[still told by Malvolio]

'Knight-errants have to be in love, like Sir Lancelot, don't they?' prattled Sir Andrew, refilling the two glasses. 'Are you in love?'

'No, not in love, exactly,' said the old man, 'but I tried shagging married women, just like Sir Lancelot. It was after I'd been banished, and I was bored and fed up and broke – well, not all that broke, the King was paying me a decent pension as long as I didn't bother him, but not enough to drown my sorrows, so really he owed me more considering he was the one who caused my sorrows in the first place. Well, anyway, I told my followers to bugger off and stop depending on me, tried to find jobs for the ones who were too clumsy to be any good as thieves, and had a go at seducing women with rich husbands.' He chuckled reminiscently. 'It could have worked, too, only the ones I chose turned out to be best friends, and they noticed that I'd sent them identical love-letters by the same post. Still, they might have been up for a spot of group sex – it was worth a try! Trouble was, I'd probably found the last town in the world where the sexual revolution hadn't happened yet, but they were just about modern enough not to know about droit de seigneur, so I was on a loser either way, and those tight-arsed bitches decided to gang up on me and get revenge.'

'What sort of revenge?' I asked, wondering how this fat, ageing slob could ever have imagined that he was anyone's idea of a romantic liaison.

'Oh, inviting me round just before their husbands got back, so that I had to be smuggled out hidden in a basket of dirty laundry that got tipped into the canal, or disguised as somebody's aunt, only the husband turned out to hate the aunt as well, so he beat me up. Still, it's supposed to be third time lucky, so when they asked me to meet them in the local park at midnight, dressed as the ghost of an ancient gamekeeper with deer's horns, I thought, well, I've partied long past midnight most nights, I've been a highway robber before dawn, I ought to stand a chance over respectable husbands who'd be asleep at that hour. Only I didn't know they'd got their husbands in on the act, and the entire town including the priest and the doctor, who were both immigrants who could barely speak English and wanted to see an English knight getting his come-uppance. All I knew was that suddenly both my girlfriends had run off, and a horde of fairies and goblins and satyrs had come to pinch me and burn me with their candles, and I kept telling myself I didn't believe in fairies, but that wasn't much help if fairies believed in me, and even if they weren't really fairies, if they set fire to me they could still fry me in my own fat. It's all the Puritans' fault, you know; ever since they started the campaign to close the theatres, people have started making their own entertainment.'

'Were they real fairies?' asked Sir Andrew.

'Of course not! They were just kids from the local school in fancy dress. And then my girlfriends and their husbands came back and told me what an idiot I was to think anyone would want to have an affair with me, and then they forgave me and invited me to dinner.'

'What did you do?' I asked.

'Went with them, and had venison pasties and cakes and spiced wine.'

'You accepted a dinner invitation from your enemies?' I was horrified. Somehow, the man's debauchery and criminality didn't seem as grotesque as his complete absence of pride and his refusal to bear a grudge.

'Of course I did. They'd finished being my enemies, and now they were willing to be friends. They're not a bad lot, really: totally bourgeois and conventional, of course, but they can't help that. And anyway, it had been hours since supper-time, and I was hungry.' He took a drink, and seemed lost in thought for a moment. 'I just wish I could have told the young King about it. I suppose when he heard about it, he just thought it was a good thing he'd got rid of me when he did, but if I could have told him about it, he'd have laughed until his knees gave way, and – oh God, I miss him!'

He began to sob uncontrollably, and Sir Andrew threw his arms round him and cried out, 'I know!' and they wept together. I forced myself to stand aloof and keep thinking, 'What a pair of big babies: laughing one moment and howling the next!' It would have been all too easy to give into the moment and cry with them, for the hopes we had lost and the people we had thought loved us, and the terrible loneliness of disillusion.

And then we heard the voice: 'Arise, Sir John Oldcastle, Knight of the Round Table.' I can't explain where it came from, except that the voice was certainly in the room, not someone calling through the door. Sir Andrew and I edged away warily, but the old man, who had been slouching against the pillows, sat upright, looking suddenly fully alert. He pulled on a bathrobe (the cord of which didn't quite meet round his waist) over his nightshirt, swallowed the last of his drink, and then swung his legs down from the bed and, grunting with effort, stood upright. I think the voice was still talking to him, although we couldn't hear it any more. I am quite certain that he wasn't mad or hallucinating, but that, somehow, he seemed to be stepping out of our world, or his, or wherever we were at present.

