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    More than one dictionary said approximately this, but it didn't seem much help.

    "Seldom known," she heard herself murmuring. She [45 bore the fattest dictionary away from a table back to its weight conscious relatives, then on an impulse continued down the aisle of shelves to find her father's book.

    Lennox Price's The Mechanics of Delusion was leaning against a stout Freudian tome on a shelf higher than her head. She climbed down from a stumpy ladder and turned to the date label. Quite a few people had borrowed the book in the sixties and early seventies, when her father's research in the woods had made headlines, but since then the book had seldom left the shelf. It began with a history of popular delusions, brought up to date by an account of myths then prevalent about drugs. The bulk of it related fringe beliefs to ones more widely held and demonstrated their interdependence, while the final pages compared skepticism with the beliefs it sought to overturn and showed they were products of the same psychological mechanism.
    The book reminded her how keen his mind used to be, and revived memories that distressed her-his bouts of walking up and down the house as though desperate to leave behind some intolerable contents of his brain, his sudden bursts of introverted mirth, his demands for absolute silence that might be expected to last for hours while he appeared to listen for some sound outside the house, his staring at toddler Sylvia as if he couldn't quite recognise her and must do so... Heather shelved The Mechanics of Delusion and made for the art books.

    Two volumes were called just Margo Price, a catalogue of her London retrospective in the eighties and a coffee-table book representing her work up to five years ago. Since then she'd concentrated on carving sculptures from deadwood she found on the edge of the forest outside Goodmanswood-the construction of the bypass had provided her with plenty of material-but Heather liked her paintings best, one in particular. She lifted the catalogue down and rested its spine on the edge of a shelf. The glossy pages fell open at Margo's Arizona paintings, desert landscapes relieved only by solitary flowers under an almost shadowless sun. Heather turned pages until she reached The Light through the Thorns, the first canvas Margo had painted after committing Lennox to the Arbour.

    It showed an arch of thorns so thickly entangled that only minute stars of light as spiky as the prickles managed to struggle through, but the longer one gazed at them, the more the thorns appeared to be partly an illusion. Did some of them rather consist of slivers of sky and a distant greenish horizon? When seven-year-old Heather had asked what was there her mother had told her it was whatever she could see. Perhaps the enigma helped explain why it was Margo's most reproduced painting, available as a poster, but sometimes it made Heather feel close to glimpsing a peace too profound to be expressed in words. Just now she seemed unable to grasp that impression. She returned the collection to the shelf and found herself heading for the folklore books.

    Someone had replaced Sylvia's with the pages facing outward. Heather almost managed to suppress the thought that it was hiding like its author. Sylvia didn't need to stay home when Heather had chosen to, and it wasn't as if she didn't keep in touch, even if her letters had grown less frequent recently-none for months since a card from Mexico, where she was apparently researching a new book. Heather opened The Secret Woods: Sylvan Myths at random, to be confronted by a Chinese folk-tale about a boy who climbed trees in search of birds' eggs and found a nest of baby birds, headless yet alive. The image, or her reading it where she couldn't see most of the room, disturbed her more than made any sense.

    Snorting with impatience at herself, she took the volume and her flock of echoes to her desk.

    The book contained stories she liked, but she seemed