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‘Yes,’ he said, still staring through Rebecca, ‘it should be done this way. You are right. Listen, then, and understand.’
    He paused, and folded his hands. ‘It happened in Greece,’ he said. ‘On my first journey there. The East had always been the most fertile island of my imagination. And yet my imaginings had never even skirted the truth, never even dared draw vaguely close to it.’ His smile faded, as the blankness of lassitude returned again. ‘For I believed, you see, that if a doom were to fall upon me, it lay dormant already within my own blood. My mother had warned me that the Byrons were cursed. She hated them, and loved them, for what my father had done. He had charmed her, married her, then bled her of her wealth - a vampire in his own way, and therefore I suppose, though I never met him, a true father to me. Left penniless, my mother would often warn me against the inheritance that flowed in my blood. Each Lord Byron, she would say, had been more wicked than the last. She told me of the man I was to inherit the title from. He had murdered his neighbour. He lived in a ruined abbey. He tortured cockroaches. I had laughed at that, to my mother’s rage. I vowed that when I became Lord Byron, I would put my patrimony to more enjoyable use.’
    â€˜And you did.’ Rebecca didn’t ask, merely stated a fact.
    â€˜Yes.’ Lord Byron nodded. ‘Indeed, I fear I became quite dissipated. I loved the abbey, you see, and the shivers of romantic gloom it sent up my spine, for, on the whole, I was then so far from being gloomy or misanthropical that I found my fear merely an excuse for revelries. We had dug up the skull of some poor monk, and used it as a drinking bowl - I would preside in my abbot’s robes, while, with the help of assorted village maidens and nymphs, we lived in the style of the monks of old. But the pleasures even of sacrilege can fade - I grew satiated with my dissipations, and boredom, that most fearful curse of all, began to dull my heart. I felt a longing to travel. It was the custom then for men such as myself, well-bred and hopelessly in debt, to perform a tour of the Continent, long seen by the English as the most suitable place for the young to take rapid steps in the career of vice. I wanted to sample new pleasures, new sensations and delights - everything for which England was too narrow and tight, and which I knew, abroad, would be easy to procure. It was decided - I would leave. I felt little regret for England as her white cliffs slipped away.
    â€˜I travelled with my friend Hobhouse. Together, we crossed Portugal and Spain, and then on towards Malta, and beyond that, Greece. As we neared the Greek shore, a purple band glimmering across the blue of the sea, I felt a strange presentiment of longing and fear. Even Hobhouse, who was seasick, paused in his vomiting to look up. The gleam, though, was soon lost, and it was raining as my feet touched the soil of Greece. Preveza, our port of arrival, was a wretched place. The town itself was ugly and drab, while of its inhabitants, we found the Greeks servile and their Turkish masters savage. Yet even in the drizzle, my thrill of excitement never wholly died, for I knew, riding through the dismal streets below the minarets and towers, that we had left our old lives far behind, and stood now on the rim of a strange untested world. The West had been abandoned - we had crossed into the East.
    â€˜After two days spent in Preveza, we were happy enough to leave. It was our intention to visit Ali, the Pasha of Albania, whose daring and cruelty had won him power over Europe’s most lawless tribes, and whose reputation for savagery was respected by even the most bloodthirsty of the Turks. Few Englishmen had ever penetrated Albania; yet for us, the lure of so dangerous and poetical a land was all the greater for that very cause. Yanina, Ali’s capital, lay far to the north, and the road