Lacroix grinned and kept his peace. He was, after nine days, becoming familiar with the way the Frends spoke to each other. Sometimes they drew him in; sometimes they seemed to perform for him. As always, with other people’s family, there was a deep story he had not the slightest hope of untangling. He did not doubt they loved each other yet he wondered if each to the other represented that which they longed to distance themselves from. The old life, the old tyrant. Their freakish days in Shoreditch. Without Thorpe and the community, would they have gone their separate ways long since? He knew he liked them though. Cornelius’s chatter, the spirited company of the sisters, the music at night in the untidy, comfortable house. His secret room at the back. And he had grown stronger—real progress at last—so that he was now a very long way from the man who lay on old Jesse Campbell’s floor staring at the sky through a smoke-hole. He should, he supposed, be more pleased about it. To be healthy, to be strong again. Wasn’t that what he had strived for ever since opening his eyes to find Nell spooning brandy and milk into his mouth? But what when it was done? When he no longer had the luxury of considering himself an invalid? The world would sidle up to him again. There would be demands he could not simply faint away from. Sometimes, his face pressed against the onrush of time (as against a film, something ectoplasmic and lucent, like the skin of an egg), he thought he could almost see it, a moment, a reckoning, a decisive moment, when everything would depend on some virtue of character he no longer believed himself to possess. One clean cut, one sweep of the blade, as in those sword drills out of Le Marchant’s Rules and Regs he never really mastered . . .

The women had settled on the grass below the trench. They had taken off their hats. Emily, kneeling behind Jane, had both her hands in her sister’s hair as though buried in sand. She was drawing the hair out, squeezing it, holding it in a fist while the other hand shuttled back to collect, to smooth. Then she lifted it all and wound around the blonde stem a fine chain the colour of red coral. When it was done, the hair sleek and orderly, Jane reached up and pulled strands free, corn-coloured helixes to hang down the sides of her face, finishing the work by undoing it a little, a careful spoiling. Then each took the other’s place and it was Jane’s turn, opening the wings of her sister’s hair—shorter, darker hair—collecting it with drowsy rollings of her wrists, with sudden sharp tugs that made Emily wince. Then the lifting, the piling up, the cunning one-handed tying of a ribbon. She was quicker than her sister, more careless, more skilful.