We were like some fleas or bees or small flies or croak beetles, or shrink blats, or scarab ants, or horned moths, that live only for a short time, flutter, scurry, creep, eat, live, love and then die within brief moments and then are all done with and then are only flecks of dirt. A whole life pushed into such little time. Oh, she’s a thought, the best of thoughts. The best thoughts I’ve ever had are all Lucy Pennant. I shall see her again tonight, I told myself, when it is dark again, that’s not so very long away and she shall be in the Sitting Room, and we shall sit together upon Victoria Hollest and I’ll tell her then what I think of her. I’ll kiss her again then.

‘Aaaaleeesss Heeeeeegsssssss.’

‘James Henry Hayward.’

‘Right you are, Alice, on we go,’ I said to the door handle, rubbing it a little in my waistcoat pocket. It sounded so faint, so unsteady.

It was at least a half hour’s journey to the Infirmary. I must hurry this door handle back to Aunt Rosamud before Uncle Idwid found me, or, worst of all, found Alice Higgs in my possession. I could not go the direct way, the main staircase would be shrieking with birth objects any moment. It was the start of a new day, the Iremonger family was getting up, the middle floors were already swarming. I would go the back way, up the winding stone stairs called the Corkscrew and take the door halfway up which would come out onto the Long Gallery – formerly a covered bridge over the Fleet River – and then climb down the other side, until at last I might achieve the Infirmary, which was, once upon a lifetime, a Turkish baths near St James’s Square.

Up the Corkscrew I went and round and round, my steps making clanks and shocks and hallo-here-I-ams upon the old stone stairs. It took so many ups and rounds to get to the door halfway up, but at last it was there, only when I tried it, it did not open. There was something the other side of the midway door, something with a name. I couldn’t catch it at first, the door was so thick. Was someone guarding the door – had Idwid had a sentry posted? Perhaps, I thought, it was Tummis’s ostrich come to surprise me. Then the handle turned and the door began to open, and then the name was quite clear enough to me:

‘Robert Burrington.’