'Of course, you do know that I'm a thief and a coward and a drunkard, and that I've already been banished by one king, don't you?' he asked, quite cheerfully. 'You realise that by the time I've been there five minutes, probably I'll have given Sir Galahad a black eye for being such a sanctimonious twat, and he'll challenge me to a duel and I'll panic and run away and you'll need to rescue me? I'll be nothing but trouble, and you'll be ashamed of me.'

Presumably the voice said something reassuring, because he grinned. 'You know what? You're absolutely right! After all, when you chose the best knights in the world, they either feuded with each other or had sex with your wife or insisted on being so pure and virginal in order to find the Holy Grail that they must have been unbearable. So if you recruit the worst knights instead, it should work out better. That's what I always did, when I was conscripting soldiers; if they couldn't bribe me not to enlist them, they were obviously good army material. Well, foot soldiers: they're just cannon-fodder anyway, aren't they?'

He broke off, as if, for the first time, the voice was shocked by what he said, and was rebuking him angrily. At last he said slowly, 'No. I suppose it wasn't funny for the people who got killed. They were men who wanted to live just as much as I did, only I was leading from behind and they hadn't got any armour, so I survived and they didn't. I don't know – maybe if I'd been taught by someone like Merlyn when I was a boy, I'd have grown into a decent man – well, it's too late now, but – do you still want me with you, now you know what I'm like?' He brightened. 'Good, that's okay then. Let's go.' And he walked towards the door, opened it, and disappeared.

Sir Andrew and I followed into the corridor, wondering whether we were going to find the man's cronies guffawing, 'You didn't fall for that one, did you, Jack? God, you're so gullible!' But there was nobody there. When we went back through the doorway, we were back in Sir Andrew's bedroom, with his clothes and suitcases, a small stack of phrasebooks and tourist guides, the notebook in which he wrote down any unusual words or phrases that he thought might make him sound intelligent, the viol he had been trying to learn to play for as long as I could remember, and an expensively-embroidered saddle which had belonged to an even more expensive horse which he had mislaid somewhere along the line. 'Shall we start packing now?' I suggested.

Sir Andrew yawned. 'No, let's leave it till the morning. Do you think he'll be all right with King Arthur?'

'He'll be fine,' I snorted. 'He's a knight, and outrageous enough to be funny, which means he can behave as badly as he likes and people will just chuckle indulgently and say what a character he is. I think when they say someone is "a character", they mean they wish he was fictional. Anyway, I don't suppose he really wanted to go with King Arthur, do you?'

'Of course he did!' insisted Sir Andrew. 'That's why he was arguing about it, because he had to make sure it was really true, because he didn't want to be hurt that way again.'

'Again? You didn't really believe his story about having been some prince's favourite, did you? As if anyone would want to be friends with someone like that!'

'Yes, I did believe him, actually,' said Sir Andrew. 'I think he needs to be loyal to someone who'll be loyal to him. I know he probably isn't a very nice person, but neither are we, and neither's Toby or Maria or anyone else we know, except maybe Olivia, and we're probably never going to see her again. There's no law saying only good people can have friends, you know.'

And that was the miracle: not a fat old man appearing out of nowhere and then disappearing in the company of a mythical king, but that Sir Andrew Aguecheek had actually produced an idea of his own. Generally he knew two ways of dealing with people: either echoing their words and views in the hope that they would like him, or trying to be a fiery, quarrelsome young gallant who challenged people to duels for no particular reason (but usually forgot that challenges to mortal combat are not supposed to be signed, 'Love from Andrew'). I had never heard him express a considered opinion on anything.

I had intended to wake Sir Andrew early the next morning to make a start on packing up his luggage (I had already dealt with my own), but in fact he was the one who came knocking at my door, looking rather dazed. 'I say, Malvolio,' he burst out, 'did all that really happen, last night? I mean, finding my room had turned into someone else's room, and then he went off with King Arthur?'

I looked him straight in the eye. 'If you're trying to tell me you had a strange dream last night,' I said calmly, 'then it was probably the result of indigestion. Do you think a cup of tea would help to clear your head?'

'Oh. Uh, yes, please. Milk and three sugars.'

'If you wish to destroy your teeth, that is entirely your decision, sir,' I said, and went down to order two teas (one with milk and three sugars, one black with lemon) and to check the morning papers. Among the Illyrian newspapers were several foreign papers, including the London Times. I browsed through it while I was waiting for the tea to be ready, and noticed an item in the Obituaries section. The name wasn't Oldcastle, but the man in the picture, looking cheerfully drunk at a party somewhere, was almost certainly the man who had been talking to us. He had died in London the evening before.