Lady Croom blames the
garden plans on Romantic literature like
The Castle of Otranto. She hears shots from the men hunting on the grounds, and mentions that maybe
Septimus’s schoolmate has managed to shoot a pigeon.
Brice thinks, rather, that it was Thomasina’s brother
Augustus who shot the pigeon. She exits with the other men.
Thomasina muses about how she’s been hearing gunshots from hunting her whole childhood, and mentions that her father could track his whole life in the game book, a record of what was shot on which day. Septimus quotes the Latin again, saying, “Even in Arcadia, there am I,” referring to death’s presence in the garden. (The death theme, present in the original Latin poem, was missing from Lady Croom’s out-of-context translation.)