Hours later in the darkness, while he slept beside her, Villana caused the day that had passed to pass again. In the long looking-glass of her bedroom at Carriglas the cornflower blue of her wedding-dress was a pale reflection of her eyes. Beneath the hem that almost reached the floor her bare toes protruded. These were her last moments alone, she had thought, sitting on the edge of her bed, the skirt of her dress pulled up just a little in order to cross her legs. She’d lit a Craven A.

‘Dear child,’ he whispered in his sleep. ‘My darling girl.’

Would this make a difference, she wondered, or whenever she entered the ice-house would she still feel the past clinging like lichen to its walls? Hugh’s love had remained at Carriglas like the ghost of a person; it had begun there and been laid to rest there, ‘It is impossible,’ he had adamantly laid down, his firmness of purpose making the sacrifice he insisted upon seem heroic and even beautiful. While they still embraced, the act of destruction had been committed.

All day, ridiculously, she had believed he might suddenly be there. All day she had believed that she would wake to find herself walking out of a nightmare that had lasted for only a few seconds. But all there’d been was the occasion she had brought upon herself—wedding guests celebrating a marriage that was a local wonder, her brother’s woman drunk. Tomorrow they would continue their journey and then they would walk by the lakes. The affection that cheered her in her desolation would not have departed from her husband’s eyes; reflected in every tone of his voice, in all his glances and his gestures, it would continue to soothe her pain. When the moment was suitable she would gently tell him that it was better to let Carriglas go, that his dream of resurrection was not what anyone wanted. He would be disappointed and bewildered, as he had been when she’d explained about the dedication on the bridge. But in the end he would accept the family’s wishes and abide by them.

John James refused the incident entry to his mind. He forced his thoughts away from it, bludgeoning them recklessly, tolerating no disobedience. At least he had remembered the carpentry man’s name; at least there was that minuscule mercy. Asquith-Jones had protested that it was common assault to strike anyone with a panel saw, and Spokeshave Billimore had called him a pup, and Asquith-Jones had said he wouldn’t take that from a carpentry instructor. Asquith-Jones had kept a caged rat in his dormitory locker, a tawny-coloured creature that would gnaw the end of your fingers if you put them between the bars. Someone else—Grub Hineforth it would have been—let it out once.