“What’s he to you?” he asks once we have established he knows the boy I am looking for.

“I’m his elder brother.”

“You don’t look alike.”

“Ah, well. You’d have to talk to Mother about that.”

The man laughs. I slip him money.

“He ran away, did he? This brother of yours.”

“He is guilty of that particular folly.”

The man jingles coins within a meaty fist.

“Awful dirty for gentry,” he muses.

I smile and add one more coin to his stack. Then I call Nótt to my side. The man studies her weight, her teeth.

“Big dog.”

“Enough of this.”

He shrugs, counts up the money. “He was heading for Oxford. Got family there perhaps?”

“A kindly uncle.”

“Those are the best sort.”

ф

I am left with a choice then. London or Oxford. My inclination lies with the city. Thomas is there. He tasks me, Thomas, tender like an abscess in my throat. How deftly has he slipped into Mother’s regard, where I could only wheedle with my money. How artfully has he contrived to set a mark against my name at school, so that I have to endure Renfrew’s insolent probing. And how similar is our Smoke once woken; how seductive in its kinship; how intolerable in its rivalry. But it’ll be hard, I imagine, tracking someone in London. Too many people, too many scents, even for Nótt. Oxford will be easier. Charlie Cooper must be heading back to school. To do what, I wonder; talk to whom? How much has he seen? It is this simple question that decides me. I want Thomas. But there must not be any talk.

There are no trains to Oxford until the following day, not from this depot. I resolve to make my way by horse. It won’t be any faster that way, but after a week of waiting it feels good to be on the move.

Darkness falls early. And just like that unease descends upon me, half childish fear, half longing, my hand dipping in the saddlebag. The feeling has grown familiar in the week since Price’s death; resembles the tangle of shame and excitement that attends the first discovery of self-abuse.

In confusion then, fretting, unsure whether it is to indulge or to distract myself, I look for company and shelter; make out a farmhouse by its chimney in the distance then see the glow of a fire in a field much closer by. When I approach, I find two men sitting around a pot of boiling potatoes. Two rabbits, crudely skinned, hang skewered over the fire. The men rise, alarmed: crooked figures, thin as rails, the clothes mere rags. Underneath the dirt and Soot their complexions are fair and ruddy. Tinkers, not Gypsies. All the same, unwelcome on these shores.