I handed over more, because I know the librarian and she operates the library well. I have worked alongside the library for years. For instance, I have run writing workshops at the library once or twice, and would do so again if asked.

Being a citizen serf changed my social status, but it neither raised nor lowered me in any practical way: no one tells me when to work, how to work, what I should write in my books, where I might travel.

Some of my literary colleagues, the ones who make the most money, describe themselves as the new intelligentsia, but for me that is self-serving and vain. They write a best-seller, make television appearances, judge literary competitions, and as a result feel themselves elevated to quasi-vassalage, taking on airs and assumptions. But their fame, their money, their reputations, change nothing. They remain serfs for life, and so do I.

I continued to dwell on this as we drove north, the weather outside gradually becoming less horrible. The landscape remained bleak and wind-carved. I said nothing about what I was thinking to Frejah Harsent. I did not want to seem defensive about serfdom, because I was not. I did not want to seem obsessed with the subject, because again I was not and in fact I took it so much for granted that my social condition rarely impinged on my awareness. On the other hand, she clearly had some kind of attitude that she had never dealt with. That was of interest for another reason. I wondered briefly what those two serfs, long ago, had done to her to warrant her antagonistic feelings?

At least an hour passed in silence, all but for the growling of the engine and Frejah’s intermittent remarks. Then, unexpectedly, she twisted the headphones away from her and pushed them back beneath the dash.

She said: ‘Someone on the staff of the hotel mentioned you had problems overnight, with horizontal mutability.’