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The one obstacle to credulity was her mother. She could not bring herself to destroy her, was too superstitious to remove her, as she had removed half an inch from her own nose, and in all the scenes Mrs Deverell hovered tiresomely in the background. After a time, Angel thought of a solution. She could be my maid, she decided. As Aunt Lottie is Madam’s.
    By the next day, there were no visible symptoms of her illness. The rash had gone. She complained instead of nausea and headaches, and her mother persisted in bringing trays of the same meagre invalid food—a coddled egg at midday, one scallop for her supper—and took away the book she was reading.
    Trapped, hungry, bored, she lay in bed all day. She had had a surfeit of day-dreaming and her mind was confused by too many pictures, which fell into fragments, into a bewildering muddle when she closed her eyes. She had imagined too much.
    Her mother had taken the only book in the room, and Angel dared not go along the passage to look for it. Time unwound itself so slowly. As it was growing dark, she thought with panic of the long evening ahead with nothing to do but doze and dream and listen to the shop doorbell ringing below, to the far-away voices and the bubbling, warbling sound of the gas-jets. For a moment she thought of Gwen and Polly coming home from school without her. When she tried to wrench her mind quickly away from that, she realised how hemmed-in she was in all her everyday doings: there were wounds in all directions, and boredom was the enemy which brought her face to face with one misery after another.
    Her mother brought in her tea and Angel saw with dismay the two small sponge fingers on the plate. She decided that whatever her complaint was going to be tomorrow, it should not be nausea or a headache, and she wondered if some trouble with her heart would leave her free to eat and read. She had never cared much for books, because they did not seem to be about her, and she thought that she would rather write a book herself, to a pattern of her own choosing and about a beautiful young girl with a startling white skin, heiress to great property, wearing white piqué at Osborne and tartan taffetas at Balmoral.
    When she had finished her tea, and that was very soon, she got out of bed and fetched an old school exercise-book from a shelf, tore out some pages of map-drawings and began without hesitation on Chapter One. “In the year 1885,” she wrote. It was the year of her own birth.
    The words flowed without effort all the evening and she seemed to be in a trance. As soon as she heard her mother beginning to climb the stairs, she dropped the exercise-book under the bed and lay down and shut her eyes. “You look feverish again,” her mother said despairingly. “Do you still feel sick?”
    â€œNot now. Just faint.”
    â€œI don’t know what to do, I’m sure. The doctor didn’t seem to think there was any call for him to look in again. This bad weather doesn’t help. You can’t see a hand’s measure in front of you for the fog tonight. A lot of throats about, customers tell me. They took Mrs Baker’s Vera away with dip. this morning. Such a pretty little girl, too.”
    Angel was quite unmoved. She never cared about such things. As usual, she was just waiting for her mother to go away.
    By bedtime, she was both excited and exhausted. Her right arm and shoulder were aching and her fingers were cramped. She had scarcely paused, either to consider what she should write or judge what she had written. Day-dreaming had paved the way. She knew what the rooms and grounds of Haven Castle looked like and could describe the Duchess’s gowns and jewellery in detail. White peacocks wandered on the moonlit terrace the night Irania was born. The birth was prolonged for several pages. Then all of the blinds on the South front were drawn and the staff appeared, as if by magic, draped in black crape.