Before them is a gentleman, imprisoned in a stiffly starched collar, walking back and forth in his study, a pendulum marking time. Behind him the walls are hung with cuckoo clocks. ‘He’s saying I will never amount to anything, that he sent me to university and now I intend to waste my life by becoming a shepherd.’

‘Perhaps he was right,’ she says.

‘No – every step I took led me to you.’

‘Led you to your death,’ says Edith.

The cuckoo clocks all chime together.

Demetrius’ perfect brother, thin as a snake, is doing up his trousers while the maid weeps.

‘When my grandfather heard I was to marry you,’ Demetrius says, ‘he wrote to tell me to be careful – that my brother had taken up hunting.’

She is dizzy with what she’s seen. ‘This was your life – in that coffin of a house?’ He nods. ‘Why didn’t your father just give the business to your brother?’

‘For the same reason that you were to be married in a traditional wedding dress. It has always been that way because no one had the imagination to think of another way.’

‘In all my imaginings about where you’d come from, I never saw you in a house like that. I knew you were clever – lots of people are who have taught themselves about the world. But I never guessed you came from such wealth. Doesn’t it make you sad to have had a family that didn’t know you?’

‘If I hadn’t found you, I would’ve been wretched. The rest doesn’t matter. The butcher, my brother, your father, my father. It’s all the same. I was the stranger who fell in love with a magical woman and that changed everything.’

‘I know nothing of the world you left.’

‘That makes me love you more.’

In the morning – which morning? In a morning with light coming through the windows and Demetrius’ arms round her, she says, ‘The word “love” is too small.’

‘It’s a word that many claim and few find,’ says Demetrius. ‘May this never end,’ she whispers.

He runs his finger down her neck. ‘All things living and dead have a season,’ he says and kisses her.

‘What would we do if you were alive?’ she asks.

‘Much as we do now. We would worry more about money and my sheep and the roundness of your belly.’

‘There will be no children.’

And then he says something that she holds tight to. ‘Not this time, but there will be. This time we have winter, we have the snow.’ He climbs out of bed, pulls on his trousers. ‘Tonight I will play for you.’

She turns away for she can’t bear to look at the wound in his back, a weeping eye that can be plainly seen.