As darkness falls, London begins to sparkle with lights. It is a cloudless, late spring night, and the stars are too beautiful to miss. I step back into my bedroom and walk through to the hallway where I take the lift installed specifically to access my roof garden. The mechanism whirs softly as I am borne up through the ceiling, and out onto my very own high plateau. The space is comfortably large enough for reclining chairs, tables, and a small swimming pool, but it is not for these that I have made the ascent today. At the far end of the garden, with its low rendered wall, white-painted, and a door displaying a detailed replica of the dragonfly that once adorned the doors of the Great Chamber, sits the glass-domed construction which speeds my heart a little each time I enter it. Once I realized that the catacombs were lost forever, I knew I needed somewhere I could connect with the Land of Night. If this could not, for practical reasons, be underground, then where better than high up in the darkness of the nocturnal sky, as close to the starry heavens as it is possible to be? The engineers who constructed Waterloo Court rose to the challenge of my request for an observatory splendidly, and I shall be forever grateful for the fine results of their labors.

Inside, although there are in fact walls surrounding the space, they are barely noticeable, for they are less than a yard high, the rest of the construction being entirely of glass. And what glass it is! The specially made panes, some flat, others curved, are slotted into a spider’s web of slim iron, giving a startling view of the skies above, as well as the city stretched out below. I love to come here on stormy nights, when the wind and rain assail my transparent shelter, but I am kept dry and snug, able to experience all the wildness of the elements without so much as getting wet. And on clear nights, such as this one, I feel as if I have been raised up to dwell in the heavens and browse among the crystal stars. There is a telescope in the north of the room, mounted on gleaming brass fittings, so that I may study the celestial bodies more closely. It is a diverting pastime, perhaps the one guilty luxury I permit myself in these troubled times.