“What?” she asked. “You know him after all? You have guessed him?”

“I do not know him,” he said. “I have sworn to you and to Captain Browne. I do not know him.”

“But something,” she said. “When you picture him you see . . . who?”

Lacroix was silent a while, however long it takes the unvoiced to thicken into language. “The master,” he began, “told us Henderson had bow legs. Bandy. The corporal in Morales, the one who cut off the girl’s hair, he had them also.”

“So have a great many,” she said. “My father’s friend Smith looked like a pair of egg tongs.”

“But the way he was in the master’s house,” said Lacroix. “The coolness of it.”

“You mean the cunning of it.”

“The what of it?”

“A cunning man. A shameless one.”

“Exactly.”

“But you cannot remember the soldier’s name?”

“No.”

“Or you never knew it at all?”

“That is possible. Likely even.”

“In which case—”

“In which case,” interrupted Lacroix, “there is nothing to say he was not Henderson. But if it is the same man, suppose for a moment that it is, why pursue me? An officer who barely knew him, who did him far less harm than he might have . . . ”

“You saw him in his crime.”

“He saw me in mine.”

“They are not the same, John! Not at all!”

“I suppose,” said Lacroix, “if they wished to have me brought before a court he would not be the worst they could send. A man who could recognise me . . . ”

“That cannot be right,” said Emily.

He didn’t hear her; the breeze scattered her words. She leaned in closer. “He has not come to arrest you,” she said. “A man who behaves as he has done does not act for any court. And did he not say to Captain Browne he was outside the law?”

“He also said he was sent by one whose word could not be gainsaid.”

“And you answered it was a fantasy to justify his violence.”

“I did.”

“But now you think differently?”

“I do not know what to think. I start to make a path, to see one. Then I lose it, or it was no path at all.”

“Well,” she said. “If we do not know all we know enough. We have been warned. That is what counts. We will fetch Jane and Cornelius and then all of us will go where this man, whoever he is, can never find us.”

“And where is that?” asked Lacroix. “Shoreditch?”