'I am calm and happy,' he said. His voice sounded distant and foreign.

He began unbuttoning his shirt. He was not giving in to this nonsense again.

He thought of Delphine, how she walked with the heavy steps and twitching vigilance of a soldier. He had done that to her. And Anne. He had always meant to protect her, but his sickness was crushing her. Worst of all, she blamed herself.

Disembodied sensations scratched at the roof tiles. Gideon clenched his fists. He lay on the warm attic floor, shuddering. Tears ran into the tissue paper in his ears.

The Debussy grew louder and louder in his head. He heard a van backfire; a ewe miscarried, disgorging a steaming purple cadaver. All the smells and tastes and sights and sounds in the world were being sucked towards the house.

His body seethed with digits. He was the Hall. He could feel its bleak geometries deep in the black earth.

Time sped up and he saw that all creation was a great plunging cycle of birth and torment; millions burnt to atone for his sins, and he could hear them screaming, broken on the wheel. He was the axle; it turned around him.

The 7s were turning to 6s. He had to stop the cycle.

He rummaged through brushes and empty milk bottles and rags scabby with paint until he found his art scalpel. He held the blade up to the light, felt himself losing his nerve. He pictured Anne's horror when she heard the news, Delphy weeping. God! But wouldn't they live better lives without him, without his sickness dragging them down?

He stared at his wrist. Bluegreen veins roadmapped a pale and freckled arm. He took a deep breath, placed the blade against his skin, and the light went out.

Gideon blinked. He was in darkness. He swayed, unsure which way was up. Had he gone blind? Was this Hell?

A voice spoke to him in the secret language God teaches the dead.

Gideon's breath stopped in his throat.

'Arthur?'

ACT THREE.

September 12th 1935.

What is a dance? No more than order cloaked in chaos. Like all of nature like a tree, like the wind it appears wild, but when we explore deeply we discover it arises from Law. The dancer may seem to be dragged first this way, then that, by the vagaries of whim, but in actuality, every step is planned. This, then, is the essence of dancing: to ride the changing winds; to surrender to fate and, in surrendering, to become its master.

Meetings With Mephistopheles, I. G. Propp.

CHAPTER 25.

PARABELLUM.

On the floor in front of the hearth, Mr Garforth rolled out a map. He placed a mug on either end.

'This is a plan of the Hall.'

'I can see that.'

His bloodshot eyes thinned. 'You promised you'd listen.'

'We've gone through this.'

'And so will we again.' He slapped the paper. 'You'll enter here.'

The map was yellow and wrinkled. It showed a plan of all three floors. The ground and first floor looked like dumbbells: the square east and west wings connected by a long rectangle of rooms and corridors. The servants' quarters, underground, were a smaller block. In the bottom-right corner, separate from the rest, were the stables and the generator room.

'So you'll come through here,' he tapped the dark line that marked the door from the cellar to the corridor below stairs. 'Along here,' his finger drew a line east, past the gun room and the game larder, 'is where they are being held.' He circled the pale box of the scullery.

'Is my father there?'

His hand slid from the map. 'Let's hope so. The only hostages they saw were in there.'

'How many?' The heat of the fire was making sweat stand out on her brow.

'Lots. They're tied up. Three vesperi on guard in the room. More patrolling the corridor.'

'How do I get past them?'

'At nine p.m., the Little Gentlemen will shut down the generator. The rest is up to you. Whatever you do, don't waste time trying to get into the gun room.'

'But I could give guns to everyone,' said Delphine. 'We could take back the Hall.'

'You're going alone because you're fast and small. If it comes to a standing fight, we'll lose. We're not raising an army. We're saving lives. That includes yours. You're none of you trained soldiers.'

'Daddy is. Professor Carmichael is.'

'So was Dr Lansley. Look what happened to him.'

'Why didn't the monsters just kill everyone?'

Mr Garforth dug a fingernail into his whiskers. 'Maybe they still plan to. Maybe they need information first. What did you say Mr Propp said? Something about handing over a child?'

'Yes, a girl. I thought he meant me, but . . . why would they be after me?'

'Promise me,' said Mr Garforth. 'Get in, get out. By the time they realise what's happened, you'll be long gone.'

'All right,' she said. 'But what about the three guards? How do I distract them?'

Mr Garforth swept his hand across the map. 'Throw 'em some bait.'

CHAPTER 26.

FORGIVE ME, COMRADE.

As Delphine reached the end of the tunnel, the light was dying. Her satchel of grenades thumped at her hip, the sawn-off shotgun weighty in her hand. The safety of the cottage lay behind her. At the top of the ladder was the Hall. The cool air reeked of wet clay.

Her torch threw a dimming ginger circle over the ladder. She looked at the shotgun. She looked at the ladder. She looked at the shotgun.

In her head, she heard Mr Garforth reprimanding her. He never let her cross so much as a puddle till she had ceremoniously broken and unloaded the gun, showing him the smooth cold cartridges snug in her palm like exotic eggs. If she rolled her eyes, he would launch a diatribe cataloguing the grim fates of those who, like her, thought themselves too busy for caution; folk like Ned Nevins' lad, who dropped a shotgun climbing onto the back of a hay cart after the harvest festival and blew his face off yes, the safety was on who survived, after a fashion, living blind and hideous in an attic, spooning pap into his ruined mouth. She had heard the story so many times three, in point of fact she could barely look at a stile without the Nevins boy's milky, shot-pocked eyes rising in her imagination like the glowing links of Marley's chain.

