“We must feel his pulse,” she answers. “It’s easiest here. At the throat.”

Without hesitation, Charlie sticks his fingers into the blood that covers Thomas’s neck. The wound above is still bleeding. It’s the left side that’s been hit, near the ear. There is no way of telling how deep the wound is. Leaves have become stuck to it, and clumps of dirt, as though the earth is already claiming him as hers.

“I cannot feel it, Livia. My hands aren’t working.”

When she bends to slip her own fingers onto the side of Thomas’s throat, she sees what he means. Each of her fingers is drumming, her own pulse shoving blood all the way down to its tips. It is impossible to feel anything. She lets go, bends lower, presses one ear right to Thomas’s mouth. Tell me your secret, she thinks. Are you alive? Charlie bends down with her, lying almost flat on the forest floor, his eyes level with hers, his mouth three inches away. There is something to his face. She studied it all through the coach ride, as they sat there, too awkward to talk. The cast of the mouth, the wide-open eyes. The kind of face saints sometimes have, painted on the glass of church windows. A face so little guarded, so unmarked by Discipline, it taunts her, terrifies her. What sort of creature is he that he can afford to live so naked and not sin?

Something reaches her. Her ear. Not a sound: a sliver of air, like the lick of a tiny tongue.

“He’s breathing.” She lets go of Thomas, turns around, lifts her skirt and starts ripping off strips of petticoat. “He mustn’t bleed to death.”

Behind her, Charlie starts praying, his voice light and firm.

ф

The woman appears like a ghost. One moment she isn’t there, then she steps out of the shadow of a tree, four yards away. Charlie does not notice her. He is desperately trying to fashion a bandage out of the strips of cloth Livia has supplied. They have no water, cannot clean the wound.

“Quick,” he keeps berating himself. “We must keep moving.”

When Livia puts a hand on his shoulder, he does not react.

The woman has no colour. She wears a sort of shift made from patches of leather and cloth. Everything about her — her clothes, her skin, her hair — is uniformly grey, the shade of spent embers. Ashen. She stands motionless, her knees bent, back humped, ready to run. It reminds Livia of nothing so much as a cat watching the goings-on of the kitchen. Curious, shy, twitchy; its ears pressed back against its skull. And all the while the woman is smoking, smoking just as steadily as she is breathing, rhythmically, ceaselessly, adding dye to her ashen skin.