“The very rummest. Like this room, in a way. Here we are, cosy as can be, even if we have no focus. What makes us so snug?”

“The stove, obviously.”

“Yes, but have you never thought what makes the stove so warm?”

“I’ve wondered—yes. How is it fed?”

“That’s one of the interesting things about these old castles. Dividing all the main rooms are terribly narrow passages—not more than eighteen inches wide, some of them, and as dark as night—and through those corridors creep servants in soft slippers who poke firewood into these stoves from the back. Unseen by us, and usually unheard. We don’t give them a thought, but they are there, and they keep life in winter from being intolerable. Do they listen to us? I’ll bet they do. They keep us warm, they are necessary to us, and they probably know a lot more about us than we would consider comfortable. They are the hidden life of the house.”

“A spooky idea.”

“The whole Universe is a spooky idea. And in every life there are these unseen people and—not people exactly—who keep us warm.—Have you ever had your horoscope cast?”

“Oh, as a boy I sent away money for a horoscope from some company in the States that advertised them in a boys’ magazine. Awful rubbish, illiterate and printed on the worst kind of paper. And at Oxford a Bulgarian chap I met insisted on casting a horoscope for me, and it was blatantly obvious that what he found in the stars was pretty much what he wanted me to do, which was join some half-assed Communist spy outfit he thought he commanded. Not a very deep look into astrology, I am sure you would say.”

“No, though the Bulgarian one has a familiar ring. Lots of horoscopes used to be cast that way, and still are, obviously. But I’ll do one for you, if you like. The genuine article, no punches pulled. Interested?”

“Of course. Who can resist anything so flattering to the ego?”

“Dead right. That’s another element. A horoscope means somebody is really paying attention to you, and that is rarer than you might think. Where, and when, were you born?”

“September 12, apparently at seven o’clock in the morning, in 1909.”

“And where?”

“A place called Blairlogie, in Canada.”

“Sounds like the Jumping-Off Place. I shall have to consult the gazetteer to get the exact position. Because the stars over Blairlogie weren’t precisely like the stars over anywhere else.”

“Yes, but suppose somebody else had been born at just that moment, in Blairlogie, wouldn’t he be my twin, in all matters of Fate?”

“No. And now I shall let the cat out of the bag. This is what separates me from your boys’-paper fraud, and your Bulgarian Commie fraud. This is my great historical discovery that the real astrologers guarded with their lives, and if you breathe it to anybody before my book comes out, I shall hunt you down and kill you very imaginatively. When were you conceived?”

“God, how would I know? In Blairlogie; I’m sure of that.”

“The usual answer. Parents are terribly niminy-piminy about telling their children these things. Ah, well; I shall just have to count backward and make an approximation. But anyhow—when were you baptized and christened?”

“Oh, I can tell you that, right enough. It was about three weeks later; September 30, actually, at roughly four o’clock in the afternoon. Church of England rite. Oh, and now I come to think of it, I was baptized again, years later, Catholic, that time. I’m sure I can remember the date if I try. But how does that come in?”

“When you were begotten is obviously important. As you seem to be a healthy chap I presume you were a full-term baby, so I can get the date fairly near. Date of entry upon the stage in the Great Theatre of the World is important, and that is the only one the commoner sort of astrologers bother with. But the date when you were formally received into what your community looked upon as the world of the spirit, and were given your own name, is important because it supplies a few shades to your central chart. And to be baptized twice!—spiritual dandyism, I’d call it. You let me have all that on a piece of paper at breakfast, and I’ll get to work. Meanwhile, just one more teensy cognac before we retire to our blameless couches.”

Days alone in the shell-grotto and nights with Ruth Nibsmith were doing much to restore Francis’s battered self-esteem. Getting away from England had been a bruising experience. There was all the trouble of explaining to Ismay’s parents what had happened, and putting up with their obvious, though unexpressed, opinion that it must have been his fault. Then there was the trouble of making arrangements about the child Charlotte—Little Charlie as everybody but Francis insisted on calling her, slurring the “Ch” so it sounded like “Sharlie”—because the Glassons wanted to have control over her, but did not particularly want to be bothered with her. Their days of bringing up children were, they said reasonably, in the past. Were they now to take on a baby, who needed care every hour of the day? They worried, understandably, about Ismay, who was God knows where with God knows who in a country on the brink of civil war. The girl, they admitted, was a fool, but that did not seem to lessen their conviction that Francis was to blame for everything that had happened. When he was pushed at last to the point of telling them that Little Charlie was not his child, Aunt Prudence wept and Uncle Roderick swore, but they were no more sympathetic toward Francis. Cuckolds are fated to play ignominious and usually comic roles.

Never had Francis felt so low as when at last he came to an arrangement with the Glassons; in addition to the money already promised to keep the estate afloat, he agreed to pay all the costs of maintaining Little Charlie, which were substantial, because the child must have a first-rate nanny, and money for whatever a child needs—and the Glassons were not prepared to stint their granddaughter—and also a sum indefinitely allocated but definitely estimated for unforeseen costs. It was all reasonable enough, but Francis had the feeling that he was being exploited, and when his honour and his affections were under ruinous attack, he was astonished to find how greatly the assault on his bank-account affected him also. It was ignoble, under the circumstances, to think so much about money, but think about it he did. What did he care about Little Charlie, at present a dribbling, squalling, slumbrous lump?

In the circumstances, it was not surprising that he had jumped at Uncle Jack’s offer of something to do, some place to go, a necessary task to undertake. But that had resolved itself into three months of grubby devilling for Tancred Saraceni, who had kept him grinding away with mortar and pestle, boiling up the smelly muck that went into the “black oil” the painter needed for his work, and generally acting as chore-boy and sorcerer’s apprentice.

What was the sorcerer up to? Faking pictures, or at least improving existing worthless pictures. Could the great Saraceni really be sunk in this worst sort of artistic sin? Certainly that was what it looked like.

Well, if this was the game, if this was what he had been dragged into, he might as well play it to the hilt. He would show Saraceni that he could daub in the sixteenth-century German manner as well as anyone. He was to paint a picture that would agree in quality and style with the panels that had been completed and that now sat all around the shell-grotto, staring at him with the speculative eyes of the unknown dead. As Francis sat down to plan his picture he laughed for the first time in several months.

He did many preliminary drawings, and just to show what a conscientious faker he was, he did them on some of the expensive old paper culled from old books and artists’ leavings he had from his Oxford days, coating it with an umber base, and making his careful preliminaries (for they were not sketches in the modern sense) with a silver-point. Yes, it was coming quite well. Yes, that was what he wanted and what would surprise the Meister. Rapidly and surely, he began to paint on his miserable old panel, in the Meister’s own careful mode, with unexceptionable, authentic colours, and every stroke mixed with the magical formula of phenol and formaldehyde.