Rab moved one burly shoulder, shaking his head.

“Nah, then. Only to the door. But I could see as there were carpets like that”—he nodded at the silk Kermanshah on the floor by the desk—“and pictures on the wall.” He lifted a chin like a battering ram, indicating the painting over the mantelpiece, of Grey’s paternal grandfather seated on horseback. The chairman frowned with the effort of recall.

“I could see a bit into one of the rooms. There was a . . . thing. No quite like that thing”—he nodded at the orrery—“but along the same lines, ken? Bits o’ clockwork, like.”

The sensation of cold heaviness was worse. Not that there could have been any doubt about it from the beginning of Rab’s account.

“The . . . woman you fetched from this place,” Grey forced himself to ask. “Do you know her name? Did you deliver her there, as well?”

Rab shook his head, indifferent. There was no sign on his oxlike face that he knew that the person he had transported was not indeed a woman, nor that Lavender House was not merely another wealthy London house.

Grey essayed a few more questions, for form’s sake, but received no further information of value, and at last he removed his hand and stood back, nodding to indicate that Rab might take his pay.

The chairman was likely a few years younger than Grey himself, but his hands were gnarled, frozen in a curve, as though in permanent execution of his occupation. Grey watched him fumble, thick fingers slowly pinching up the coins one by one, and curled his own hands into fists among the folds of his banyan, to restrain the impulse to do it for him.

The skin of Rab’s hands was thick as horn, the palms yellow with callus. The hands themselves were broad and bluntly powerful, with black hairs sprouting over knobbled joints. Grey saw the chairman to the door himself, all the while imagining those hands upon Nessie’s silken skin, with a sense of morbid wonder.

He shut the door and stood with his back against it, as though he had just escaped from close pursuit. His heart was beating fast. Then he realized that he was imagining Rab’s brutal grasp upon his own wrists, and closed his eyes.

A dew of sweat prickled on his upper lip and temples, though the sense of inner cold had not diminished. He knew the house near Lincoln’s Inn, called “Lavender.’’ And had thought never to see or hear of it again.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Molly-Walk