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this madhouse?’ Mama blushed, and glanced nervously up the stairs. Aunt Martha laid a hand on her arm. ‘Don't worry about him, I don't mind, really, I'm used to it by now.’
    It was not my father who worried Mama, but Granny Godkin. The time had come and gone for her morning tea and still her curtains had not been drawn. The choice now was to leave her there to work herself into a temper, or bring her down to greet her long-lost daughter. What a choice! We went into the drawing room.
    The women sat down by the fire, and Aunt Martha immediately launched into a cheerful account of her trials and troubles. I paid no attention to her tedious rigmarole. Michael and I stood before the window, locked in a tingling silence, and frowned out at the garden where a pair of sparrows were fighting like frantic mechanical toys. A silent scream of boredom began to rise within me, but there rose also a vague fear, vague sense of being threatened by the arrival of this virago and her cretin. No, that is not true. Only hindsight has endowed me with such a keen nose for nuance. I glanced at the boy by my side. He was no longer watching the garden, for something new was happening behind us, and I had barely time to notice the hush that had descended on the room before there came a kind of strangled wail, and slowly, hardly able to believe our luck, we turned to the fire. Aunt Martha was biting her knuckles and weeping, crouched piteously in her chair with her head bowed. Mama stood over her patting her shoulder and making incoherent little noises meant to comfort, and Michael and I, holding our breath, took one cautious step forward and gazed blissfully upon the immensely satisfying spectacle of a grown-up dissolving in a puddle of grief.
    Of all our histories, Aunt Martha's is perhaps the most bizarre. She was the black sheep of the Godkins, if such a term means anything when speaking of my family. In the town she was known as a brazen hussy from the time she was a child, and was once, I believe, denounced from the popish pulpit in a veiled though obvious reference to bad companions. However, it was not until a certain summer of her young womanhood that she gave the gossips some real red meat on which to chew, and she was hardly sure of her own condition before the town also knew, in that mysterious way towns have of knowing such things, that she was expecting a little surprise. All hell broke loose in the happy house of Birchwood. Granny Godkin beat her daughter about the head with a silver-backed hairbrush. Papa returned from his honeymoon.
    For nine long months Martha was not allowed outside the grounds. She spent her time wandering in the wood, or sitting by the lake, with a sly secret smile in her eyes, hatching her plot. Her firstborn arrived that spring day of storm and panic when the circus invaded Birchwood, and Papa, dismounting that evening by the fountain, looked up and saw an infant lifted in the window. However, that infant was I, but more of that presently. Aunt Martha had already prepared for her departure. She paused only long enough to confer with Papa behind locked doors, and then bundled up her son and took flight. Granny Godkin stayed in bed for a week.
    And Martha's mysterious lover? Rumour had an inspired farrago of a story, according to which the leader of the Magic Circus, the travelling troupe of shams which had laid siege to our house, one Prospero by name, a magician apparently, had with Aunt Martha's enthusiastic cooperation conjured up the makings of that homunculus that stood beside me now gaping at its mother. I cannot say where rumour found evidence to support its claims, but the story had one point in its favour, that is, it held that the invasion by the circus was nothing more, or less, than Prospero's effort to claim his son and heir. Well, I shall say nothing. People must have their myths. Some said that Prospero was a cripple, some that he had a cloven hoof. One story, the favourite, and still current,