“Perhaps I chose the wrong shoes,” I offer, apologetic. She looks down at my brown brogues; reasonably rustic in aspect but with poor soles for such terrain.

“Perhaps,” she says. I do believe I am frightened of her, just for this moment. I could believe that she is capable of blowing a hole in me with her shotgun, or putting a bullet from her pistol through my head, or even just having me thrown over this wooden parapet by her men. Instead she takes one last glance at where the birds have disappeared within the rocky race and, in that cataract losing sight of them, has the soldiers load me with the remaining guns. “I really wouldn't lose those, Abel,” she says, sounding almost sad. “Really.” She turns away. “Watch our friend carefully,” she tells the man behind me. “We don't want him slipping again. That would be too terrible. Eh, my lady?” she asks as she passes you. We tramp on, and leave the river's roar buried in its chasm.

I am closed within a high and unused room, a silted backwater in the east tower's highest floor. Cluttered, it is, jumbled with all the froth of our living, like our fond remembered attic. The small windows are mostly smashed, their sills spattered with bird droppings. The fractured panes let in chill rain; I stuff some old curtains into the spaces. In the cold grate I light a fitful fire from bound, collected volumes of old and yellow paged magazines, some of them dealing with hunting and other rural matters; it seems appropriate.

This theme continues. I cannot believe the good lieutenant memorised the castle's every room on one tour round, so I conclude it is just luck that she has me confined here, with these old journal collections, and in glass cases trophies of previous hunts. Animals, birds and fish stare out, glassy eyed and stiffly posed, like awkward ancestors in paintings. The cases are locked; I look for keys in vain, so force a few of these glass sarcophagi, splintering the wood and fracturing the glass.

Regarding the stuffed fowl, the gutted fish, the glass eyed fox and hare, I tap their hard, dead eyes, sniff their dustless plumage and stroke their strange dry skins. Feathers and scales stay with my hand. I hold them up to the candelight, trying to see their link, the time slow change from sea to air, from scale to feather, tail to tail, iridescence to iridescence that these ends unravel back to, expressing evolution's glacial, erratic continuity. The scale, so small, stays too great, however, and remains unseen.

I throw open a narrow window over the moat and launch the birds; they fall. I heave the fish out to the waters; they float. I suppose this is the extra element revealed; the quickness found in living things which ranks above the rest and makes fire, air, earth and water seem closer to each other than ever they are to it.

Just so, the bird and fish, elementally distinguished, are more similar to each other than either is to us. (I stretch the unpinned wings they grate upon their keel. The lithe trout's body, a single fluid muscle wrapped in rainbow tissue, stays inflexible as bone.) But theirs is a beauty of extremity, and I remember catching sight of a bat, silhouetted against a floodlight, its skin like translucent paper, each long and tiny bone picked out in a tracery of exposed flight; the thing was comely but the outline of elongated limb, the paw shape stretched out contorted to become half the wing itself, looked like some preposterous distortion, a mad exaggeration of form which nature somehow ought to feel guilty for. The grace and poise bestowed upon the beast by that exaggerated reformation of its inherited parts, from hand to wing, is something that hands alone, need time and a mind to fashion so decidingly.

I throw the useless things away, burning them on the bed of pages. Before I go to bed, on a platform of boxes, rugs and cloaks, I eat the tray of roasted peahen, plucked but dressed, you have the lieutenant send to me.

I dreamt that night, and in amongst the amber wreckage of your eyes, like a fractured glass containing your chill spirit, hazy visions of a brighter fate swam slow. It was, in the end, the usual thing, the ordinary speciality of our minds” house, a seamy buffeting wrestled out within the pillowed folds of the brain; desire expressed, wishing to impress. Yet, like an old book by fire or dampness warped, around the edges of this fancy lurked my submerged thought (or dream's the fire, consuming, the mind the centre, the little bit unburned, the prose reduced, promoted to a random poesy).

And I have written you, my dear; I have left my mark, my pen's spilled, I've left you soiled and more than my tongue has lashed. falling, to raise the scores. Cut, hurt, tied, taken, left, you want what you do not want and get it; a kinder fate, it suits me to consider, than really wanting what you do, and not.

But by being less than tender on occasion, I have made you rare. and what we share is not much shared. I have watched servants. farmhands, mechanics and secretaries make that backward beast, I have observed their palled equality with our own state, and been with that cosy ordinariness, that unthinkingly smug normality, perversely disgusted.

I have decided, however coldly, that for any of this life, this passing thought of mind, this wisp of purpose in all the surrounding. universal chaos to have value, to be worth anything at all I we must evade such mundane pursuits and set ourselves apart as much in the staging of that customary act as in our dress, habitation, speech or subsidiary manners. Thus have I degraded both of us in order to set us equally as far apart from the lowly as my imagination can devise, hoping by these indiscretions to make us both discrete.

And you, my base precious, have never blamed me. Not for all that ravishing pain and necessary wickedness; for all that's passed your lips, not one word of abjuration has ever issued from your mouth.

Oh, you were always lost in the depths of some calm assessment, always rapt, always cloaked in the simple but engrossing business of just being yourself, I have seen the choice of morning clothes occupy you almost until lunch, been witness to the search for precisely the correct scent, watched it take an afternoon or more of delicate, dedicated anointing, slow rubbing and judicious sniffing, observed a simple sonnet absorb you for an evening of frowns and troubled sighs, found you intent and serious, the very picture of unaffected sincerity as you hang on every word of some dreadful bore for what seems half the night, and known you in your sleep, I'd swear, be roused, rutted and then resume your deeper slumbers without ever fully waking up.

Still I think you see as I do, for all our variations.

We alone are choate, we solely are ordered, while the rest distributed, piled like grains of sand, these refugees are but random light, a blank white hiss, an empty page, a snowed out screen, the always renewing, ever decaying fall out from a state of grace we may at least aspire to by our efforts.

Flapping, snapping, in the air above my musing head, I think I hear the old snow tiger's still extant exterior as, like one hand clapping, one hand waving, it salutes the night.