We shall not, however, let ourselves be flushed out to sea. At Rotterdam we divert from the river's natural course and follow a canal to the Hague. There the Princesses can find refuge, just as did the Winter Queen at the end of her wanderings. And there I shall try to deliver a coherent report to the Prince of Orange. This bit of embroidery is ruined before it was finished, but it contains the information that William has been waiting for. When I have finished my report I may make it into a pillow. Everyone who sees it will wonder at my foolishness for keeping such a dirty, stained, faded thing around the house. But I will keep it in spite of them. It is an important thing to me now. When I started it, I only intended to use it to record details of French troop movements and the like. But as the weeks went on and I frequently found myself with plenty of time on my hands to tend to my needlework, I began to record some of my thoughts and feelings about what was going on around me. Perhaps I did this out of boredom; but perhaps it was so that some part of me might live on, if I were killed or made a captive along the way. This might sound like a foolish thing to have done, but a woman who has no family and few friends is forever skirting the edges of a profound despair, which derives from the fear that she could vanish from the world and leave no trace she had ever existed; that the things she has done shall be of no account and the perceptions she has formed (as of Dr. von Pfung for example) shall be swallowed up like a cry in a dark woods. To write out a full confession and revelation of my doings, as I've done here, is not without danger; but if I did not do so I would be so drowned in melancholy that I would do nothing at all, in which event my life truly would be of no account. This way, at least, I am part of a story, like the ones Mummy used to tell me in the banyolar in Algiers, and like the ones that were told by Shahrazad, who prolonged her own life for a thousand and one nights by the telling of tales.