So the weight of his family's expectations increased a thousand-fold. It near to crumpled him flat.

The Worthingtons accomplished so much by sheer will. It was the pressure of that combined, focused, thrice-damned will that drove Lysander into the streets of London. There the burden attenuated with distance, even though the crowds and noise ate at his calm in other ways.

They were all counting on him.

Yet he could not heal himself. He could not heal Iris.

So he would escape and stride furiously, sometimes for many miles in a day. Occasionally he paced through the finer parts of town but most usually through the grittier bits, the areas where people didn't even attempt to make eye contact or to speak to him or even nod in his direction, where the constant pressure to hide the darkness within him eased, for dark spirits abounded in the narrow dirty streets he frequented.

Sometimes rough men jostled him, looking to vent their resentment against the gentry. Sometimes rough women called to him from dim alleyways where they plied their wares. Sometimes rough children followed him and begged for a coin or a sweet, all the while nimble fingers swept his pockets with a touch lighter than a fluttering breeze. Lysander ignored them all.

He wanted nothing from them, not the fight, nor the lust, nor even to grab a small skinny arm and teach a waist-high pickpocket better manners. He had nothing in his pockets to lose. When he'd come home from the war hospital — and when he finally left his room — he'd chosen only the darkest of his old clothing to don. The vibrant dandified waistcoats, gleaming boots and glittering cravat pins of old now rubbed him as raw as jagged gravel.

Now, he swept through London as a swift shadow of a man, lost in a strange state that was both overly sensitized as well as bleakly deadened.

But now Iris was truly ill and his family was frightened. As much as Lysander longed to flee the agonizing tension and eerie grim silence that permeated the house, he could not abandon them. He knew he was of little help, but to leave simply to ease his own twitching discomfort seemed too base an act.

The sky eased a trifle bluer as he watched. There must be a breeze from seaward shifting the ever-present soot aside.