She thumbed the locking lever (oiled by Mr Garforth so it moved smoothly) and broke the sawn-off barrels, holding a palm over the breech to stop the shells jumping out. She balanced the gun on her forearm like a bird of prey. She switched off the torch.

Her satchel swung as she climbed the ladder. She was going back. After everything that had happened, she was going back. Her head swam. Her fingertips felt numb.

She stopped beneath the heavy oak trapdoor. She listened.

There was only her breathing.

She felt about for the latch and drew it. Slowly, slowly, she raised the trapdoor with her head.

Blackness. She smelt mould and vinegar. She listened again. Nothing. She lifted the trapdoor a little farther and the sack covering it slid back with a hiss. She placed her shotgun on the floor and switched on the torch.

Dust motes swam bronze and aquatic in the torchbeam. Cobwebs hung from the wine racks like seaweed.

She crawled out and gently lowered the trapdoor. The dust coating the floor was gritty, damp and salted with mouse droppings. She wiped her hands as best she could on her knickerbockers. She picked up the shotgun, checked the shells were in place and shut the breech. It closed with a satisfying clop.

The wine cellar was three small rooms linked by stone archways. There were bottles of Lacryma Christi and bottles of calvados, clarets and champagnes, and in the dying torchlight they seemed to breathe. Set into one wall was the dumbwaiter shaft connecting the cellar with the kitchen, dining room and master bedroom above. A mahogany barometer lay on its side, the face smashed in. She crept past ale kegs stamped with the local brewery's mark, a pair of bull's horns. At the foot of the stairs, she stopped.

A flight of steps led up, lined with wooden struts. At the top was a door.

She crept up the creaking stairs. Fishing in a slip pocket of her bandolier, Delphine pulled out a long brass key. On the other side of the door was the corridor that linked the kitchen to the servants' quarters, game larder and gun room. She put her ear to the keyhole and listened.

Something was coming.

She held her breath. Footsteps padded from the larder, past the door. They stopped.

Beneath the sawn-off barrels, her palm grew slick.

The footsteps continued.

Delphine crept back down the stairs and shone her torch on the glass face of a carriage clock. It was almost nine o'clock.

She walked across the black cellar to the dumbwaiter, brushed dust from the panel. The button for the kitchen was smooth and black and humped.

She placed a jam-tin grenade in the dumbwaiter car, struck a match and pressed the button with her thumb. Somewhere in the shaft, a motor started. The car began to rise. Just as it was about to move out of sight, she touched the flame to the fuse.

She ran back through the cellar and up the stairs and at the door she paused. She held her breath.

The clocks struck nine.

In the kitchen, two vesperi, one with a triangular notch docked from her soft dark ear, were talking.

They spoke in short, crickling bursts. The first vesperi, the shorter, ran his stubby fingers along the ridge of the smooth oak worktop. He looked at his hand. He said something to the second vesperi. She snapped a retort.

The second vesperi opened a drawer and took out a whisk. She shook the whisk and it rattled. She slotted it into her belt.

The clock on the shelf began to chime. She wheeled round, noseleaf flaring as she chirruped an alarm call. A second clock on the wall beside the range made a straining noise, then a tiny pair of doors snapped open. A figurine dressed all in red puttered out along a set of wooden battlements. It stopped before a silver bell, tilted back as if surprised, then began striking the bell with a hammer.

A third clock went off, a fourth.

An animal groan came from the open hatch at the far end of the room.

The vesperi's hands went to their daggers. The second vesperi pop-whistled instructions to her partner.

Something was rising. The first vesperi held back but his comrade advanced, her blade out in front of her.

The hatch opened onto a shaft. In the darkness, a cable was moving. Rising into view was the lip of a wooden box.

Her wings fanned. She approached on talontips.

The box was lit from within. It stopped with a shudder.

It was open at the front. Inside, something fizzed and smoked a stub of black rope, stuck in a tin.

She squinted.

The lights went out.

The bomb went off.

Delphine heard the concussion, trains shunting in a distant yard. A couple of seconds later, the door rattled in its frame. She waited.

Chittering. Several sets of footsteps passed the door, moving rapidly from left to right, dashing for the kitchen. She let them fade, and as the clocks finished chiming she opened the door.

Her eyes were used to the dark. The corridor was clear both ways. Clutching her sawn-off, she crept east, past the gamey pong of the larder and the locked gun room, to the open doorway of the scullery. She pressed her shoulders to the wall, clutched the shotgun to her chest, listened.

Soft, steady weeping. A cough.

She hugged the abbreviated barrels, whispered the simplest prayer she knew: Dear Lord, please.

She swung into the room.

To her left, people tied to chairs: Mother, Professor Carmichael, at least eight. Alive. Gasps. To her right, a lone vesperi raised its hooked dagger. She rounded on it.

It stared at her gun. The brindled fur covering its scalp and cheekbones ranged from chestnut to black with ruby notes.

The creature looked up. Its nostrils were little sideways mouths that flexed and pinched. It tossed its dagger onto the stone flagging, then slowly raised its palms. Its eyes were hazel, like Mother's.