The day after, the wind shifted and blew from the south, and a soft rain fell from a grey-feathered sky, and Aubrey felt well enough to work on his proofs again. Late in the afternoon, the Tittingham police sergeant called about the 175yearly renewal of the gun licences. When this had been seen to, Aubrey said, ‘By the way, what was all that I heard about a man falling off a ladder at the new Museum? I didn’t think it was high enough for such doings yet.’

‘I wouldn’t hardly have thought so myself, sir. But fall off he did, and what’s more, he sustained a considerable fracture. It was young Rex Shillibeer.’

Aubrey asked if this was one of the Milk Street Shillibeers, and was told that he was correct. His hand was quite steady as he took a note from his case and gave it to the sergeant to be given to Mrs Shillibeer with his condolences.

Bright reason told Aubrey there was nothing in it. One of the tribe of Shillibeers had fallen off a ladder—probably he had been gaping at Dulcibella. There was nothing in it at all, except that it confirmingly accounted for the way his servants were behaving. A household of devoted Devonbred servants makes a bad climate for a gentleman engaged in pooh-poohing the superstition of the Evil Eye. Aubrey was beset with four-leaved clovers, the garden walks were infested with horse-shoes and bits of old iron, he could not put his hand into a pocket without meeting a rowan twig, and one night when he happened to be lying awake and turned the pillow for its cooler side his cheek was scratched by two pins neatly stuck into the linen in the shape of a cross. A persistent faint odour of something disagreeably roasting suggested that a bullock’s heart, stuck with more pins and representing Jeanie, was hanging in the kitchen chimney. Mrs Trumper was doubtless reinforcing his food with anti-malefic herbs, which would account for the 176fact that his meals now disagreed with him, and Hopkins encompassed him with a haggard cheerfulness, like one keeping up morale on a sinking ship.

‘I tull’ ee vor zhure: he’m overluked.’ The assurance came in through the bathroom window, and rose from Primrose’s mother, who was now a daily backdoor visitor, as if for bulletins, though on a pretext of new-laid eggs.

These attentions were the more depressing since they could only be offered as precocious funeral tributes. Everyone concerned knew that there is only one way to turn back the curse laid by an Evil Eye, and that is, to draw the blood of the bestower. But the rowan twigs, the four-leaved clovers, the horseshoes, the pins and all the other sad assiduities continued, and so did Aubrey’s state of feeling not quite the thing, until he decided that, even at the price of raising blood-thirsty hopes in vain, there was nothing for it but that he should drag his old bones to London.