Then he slips off his belt, loops it quickly through her harness and ties her to the door knob before knocking hard against its wood. The girl starts crying as he stumbles away through the bushes, but she does not shout. She may not have the breath to do it.

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Charlie lingers on the far side of the hedge for far too long, lying flat against its base, hiding in the dark. Julius might have left Renfrew’s cottage by now. He might have seen their tracks (how much has it snowed?) or gone upstairs and realised someone was staying there. His dog might have taken Charlie’s scent. It is madness to linger. He needs to run, lose himself in the snowstorm. Go to London to report to his friends.

What Charlie does do is lie flat on the ground, count the minutes. Crawl back through the bushes, back to the window. Raise his head above the window ledge and take a peek.

Eleanor is sitting on a chair, tears rolling down her cheeks, her skin glowing red from the cold. Other than the sobs that rack her frame, she is not moving at all. Her hands are wrapped around a mug of tea, demurely, in an attitude oddly like prayer. By her side, crouching and hence shorter than her by half a head, is Cruikshank, holding a big pair of scissors and moving them about her torso like a bird picking berries from a thorny shrub. Each sharp little snip cuts a leather belt on Eleanor’s harness. When one side gapes open like a bust valise, the knotty old porter moves around to the other side, facing the window. Charlie is not quick enough to duck and for a full second they stare at each other while the girl sits unmoving, warming her hands on the hot tea.

Then Cruikshank looks away and resumes his labours, and Charlie turns to run into the frozen night.

HEADMASTER

HEADMASTER

There is something objectionable about Swinburne. It goes beyond his overbearing boorishness; the wheeze of his voice; his massive, hulking, clumsy body, so much like a dead man’s brought back to life. I think it is his eyes, small, too-round eyes, tucked piglike under too many wrinkles. They are fixed on me now, studying me past the rim of the teacup he has lifted to his lips and then forgotten. His thoughts are easy to surmise. He is wondering why I asked him up here, at an unconventional hour, too hard on supper to call for tea. Other questions are churning in him, close to the surface. In the end he cannot help himself: it spills out without subtlety, the thing that bothers him most. It never ceases to surprise one how much like a schoolboy this old man really is, underneath the fire-and-brimstone bluster: a schoolboy in a cassock and a licence to spank. It is little wonder the pupils fear him so.