“I doubt even in London,” he said, “we would find anywhere as impressive as this. In the way of a hospital.”

“Think of the suffering in there,” she said.

“Think of what . . . ?”

The building should have had a grand vestibule—deserved one—but instead they entered a corridor—brown below, green above—that smelled of carbolic and kitchen steam. In the right-hand wall was a hatch, curiously low down. Lacroix had to bend his knees and stoop in order to poke his head through. On the other side was a room lined with shelves, record books of some description, ledgers, tall like his father’s music books. At a table in the centre of the room two men played dominoes. A third man was sleeping precariously on a narrow bench.

“Mr. Rizzo,” called Lacroix. “The surgeon, Mr. Rizzo. Can you tell me where I might find him?”

The players did not know. They had not heard of any Rizzo, and they had been at the hospital since the day it opened its doors. There was a Mr. Rice. There was a Dr. Rollo. Might it be Dr. Rollo that he wanted? They could tell him where Dr. Rollo was.

“Rizzo,” said Lacroix. “An eye surgeon.”

“What does he look like?”

“I’ve never seen him.”

“Third floor,” sang the man on the bench, who had perhaps been awake all along. “Far end of the ward . . . ”

Neither Lacroix nor Emily had been inside a hospital before. They went up a swoop of stairs to a large room lined on both sides with beds, all of them occupied. They went up more stairs to a room identical to the first, though here it seemed there were more serious cases. One man, seeing Lacroix, called out, “Doctor! For sweet Christ’s sake!” Lacroix smiled at him, made a gesture that might be mistaken for an intention to return.

Another flight, a third room with its uneasy smells, its mood of lassitude and restlessness, as if the patients had all been assigned a problem out of Euclid’s Elements they must solve before they could leave. They stopped a woman on her way between the beds. She looked at them from over the top of a bundle of used sheets in her arms.

“Rizzo?” she said. “Does he work with the unfortunates in the basement?”

“He is a surgeon,” said Emily. “An eye surgeon.”

“Does he have a beard?”

“We have never seen him.”

“Spectacles?”

“We don’t know.”

From behind her, the great swell of her hips, a boy in a nightshirt appeared. Skin like watered milk, enormous brown eyes. “I will take you to him,” he said.