His eyes watered: so pretty. Who would leave their precious child alone, someone might push her down the stairs. Set her on fire.

He tore off the picture and put it in his pocket, reached down again, and pulled up an issue of Pearson’s with an advertisement for Pears’ soap on the back: an infant with golden hair, her chubby hand reaching for a soap bubble.

Joy!

He curled up the magazine and stuck it down his trouser leg as someone shouted from the ward, then clattered up the steps, one of the nurses. She raced by him, knocking the metal bucket so that filthy water spilled everywhere and he cried out in a rage.

Damn the mop!

Chapter 71

Chapter 71

HE CONTINUED TO swear, enraged at the pock-faced children, but they had already disappeared. He hurried on, the poverty of the slums trailing him like a bad smell. Twiglike girls nursed bundles of rags. Men pissed in the street, drunk through the morning. All of them foreigners, chittering like insects. They should never have outlawed wooden structures here, better it all went up in flames.

Another quarter hour and he reached a block where every building had been razed. Boards and twisted metal, heaps of rubble and rotting wood. He wrinkled his nose at the odors of charred brick, horse dung, river bile, and sewage. The North Branch wouldn’t be far off. The tenement block must have abutted a brickyard, now demolished.

But people still lived close by. He craned his neck to see yet another row of dilapidated tenements. Between here and there stretched a wasteland of abandoned kilns and warehouses, a freestanding brick archway that opened onto nowhere.

Lightning lanced the horizon. The humid air played tricks with distant noises. The groan of an unseen freight train seemed to come from only a few yards off, along with snatches of a man singing “Can’t You Hear Me Callin’, Caroline.” Yet when he turned, no one was there.

He walked on, after a few minutes stopped again.

Shrill voices echoed from the ruined brickworks. He heard laughter and then a shriek, followed by the sound of an argument.

His hands trembled with anticipation. He shoved them back into his pockets and continued at a brisker pace, picking his way through broken glass and boards riddled with nails, until he reached the phantom arch, the name FELLISON’S carved into its bricks. He stood there, hidden from view, and watched the scene in front of him.

Children played in the ruins, all girls. He counted seven, clad in a patchwork of drab plaid dresses and pinafores. One girl, blond and taller than the rest, stood atop a pile of bricks, hands on her hips as she surveyed her kingdom. Two smaller girls crouched at her feet, whispering to each other and holding hands. The others remained a safe distance away and warily circled the mound. No one seemed to have spotted him.