“You must tell me,” he said, after some minutes had passed and the inn’s old clock had wheezed out a long chiming, “what you wish to do today.”

This too, perhaps, was a mistake. She frowned at him. “Do? I wish to do what we came here to do. What else?”

“You want to find Rizzo today?”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course!” She looked away from him, stared into her empty cup.

Whatever she had been before, whatever her mood—the laughter of the crossing, the laughter at the hotel—she was scared now, openly so. He should have known it the moment he came down and saw her. It should have been obvious to him. He felt ashamed. His meat-lust, his testiness. He put an eye to the bubbled glass of the window and looked out at the transport of shadows.

“I do not know exactly where we are,” he said.

“The Trongate,” she said.

“The what?”

“The Trongate. Or somewhere near it. The woman I shared with last night knew the city. She drew a map for me.”

“And you have it?”

“She drew it on the mirror with her finger. But the infirmary is only a short walk away. That is where we will ask for Rizzo.”

They left their bags at the inn. Yesterday’s rain, last night’s rain, lay in broad puddles whose surfaces glittered and darkened in fitful sunlight. The road was full of business, men and animals breasting the cool air, shoving through. Everywhere you looked a face looked back, absorbed you without expression. Emily and Lacroix were out of practice. The island had softened them, attuned them differently.

As the road turned and climbed it became quieter. They saw the cathedral. It was no beauty. It sat there like a man bowed under the weight of his own pack. It did not soar. Then, beyond it, they caught sight of something in a different idiom entirely, with pillars and balconies of pale, unweathered stone. On top was a dome roofed with glass, like an observatory.

“You think that’s it?” asked Lacroix.

They skirted the walls of the cathedral and came to a halt beside the gates of the new building. No question now of what it was. Under a fanlight, the double doors of the entrance stood wide. A man came out, a woman, two nuns. Then a young man with one leg, swinging himself between crutches, and another man with both hands heavily bandaged, an expression of deep perplexity on his face. Others passed on their way in. A woman, her face sunk on to the bones of her skull, her hands shaking in a palsy, and behind her, two men in top hats and good coats, doctors perhaps, or undertakers. In the gardens between the railings and the door, a person, hidden by a bush, was being comforted by a woman Lacroix thought was probably drunk.