Everyone who knows Sibyl well knows that her dance to free the creative spirit is an annual ritual. Each New Year’s Eve she dances in the tavern and releases a black bird from the golden cage. It was never the dancing that shocked old Riversleigh, it was the sense that his daughter could not be contained within the cage of conservatism that he had planned for her. She was, after all, her mother’s daughter and who knows who really sired her. Village rumour spoke of Lavengro’s uncle having spent an inordinate amount of time with Cecily Riversleigh. And given that Sibyl had so little in common with old Riversleigh it is just possible that he was not her father after all.