‘The Fisher King,’ I whisper to myself. He looks exactly like a man under an enchantment. This is not an illness of this world: this has to be a curse laid on him. He looks like the wax image of a king that they lay on the coffin at a royal funeral, not a living man. Only the rise and fall of his chest, and the little noise that he makes from time to time, a little snuffling snore, tells us that he is alive. Alive but not a living man. I glance at the duke: he is looking at his king with an expression of horror. ‘This is worse than I thought,’ he says quietly to me. ‘Far worse.’

The doctor steps forwards. ‘He is in good health – otherwise,’ he says.

I look at him blankly. This state cannot be described as good health. He is like a dead man. ‘Does nothing make him stir?’

He shakes his head, he gestures at the table behind. ‘We have tried everything,’ he says. ‘We go on trying. At about noon every day, after he has broken his fast, we spend an hour trying to wake him, and every evening before dinner for another hour. But he seems to hear nothing, and he feels no pain. Every day we tell him that he must wake, sometimes we send for a priest to call on him to do his duty, to reproach him for failing us; but he shows no signs of hearing or understanding.’

‘Is he getting any worse?’

‘No worse; but no better.’ He hesitates. ‘I think his sleep is a little deeper than when it first came on him.’ He gestures politely to the other doctors. One of them shakes his head. ‘Opinions vary.’

‘Do you think he might speak when we bring his son in to him?’ the duke asks the doctors. ‘Does he ever say anything? Does he even dream?’

‘He never says anything,’ Dr Faceby volunteers. ‘But I think he dreams. Sometimes you can see his eyelids moving, sometimes he twitches in his sleep.’ He glances at me. ‘Once he wept.’

I put my hand to my mouth at the thought of the king weeping in his sleep. I wonder if he is seeing in another world, I wonder what he has been watching. He has been asleep for nearly four months, it is a long dream. What can a four-month dream show a sleeping man?

‘Could we prompt him to move at all?’ The duke is thinking of the shock to the council, seeing the king like this for the first time. ‘Could he hold the baby if we put it in his arms?’

‘He is quite limp,’ Dr Arundel says. ‘I am afraid he would drop the baby. You could not trust him with anything of value. He is, himself, quite incapable.’

There is an appalled silence.

‘This has to be done,’ the duke decides.

‘At least move that terrible chair,’ I say, and the two porters lift the chair with the straps and the close stool and carry it out.