Gay drew in from her cigarette, the sudden flare of light showing her pensive face, then let out a cloud of fragrant smoke. “We’re spoilt children, all of us, and it can be difficult for someone in Jimmy’s position to think of ways to fill the day. Unless one is taken with administering roads projects and building schools, there’s basically nothing to do. My own father drank himself to death at the age of thirty-one, there’s another uncle who reached the age of forty and locked himself up in his palace to become what you might call a connoisseur of perversion. Jimmy himself spent a few years gambling in Monaco, then he turned to racing cars, and of course you’ve seen his aeroplanes. I think he found danger boring after a time, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, because he threw it all over and came home. He spent a couple of years setting up elaborate practical jokes on people, and getting a reputation for sorcery—the servants are still convinced he can walk through solid walls—and then got tired of those games as well. That’s when he began to restore The Forts, and a couple of years later he started the zoo. So far that’s kept him busy. I suppose African lions and Australian birds make for a more satisfying collection than Moghul miniatures or Japanese armour, or even motorcars and fast planes.”

“Are you saying that your cousin, what? Collects human oddities?”

She snorted delicately. “Those you’ve met, they’re nothing, they’re practically normal. He had a two-headed child for a while, although I think she died last year, and he found a pair of albino dancers in Berlin who can’t venture into the daylight. And you won’t have seen his village of imported dwarfs—it amuses him to put the smallest people he can find in charge of the lions and giraffes. The village headman is three feet tall, and used to be with Barnum and Bailey. Not that the circus was sorry to be rid of him—he’s got the foulest mouth of any creature I’ve ever heard. Jimmy thinks he’s hilarious. Or he used to; I think he’s beginning to find it all a bit tedious. He’s showing signs of looking around for something new.

“Oh, is that the bell already? Hell, I’ve got to dress.” She tweaked the end of her cigarette out of its holder and tossed it into the shrubbery, tracing an arc through the night, then left without saying good-bye.