[still told by Sir Andrew]

The path to the Lair of the White Rabbit was a bit longer than King Arthur had remembered, and led up and down rocky slopes. It didn't look like anything I recognised, but I suppose England looked different a thousand years ago. It wasn't even England, because it was Britain in those days. We tried explaining to Malvolio why this was, but as I'd never paid much attention to history lessons as a child, and neither had Sir John, and King Arthur's tutor had been a time-travelling wizard who could remember the future, we were all a bit hazy about the details.

Eventually, Arthur said, 'Ah, here we are. Now, Cheiron is a centaur – a being who's half man and half horse – but I promise you can trust him. We'll meet him in just a moment, and I think he's bringing another friend to join us.'

A shrill voice to the left of the path cackled, 'We're over here!' at which a warm, motherly voice on the right said, 'No, moi loverr, 'tis over 'ere.' Next, a deep, resonant voice from the cave in front of us said, 'Erik, stop messing about,' and then the same deep voice again, now behind us, said, 'Sorry about Erik – he's a ventriloquist, and he won't stop showing off.'

We looked at each other, and King Arthur said, 'Well, the cave is this way, anyway – and there's a sheer cliff off to the right.'

While he was still speaking, a voice that seemed to come from deep underground said, 'By all the djinn of the desert, Cheiron, what kind of freak have you wished on me now?' A moment later, Cheiron the centaur came out, carrying a man who looked like a skeleton in a suit. I didn't want to look, in case the man's head turned out to be a skull, but when he looked towards us I realised that he did have a face, because there were dark pinkish-purple scars running across his pale, shrivelled skin. I wondered whether he'd been hurt in a fight and Cheiron had looked after him until he got better, the way Malvolio had for me.

'And now you can say hello like a normal person,' said Cheiron, setting Erik down on the ground. 'This is King Arthur, this is Sir John Oldcastle...'

'No he isn't,' said Erik, whose glowing yellow eyes were staring into Sir John's. 'I know who you are: you're the inspiration for operas by Verdi, Salieri, Vaughan Williams, Carl Otto Nicolai, and Gordon Getty, plus a symphonic study by Elgar. And who did I get? Andrew Lloyd-Webber! But everyone knows your name; it's too famous to be hidden.'

'I can be famous under any name,' said Sir John, 'but Oldcastle was my name in the original manuscript. It's just that my author had to change it for legal reasons.'

'I, too, have gone under many names,' said Erik. 'In the circus, I was exhibited as The Living Corpse. In Persia, I was known as He Who Loves Trapdoors, and in Constantinople, I was The Fiend with the Punjab Lasso. In Paris, I was The Phantom to those who feared me, The Angel of Music to my admirers, and Erik to my girlfriend.'

'Erik, we've been through this,' sighed Cheiron. 'She wasn't ever your girlfriend. Kidnapping does not constitute a relationship.'

'It wasn't just kidnapping!' protested Erik. 'There was all the stalking first, as well. Anyway, it was the nearest I've ever had to a relationship. You see, I am a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional defects. I am a greater musician than Mozart, and more multi-talented than Leonardo Da Vinci, but, to balance this, I was born uglier than Quasimodo and more deranged than the Emperor Caligula.'

'And even more of a show-off than I am,' concluded Sir John. 'You should fit in perfectly with this lot.'

'I've never fitted in anywhere,' said Erik wretchedly, and then brightened. 'But now that Cheiron's mending me, I might! Has anyone got a mirror?'

I fished mine out of my pocket, wiped the shampoo-smears off it with my sleeve, and handed it to Erik, who stood for several minutes peering at his reflection, and running his pale, bony fingers over his face in astonishment. 'I have a nose!' he exclaimed. 'I own an actual nose that isn't made of wax and is an integral part of my face, and I don't need to wear a mask ever again! Cheiron, you're nearly as great a genius as I am!' And with that, he threw himself down on the ground and began kissing the centaur's hooves.

'Oh, it was the least I could do,' said Cheiron. 'But getting enough sunlight and fresh air, and remembering to eat meals, will do more for your looks than my poor skill in surgery ever could.'

'That's doctors for you!' said Sir John. 'He's always nagging me like that, as well.'

Erik jumped up, his eyes blazing and his fists clenched. 'Don't you dare say a word against Cheiron!' he shrieked. 'He's a god, do you hear me, a god! He's ransomed my life from the grave and he's given me a nose, and now I'm starting to look nearly like a normal person, the sort of man who can get a flat and a wife and live a normal life and go and assassinate Andrew Lloyd-Webber!'

Cheiron laid a hand on his shoulder. 'Erik, we agreed: no more assassinations.'

'Are you a real assassin?' I asked. 'A professional one, I mean?'

'Amongst other things. I have been a sideshow freak, conjuror and ventriloquist; a political assassin and executioner; an inventor of mechanical toys, spy devices, and instruments of torture; an architect and building contractor; and a protection racketeer, composer, and singing teacher. What do you do?'

'Not a lot,' I said. 'I like fencing and dancing, and I'd like to learn to sing. Could you teach me, do you think?'

Erik shrugged. 'I can try, I suppose. What voice are you?'

'How do you mean?'

'I mean, what notes can you sing? Most men are either bass, baritone, tenor, or occasionally alto; most women are soprano or alto, but I've heard some good female tenors. Personally, I've always been able to sing everything from bass to top soprano, which means that an opera scored for tenor hero, soprano heroine, pompous bass in love with the heroine, elderly ugly contralto in love with the hero, comic baritone with patter-song, and male and female choruses, is, if you look at it another way, an opera scored for Erik. But anyway, try singing something.'

