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Ask his host whether he was all alone here or who looked after him?
    He was still wrestling with the problem when he heard himself addressed in what he took to be a foreign language.
    â€œAlc?”
    To compound Cassidy’s sense of unreality he had the strong impression of being cut off by fog, for the enormous fireplace was emitting billows of cannon smoke over the stone floor and heavy palls already hung from the rafters overhead. The same fire, which seemed to consist entirely of kindling wood, provided their only source of light, for the lantern was now extinguished and the windows, like those in the Great Hall, were firmly shuttered.
    â€œI’m awfully sorry. I don’t think I understand.”
    â€œ Alc, lover. Alcohol. Whisky. ”
    â€œO thank you. Alcohol. Alc.” He laughed. “Yes indeed I’d love an alc. It’s quite a long drive from Bath actually. Well fussy, you know. All those narrow lanes and side turnings. Alc. Haha.”
    Mistress? Lecherous housemaid? Incestuous sister? A gypsy whore slunk in from the woods? Fiver a bang and free bath after?
    â€œYou want to try walking it.” Glass in hand, the tall figure rose massively at him out of the smoke. If we were the same size, thought Cassidy, how are you now bigger? “Eight bloody hours it took us, with all God’s limousines damn near running us into the hedge. It’s enough to turn a man to drink, I’m telling you.” The brogue was even stronger. “Still you wouldn’t do that would you, lover? Carve us into the ditch, and not even stop to set the bone?”
    A call girl perhaps, sent down by disgraceful agencies? Question: how can you call a call girl when your phone’s cut off?
    â€œCertainly not. I’m a great believer in defensive driving.”
    â€œAre you now?”
    The dark eyes seemed, with this question, to invade still further Cassidy’s unprotected consciousness.
    â€œLook my name’s Cassidy,” he said as much to reassure himself as to inform his host.
    â€œCassidy? Jesus that’s a lovely native name if ever I heard one. Hey, was it you robbed all those banks then? Is that where you got your money from?”
    â€œWell I’m afraid not,” said Cassidy silkily. “I had to work a little harder for it than that.”
    Emboldened by the aptness of his retort, Cassidy now undertook an examination of his host as frank as that which he himself had recently undergone. The garment which encased his dark legs was neither a skirt nor a bath towel nor yet a kilt, but a very old curtain embroidered with faded serpents and ripped at the edges as if by angry hands. He wore it off the hip, low at the front and higher at the back like a man about to bathe himself in the Ganges. His breast under the black jacket was bare, but garnished with clusters of rich black hair which descended in a thin line down his stomach before opening again into a frank pubic shadow.
    â€œLike it?” his host enquired, handing him a glass.
    â€œI beg your pardon?”
    â€œ Shamus is the name, lover. Shamus. ”
    Shamus. Shamus de Waldebere . . . look him up in Debrett.
    From the direction of the doorway Cassidy heard Frank Sinatra singing about a girl he knew in Denver.
    â€œHey Helen,” Shamus called over Cassidy’s shoulder. “It’s not Flaherty after all, it’s Cassidy. Butch Cassidy. He’s come to buy the house now poor Uncle Charlie’s dead and gone. Cassidy me old friend, shake hands with a very lovely lady, lately of Troy and now reduced to the abominable state of—”
    â€œHow do you do,” said Helen.
    â€œMatrimony,” said Shamus.
    She was covered, if not yet fully dressed.
    Wife, he thought glumly. I should have known. The Lady Helen de Waldebere, and all doors closed.
    There is no established method, even to a formalist of Cassidy’s stamp, of greeting a lady of great family whom you have just met