“Do they now?” he said. “Then they’re wrong. I think I would have remembered that, you know.”

“Are you going to disappear again?” asked Alice.

“I don’t know,” said the Duke crossly. “What a lot of questions you do ask.” He then proceeded to ask some of his own. Who was the present Duke? What was he like? Married? Children? And Alice answered as best she could.

“Don’t you want to know about how hard life is for us here?” ventured Alice.

“No, not in the slightest,” said the Duke. “There is nothing more boring than a whining, ungrateful servant. Go to sleep. Go off to bed, there’s a good girl and leave me to cogitate.”

“What’s that?”

“Think.”

“Oh!” Alice got up reluctantly. He made no move to detain her. She turned at the door and looked rather wistfully back at him. “I did fetch you back,” she said softly.

“And that gives you a claim on my time, you grubby fairy? Very well, my kitchen elf. I shall meet you here, every evening at this time.”

Alice bobbed a curtsy and slipped as quietly from the room as she had entered. She was suddenly so tired that the stairs seemed to rise up to meet her. Wearily she stumbled back to the kitchen, pulled her mattress from its corner and fell immediately asleep.

The next day Alice was sure it had all been a dream but, dream or not, she could not forget that the phantom of her dream had called her dirty. When all the other servants were at their evening meal, she slipped out to the pump at the back, and, stripping off, scrubbed herself until she felt raw, and soaped her hair, gasping at the bite of cold water as she rinsed it.

When she was finally allowed to escape to her “bed” that night, she lay down with a feeling of anticipation. She expected to be wafted back to that dream banqueting hall where the dream Duke would be waiting for her. But nothing happened. Only exhausted sleep and the waking in the chill dawn to a feeling of loss.

As the day wore on, she saw several of the men gazing at the freshly washed, midnight cloud of black hair which now tumbled down her back and, feeling uneasy, she found a piece of string and tied it up on top of her head in a severe knot. “If only my ghost had really existed,” thought Alice, afraid of these new lecherous looks and particularly afraid of the Groom of the Chambers whose shoe-button eyes had fastened greedily on her budding bosom as she had bent over to lift a pail of water.