The room was not the kind of room given to eminent men. Its smallness, its lack of a fireplace, sconces, furniture of any standard beyond the disposable. He had other rooms, perhaps, grander, somewhere else in the city. On the walls were closely pinned charts of eyes. Eyes in faces, eyes alone, eyes in cross-section. Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3. One chart depicted an eye the size of a soup plate, a cyclop’s eye that stared back at Lacroix until it stared him down and he turned away from it towards the window.

Rizzo was leaning over Emily in the posture of a man inviting a woman to dance. She had her bonnet in her lap. He raised her chin, tilted her face to the light, then tilted it away. He asked her to look out of the window and describe what she could see. She did so. It was not what Lacroix could see or it was some poor fraction of it.

He asked her to close her eyes.

“Close them?”

“If you would be so kind.”

She closed them, her face still angled upwards, still flush with light from the window.

“You will feel me touching your eyelids,” said Rizzo. “There . . . But please, you must not forget to breathe.”

After a few moments he glanced over at Lacroix.

“Perhaps Mr. . . . ?”

“Lovall.”

“Perhaps Mr. Lovall could do as I am doing. Touching the eyelids. You will not object, Miss Frend?”

“No,” she said. She spoke as in a trance. (Who was that man in Paris who placed women in a kind of stupor? What became of him?) Lacroix walked past the desk to the window, stood in front of the chair, Rizzo at his shoulder.

“Very lightly,” said Rizzo. “Your hands here, and here. Your fingers . . . Yes. That is excellent.”

The instant Lacroix touched her he felt her response. The barest movement—a flinch, though he did not think she flinched away from him. He stroked his thumbs across the lids of her eyes, the living fragility of the skin with its shadowings, its tiny deltas of blood vessels. He touched an eyelash. He felt her breath on the inside of one of his wrists. Her own hands still gripped her bonnet. Knees together, boots together. Her back in the blue coat slightly arched.

“Now,” said Rizzo. “Please do the same with your own eyes . . . Yes? And now”—he took hold of Lacroix’s hands—“feel mine . . . ” The surgeon’s face. His skin warmer than Emily’s. The soft scrape of his whiskers. He smelled of something. Lacroix thought it might be Windsor soap. Emily looked up at them, blinking.

“There,” said Rizzo, removing Lacroix’s hands.

“Yes,” said Lacroix.

“You feel a difference? Miss Frend’s eyes are more stiff, yes? They do not . . . yield.”

“Yes,” said Lacroix. “I could feel that.”

“You could, of course.” The surgeon returned his attention to Emily. “You have headaches, Miss Frend?”

“On occasions.”

“You vomit?”

“No.”