I stood up. ‘Thank you for your help, both of you. I am going to Jack Barak’s house now. He may have some ideas.’ He would, I was sure; he had been a child on the streets himself once. ‘With your employer’s permission, Goodman Brown, we shall resume the search at first light tomorrow.’

‘OFFER A REWARD.’ That was Barak’s first suggestion. I sat with him and Tamasin in their parlour, nursing a jug of beer. As always, it was a cosy domestic scene: baby George abed upstairs; Barak mending a wooden doll the child had broken; Tamasin sewing quietly by candlelight, her belly just beginning to swell with the coming child.

‘I’ll do that. When we go out tomorrow. Offer five pounds.’

Barak raised his eyebrows. ‘Five pounds! You’ll have every lost urchin in London brought to your door.’

‘I don’t care.’

He shook his head. Tamasin said, ‘What is Josephine’s fiancé’s first name? You always speak of him just as Brown.’

‘Edward, it’s Edward. Though I seem to think of him as just young Brown.’

She smiled. ‘Perhaps because he is taking Josephine away from you.’

‘No, no, he is a fine lad.’ I thought of his uncomplaining willingness to help tonight, his obvious love for Josephine. She could not have done better. Yet perhaps there was some truth in what Tamasin said.

She said, ‘I will go out tomorrow with Goodwife Marris. I’ll come to your house in the morning and we can divide the city into sections.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Barak interjected. ‘Going up and down the streets and stinking lanes. No.’ He put down the doll. ‘I’ll talk to some people; plenty of the small solicitors and their servants would be happy to look for the boy for five pounds.’ There was still amazement in his voice at the size of the sum I was prepared to lay out. ‘Have you paid the latest instalment of your taxes?’ he asked me.

‘Not yet. But remember I got four pounds from Stephen Bealknap.’ I frowned slightly, thinking again of his deathbed words.

‘Make sure you find him,’ Tamasin told her husband. ‘Or I will be out looking the next day.’ She asked me, ‘Is tomorrow not the day you go to Hampton Court?’

‘Yes. But I do not have to be there till five in the afternoon. I’ll search for Timothy till I have to leave.’

NEXT MORNING, while Barak was busy rousing people to join the hunt, Josephine and Goodman Brown and I went out again. They took the road eastward, to see if the boy had left London; if he had, he would be impossible to find. But he had spent all his life in the city, he must surely be here somewhere.