The baby comes in the middle of August and we fetch down the family crib, polish it up, launder the little sheets and I go into my confinement. She is born easily, she comes early without great trouble, and I call her Martha. Within a few weeks Richard has taken her into the small chapel where we were married and she is christened, and soon I am churched and up and about again.

It is her, the new baby, that I think of when I start up out of bed one night, as alert as if I had heard someone suddenly call my name. ‘What is it?’ I demand into the darkness.

Richard, groggy from sleep, sits up in the bed. ‘Beloved?’

‘Someone called my name! There is something wrong!’

‘Did you have a bad dream?’

‘I thought . . .’ Our lovely old house is silent in the darkness; a beam creaks as the old timbers settle. Richard gets out of bed and lights a taper at the dying fire and then lights a candle so that he can see me. ‘Jacquetta, you are as white as a ghost.’

‘I thought someone woke me.’

‘I’ll take a look around,’ he decides, and pulls on his boots and drags his sword out from under the bed.

‘I’ll go to the nursery,’ I say.

He lights me a candle and the two of us go out together into the dark gallery above the hall. And then I hear it. The strong sweet singing of Melusina, so high and so pure that you would think it was the sound of the stars moving in their spheres. I put my hand on Richard’s arm. ‘Do you hear that?’

‘No, what?’

‘Music,’ I say. I don’t want to say her name. ‘I thought I heard music.’ It is so clear and so powerful that I cannot believe he cannot hear it, like silver church bells, like the truest choir.

‘Who would be playing music at this time of night?’ he starts to ask, but already I have turned to run down the corridor to the nursery. I stop at the door and make myself open it quietly. Martha, the new baby, is asleep in her crib, the nursemaid in the truckle bed nearest ls, like fire. I put my hand on the child’s rosy cheek. She is warm but not in fever. Her breath comes slowly and steadily, like a little bird breathing in a safe nest. In the high-sided bed beside her sleeps Diccon, humped up with his face buried into the down mattress. Gently I lift him and turn him on his back so I can see the curve of his sleeping eyelids, and his rosebud mouth. He stirs a little at my touch but he does not wake.

The music grows louder, stronger.

I turn to the next bed. John, the five-year-old, is sprawled out in sleep as if he is too hot, the covers kicked sideways, and at once I fear that he is ill but when I touch his forehead he is cool. Jacquetta, next to him, sleeps quietly, like the neat little six-year-old girl that she is, Mary in bed beside her stirs at the light from my candle but still sleeps. Their eleven-year-old sister Anne is in a truckle bed beside them, fast asleep.