I am on the street beneath windy sky, and Orvar is speaking to me from the roof of the carriage.

“She receives in the late afternoon, past three.”

There is a crisp card in my hand, pale lavender with metallic print, an address in the death district not far from here.

“Come soon, won’t you?” he says almost merrily.

I hold the card up to my face and that scent unfolds its petals for me again. A rattle of hooves, and then no sound but the rustle of wind against the eaves. A tin can clambers down the street behind me.

*

What at a distance I took for rags of hanging moss prove instead to be enormous veils festooning every bough of every tree on the grounds. I have wasted my time wondering how I will get inside the high stone walls, if there will be a bell or if I will have to stand in the street and shout like a fool, because Orvar emerges from the small door in the elephantine wooden gates pimpled over with bronze busses as I approach. He is thumbing his keys in his palm. As I approach, he looks up without surprise and stands away from the door.

“Go on through. The Girl will show you in.”

He seems brisk and cheerful as he pulls loose from the house.

“Good of you to come,” he says even jauntily now, and waving. “So long.”

I have to raise my feet high to get through the door, and the greasy black lock snaps noisily as I draw it to behind me. There is no gap in the wall here, I see as we go through, rather the walls fold inward to form a causeway leading to the front of the house, where they fold again to form a high, narrow gravel court. The fluttering trees appear to be imprisoned, like zoo animals, behind these unbroken walls. The branches are robust and beneath the floating veils the soil sports a rich pelt of luxurious black grass soft as sable. The house presents a flat and undemonstrative front of windows shuttered in discolored ivory and a bronze door and footplate level with the ground. Above this, a bronze canopy, its outer ring studded with round baubles, and topped with two life-sized bronze foxes, mirrored, creeping along the edges of the canopy with the far forepaw raised and matching sidelong looks. A human expressiveness has been inharmoniously grafted onto their faces, and the resulting look mingles derision, rapacity, idiocy and yawning in equal parts.

In the gloom under the canopy I am injected with nervous excitement. How do you knock on a bronze slab like this? Now I see the metal rod to one side; I have to hold it in the fingers of my left hand, while my right turns a crank at the end. I’m not sure I hear any responding action from inside; I wait.

A few wisecracking birds, a slurred gush of wind over the ground.