“Are you coming to my defense, Matthew? Now isn’t that jocular … a member of the Herrald Agency … a law-abiding, stuff-shirted prick who thinks the world can be controlled by order … coming to my defense. It’s all Fate, Matthew. And Fate knows only chaos and confusion. All right, if you wish a bedtime story, I’ll give you one. A story to warm your heart on a cold winter’s morn. Would you like that?” The face he turned toward Matthew was ghastly.

“I have time,” Matthew replied.

“Time past,” said Julian. “When I was supposed to be an officer in the Royal Navy. That was my father’s plan. To make an upstanding officer out of the boy who had come upon the earth and killed his wife. He had no use for me, but I was supposed to follow my elder brother’s course. Oh, what a wonderful time. He sent me to school here. The lessons he arranged for me, from the grand old men of the navy. Day in and day out … navigation and seamanship, and order and discipline and discipline and discipline and …” He stopped, because it sounded to Matthew as if he were starting to grind his teeth together.

“Discipline,” Julian went on, when he could speak again. “I despised all that. It was supposed to be good for me. Poor Julian, that ill-starred boy who now and again stole small items from shops and thumbed his nose at the law. And thumbed his nose at the Lord … and the lords who swaggered on their decks and treated their crews like garbage in the streets. That’s who I was supposed to be. One of them, and that would bring me into fine favor with society. Society,” he repeated, with a caustic edge. “As if that ever mattered to me.”

Julian was silent for a while, but Matthew did not speak or otherwise try to prompt anything more. If it was coming, it would come.

“On the day of my examinations,” Julian said quietly, “I did not go. I had decided the life was not for me. But I knew what I was going to get from my father. More and more of the same. I went into a tavern and decided to drink. The whole day, I drank. Then I went out—stumbled out—and I got on the fine horse I had stolen the week before. Poor, poor Julian … that ill-starred boy.” He shook his head back and forth like a wounded animal. “That fine horse got away from me. A second of inattention, an errant pull on the reins, too sharp a dig with a spur … whatever happened, it was fast, and suddenly the horse was running wild. I tried to control it, tried to get it off the street … and then there he was, right underneath me. And I ran him down. I ran him down as if he were a little bag of nothing.”