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and half the female dons as well, and say how exciting, and wouldn’t their father have been pleased, and it was time Dan took a swing at fiction anyway.
    I believe I’m going to do it, Dan thought suddenly, and was conscious of rising excitement. It would not be a serious book of course, at least, not in Oliver’s meaning, but it would not be lurid pulp fiction either. One would have to avoid certain influences; the shadow of Angela Carter hovered perilously. Dan tipped Ms Carter a nod by way of acknowledgement, and reached for a fresh sheet of paper. At least let’s see how it looks. Let’s see if we can translate the original legend into modernity.
    A girl born not quite into high wealth, which would be a little too sequinned, but born into reasonable affluence . . . Yes. But born under a threat of some kind. A disease? Well, you can hardly make it a spinning wheel and a dark bewitchment at a christening party, but what about making it one of those appalling inherited things? Was it Huntington’s disease that lurked in the system and didn’t make its presence known until the victim was thirty? Don’t be absurd, Daniel, you’re not Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn; you can’t have a heroine crumbling away from some ghastly terminal illness through two or three hundred pages. In any case, you know perfectly well you’re going to make the menace inherited madness. Lucienne and Sybilla Ingram, said his mind, with a satisfied nod.
    The minute he started to type, the sentences tumbled out of his mind and rattled across the page. They became paragraphs before he knew it, and the paragraphs became full pages. Hardly daring to breathe in case he broke the spell, Dan experienced the indescribable sensation of seeing a huge, immensely exciting landscape start to unfold before him. I’m about to take a journey, and I don’t know where it will take me, and I don’t know what travelling companions I shall make, or even what kind of bedfellows I might pick up . . . And, said his inner voice, caustically, if you can possibly manage to avoid all the appalling puns about being sent to sleep by a prick and woken up by one as well, you might make something halfway decent out of this.
    It was important to get rid of most of the heroine’s guardians fairly early on, in order to leave her entirely vulnerable. Dan considered the methods of murder available to him. How close should he go to the original fairy story? Hadn’t there been something about the princess’s family – or at least her parents – being cast into a bewitched sleep as well? Would it be possible to recreate something along the lines of the sleeping sickness epidemic of the 1920s? Or could he come up with something more sinister? Some kind of deathlike trance? Catatonia, wasn’t it? He would have to get hold of a copy of the story, and from the look of it a shelf-full of medical tomes as well.
    But if he was going to deal out murder and mayhem on this scale, the first priority was to create an archvillain – or perhaps villainess . . .
    A villainess. Dan felt his lips curve into a smile. He would have a villainess, a greedy, feisty lady who would wear a false face to almost the entire world, a bland, civilised mask that would stay firmly and undetectably in place until the killings began and the reader felt the spine-chilling breath of evil, and began to catch glimpses of the red tooth-and-claw madness beneath the urbane exterior.
    But until then, while the archvillainess planned the killings and spun her evil web and discussed the heroine’s plight, the mask would remain firmly and undetectably in place and no one would have the least idea of the truth.
    How would she set about the murders?
    â€˜What’s going to happen to her now the madness has finally surfaced?’
    Inevitably it was Aunt Dilys who said it, and most of the people in Royston Ingram’s study thought she said it against