"Here is what I did not know," Ilse said. "I did not know it would hold for sixteen years and then stop. I thought it was permanent. Gest thought it was permanent, and Gest was the last man on earth who knew anything about it.
"What I learned — four years ago, from a book I should not have been able to buy, which cost me a piece of jewellery my mother left me — is that the silvering rots. It always rots. In the ground it takes four hundred years; in a living body it takes about sixteen, because a body is warm and wet and patient and has all the time in the world.