Riveted by these words and yet unable quite to grasp their meaning, Lucy turns from the man who is clearly their elder, and looks again at the riddler, the man they call Will, and whom she would choose to call Will Shakespeare, if she dared. She is searching for some word, some question: but he is there already, and speaks now to Lucy herself: “You must remain, decide the ending for our play. And you must do it extempore, for the words are in your characters. So, for now, you that way, we this way.”

The words are crowding Lucy’s mind—a din in her ear, inaudible against the noise of her heart. All other sounds are becoming dulled. On the wall behind them she glimpses the painting. She stops suddenly, scouring it for details in the dim light. She is at ease with the images—if not with these strange souls in the room. Her eyes begin absorbing the freshly painted horse, with a rose in its mouth; and she sees also a knight, tumbling at the horse’s hoofs. There is a tree with a gaping hole at the base of its trunk. Her head feels tight, and her ears are hollow again. She believes she must be dreaming, but knows certainly she is not. Her mind moves to the soft focus of Will’s Leica, and of Alex reminding her of the effect of her drugs when taken with a glass of wine, as on that night on the Thames. How many ways of seeing are there? she thought. And is Alex right?

The laughter is now clanging, the sounds close to disturbing, the moment fleeting. She unfastens the front door quickly to the street opposite the passage from which she and Guy Temple have just come. When she turns around again, the other occupants of the room are gone. It has never happened. Using a disused entrance to avoid prying eyes, she has caught the room as it once was, when her name was first spoken here by them hundreds of years before. The moment itself, she thinks, was a palindrome.

All the light is now extinguished except for the small shaft thrown by the flashlight which the manager had given them at the hotel desk to find their way through the old, seldom-used passage to the adjacent pottery shop, which had been a part of the pub’s suite of rooms for hundreds of years.

And now Lucy notices that Guy Temple, perhaps nervous and unsettled by what they have just seen, is slumped against the door frame, looking gray and ill.