I launched into a song I remembered Feste singing:

'Come away, come away, death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid;

Fly away, fly away, breath;

I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

O, prepare it!

My part of death, no-one so true

Did share it.'

Erik nodded. 'I'd say you're a light tenor: rather a narrow range, so you probably shouldn't attempt difficult classical pieces, but you should be all right on popular and folk songs. But you're a dilettante, a hobbyist, that's your trouble! You could have hit all the notes in that song without straining; as it was, you got about two-thirds of them right. You must learn to listen, to hear how a song should sound, and then learn to listen to yourself as you sing it back! This is how the tune goes:

'Not a flower, not a flower sweet,

On my black coffin let there be strown;

Not a friend, not a friend greet

My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown;

A thousand thousand sighs to save,

Lay me, O, where

Sad true lover never find my grave

To weep there!'

'In my opinion, sir, it would be best to ignore Monsieur Erik,' said Malvolio in his most butler-ish voice. 'His interest in giving you music lessons is more likely to lie in his amusement at your failure, rather than a desire to develop your negligible ability.'

'No, Monsieur Serviteur, it doesn't!' snapped Erik. 'I don't care about this brainless popinjay for himself, but I do care about music, and I wouldn't try to teach it to someone who didn't have potential.'

'How do you spell "popinjay"?' I asked.

'P, O, P, I, N, J, A, Y,' said Erik. 'It means "a shallow and conceited fop", and comes from Spanish, ultimately from Arabic.'

'Thank you!' I borrowed Malvolio's pencil and wrote the word in my notebook before I had time to forget it, underneath 'poetaster' and 'pleonasm'.

'Would you like something to eat?' asked Cheiron. 'Erik requested mushroom soup and a strawberry flan, but by the time I'd made them, he'd decided he wasn't hungry.'

'I just don't like home-made food,' grumbled Erik. 'And I hate English bread; it's all brown and stodgy. In Paris, if I wanted to eat, I could put on my "looking like a normal person" mask, go out through the tunnel to the market and pick up a croissant and a baguette and a bit of Brie, and then go home to my island on my subterranean lake and spend the day in peace. And if I didn't feel like eating, there was nobody to pressure me about it. Anyway, I hate eating in front of other people.'

'Good, we'll eat yours, then,' said Sir John. 'I've been fading away since breakfast.'

'Malvolio and I didn't even get round to having breakfast,' I added.

So Cheiron shared out the thick, dark, field-mushroom soup and the wholemeal bread, followed by the flan. There wasn't much between the six of us (or five really, because Erik refused to eat anything except a tiny piece of flan), but it was delicious, and afterwards, I decided to do the washing-up. When I'd put everything to drain on the ground outside the cave, King Arthur noticed that I was doing. 'Oh, thank you, Sir Andrew, that's very helpful,' he said. 'But – can I ask you something?'

'Of course.'

'Well, in my day, boys who were expecting to become knights would start off working as pages, just doing routine chores, then serve as squire to a knight, and then be knighted themselves if they proved worthy. I didn't think I actually would become a knight, because I was a foundling and didn't know who my parents were, but I'd served my apprenticeship anyway, just in case. Now, did trainee knights still prepare like that, later on?'

'I did,' said Sir John. 'I was page to Sir Thomas Mowbray.'

'Well, I didn't!' I said. 'I thought that was what servants were for! And I know you two probably think I'm not a real knight because I've never been a soldier and I was dubbed with unhatched rapier upon carpet consideration and I can't even win a fight against a girl, but I was just trying to be helpful by doing the washing-up, and if I haven't done it the right way, well, it was my first time, and I don't see how being good at housework is going to turn me into a hero!'

'Maybe it won't,' said King Arthur, 'but it will mean that we aren't eating dinner off dishes that still have bits of lunch stuck to them. You see, if you just dip plates and dishes in water, it doesn't always dislodge all the bits of food, and then, if you leave them stacked right-side-up, one on top of the other, they won't drip dry. Shall I show you how to do it? You see, this is a washing-up bowl, and this is a rinsing-bowl, and this is called a scrubbing-brush...'

'If it's going to take a long time to explain, I'm going to get my head down for a bit,' said Sir John. 'Don't be ashamed; Arthur's nephew Gareth spent a year working in the kitchens of Camelot, in disguise so that nobody even knew he was the King's nephew and the brother of the great Sir Gawain. He was knighted after he'd fought a Green Knight, but a different one from the Green Knight Sir Gawain fought. In fact, Sir Gareth fought a whole spectrum, with the Red Knight and the Puce Knight and the Indigo Knight and the Knight in White Satin; his adventures were like one of those picture-books for teaching babies to recognise colours. Get Arthur to tell you the story later.'

And with that he disappeared into the cave, leaving King Arthur to show me how to wash up properly. It was a bit complicated, but I got the hang of it in the end, and in a way it was good that people could be bothered to correct me. In my world, everyone had either said, 'Yes, yes, your clothes/hair/dancing looks very nice; yes, of course my niece wants to marry you; now I'll have another bottle of Amontillado, as it's your round,' or they'd told me I was a waste of space, or they'd just pretended I didn't exist. Erik and King Arthur were the first people I'd met who took me seriously and really believed I could learn things.