Thirty years ago, the castle, centuries old and built by a king, had trees at its eyes and rhododendrons growing into the rooms. Statues in the old sunken garden had been visible only as floating heads on the blanket of shrubbery and creepers. The owner had been in the news occasionally, banishing the island's four hundred inhabitants, cottage industrialists, daffodil cultivators, the baker, the butcher, the tanner and the ferryman, so that she could be alone with the vampires and demons and wear a veiled hat curtaining her features like spiders' webs. She'd had her female bodyguard fling a young Dutch girl, an intruder, from the causeway, so, as she claimed, the birds could breed and nest undisturbed, feasting on the armies of mosquitoes that drifted over the island like a vicious fairy cape.
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