And there it had been again as last night, Matthew thought as he lay on the canopied bed: Julian’s cry from the tortured depths of his sleep, which seemed to be a fearful place for him since it was a land beyond his control.

But this night, as the frigid wind whistled beyond the window in the front room, Matthew had also found sleep to be a horse that throws its master after a short spate of equine comradery.

He thought that since he’d prepared himself to rest he must’ve dozed, awakened, dozed and awakened eight or nine times. It was one of those nights when the pitiless hours moved past at a slow crawl, and one knew sleep was necessary for the rigors of tomorrow but … no, it wasn’t going to be so simple.

He heard the sofa’s frame creak softly as Julian shifted his weight upon it. Then there came a peculiar sound: Julian drew a long breath as if it were his last draught of air in the world, and when he let it out it ended in what was very much like a sob.

Matthew got quietly out of bed, put on the maroon blouse and the brown-checked breeches he’d worn the evening before and picked up a lantern from the bedside table. He walked into the front room and found Julian standing before the window, his cloak bound tightly around himself, his face pressed nearly against the cold glass.

“Leave me,” he said without a glance at Matthew. His voice … strained … terribly weak.

“What’s wrong with you?” Matthew asked.

“I said … leave me.”

“No,” Matthew replied.

Julian’s bald head swivelled around. The lantern’s light fell upon a fierce, sweat-damp face in which the teeth were bared. “Get away from me,” he breathed. The voice was all the more terrifying because it was a whisper instead of a shout. “You don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“What I have done. What I am capable of doing. No one knows … not really.”

“I don’t think you’re as much the bad man as you pretend to be,” Matthew said. “But you might think of giving up your present course of life so as to get a good night’s rest.”

“Ha,” came the answer, delivered as if the solemn laugh of the dead from the city of graves.

There was a quiet in which the wind could be heard keening and crying beyond the glass. The early morning lamps of London burned out in the dark and once more everything out there was shapeless and ghostly white.

“Before I go out with you to that house,” Matthew said, “I think I deserve—”

“Deserve,” from the crimped mouth.

Matthew went on with hardly a pause. “I deserve to know what’s wrong with you. At that house, if you have some kind of breakdown or something—”

“I do not break down,” Julian said.