Now that she had her Underground pass, Rat could take Morgan farther afield. She wanted to learn how the city was put together. She liked wandering along the canal that ran from close to their house to Regent’s Park. Even better was the Thames. They’d take the Tube to Embankment and then find one of the secret staircases that led down to the water.

The Thames was wide and bronze-green and swift-moving. At low tide, there was a rocky beach where people walked, picking up shells and odd bits of china and pottery, scavenging with metal detectors, letting their dogs and children loose to play. It cheered Rat to wander along this shore, or to sit and watch the churning curlicues of current. She could dream that if she and Morgan hitched a ride on a barge, eventually they might find themselves back among the marshes and flamingo-haunted lagoons of the Pyrénées-Orientales, with snow-streaked Mount Canigou looming in the distance instead of office towers.

Rat was puzzled by her own homesickness. She had spent much of her life angry or bored, but she’d never before been blue.

Once or twice Kate tried to cheer her up by inviting over friends or relatives who had teenaged children but that made things even worse. Rat tried to stay in her room until the last moment, and excuse herself as soon as was decently possible.

She felt embarrassed by how dull and badly dressed she was compared to these fluent, knowing youngsters—the Parisian kids who spent summers in the Pyrénées-Orientales by comparison seemed like louts—and how little of the dinner conversation she followed. Was she supposed to laugh when they all laughed, even if she didn’t understand, or did that make her look even stupider? If she’d grown up among these children, would Gillem like her any better?

Afterwards, she would lie awake, reliving her blunders—how when Tarquin had asked her if she liked Pete Doherty, one of her all-time favorite musicians, she’d replied she didn’t know who he was, never having heard his name pronounced in English.

Her ambiguous position—was she officially Gillem’s daughter or wasn’t she?—which was bad enough when it was just her and the McKanes, became excruciating in front of outsiders.

As for her original purpose in coming to London, that remained elusive. Gillem was unfailingly gentle and courteous, but remote. She felt as if she knew him no better after three weeks in his house than she had the first night. She had no idea whether he was pleased she was there, or indifferent, or desperate to be rid of her.