“Nothing. It’s just — I like this tree.” He talks with his back to her, so she won’t see his face. There is a catch to his voice, a hint of a younger Thomas, gentler in pitch. “What kind is it? I have never seen it before.”

“A cedar of Lebanon,” she answers without hesitation. “There is a grove of them on the grounds of my school, along with a plaque. It says an explorer brought back a handful of seeds, in the early 1600s. All British cedars descend from that handful. There was a debate in Parliament not long ago over whether they should all be cut down.”

“Why? No, I know. Because they are foreign. An outside thing.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she says reasonably. “They do not belong here.”

“It’s beautiful.”

He touches the bark, both hands flat on the tree, lets it take his weight. There is a high, light humming in his chest. Bone music. Singing of home. Home? A tree transplanted from its native soil, planted at the edge of purgatory. The early 1600s. It came with the Smoke. Its bark warm and rough under his spread-out palms.

“Come,” Livia urges, not unkindly. “We cannot stay here. We’ll freeze to death.”

Indeed a deep chill has started to rise out of the land and pinpricks of snowflakes stand in the air, catching the sunset. Only the breeze blowing in from the south is a little warmer. It carries London to them, sewage and sin, and the dank stink of boiling cabbage.

They walk towards it side by side.

ф

Darkness falls just as the muddy little path they follow feeds into a cobbled road. All of a sudden there are people, dwellings, mangy dogs hunting for offal in the ditch. They are still far from the centre, in a no-man’s-land of pig farms and factories, vegetable plots, lean-tos made from wood and sackcloth. The closer they draw the less certain they become of the way, encounter sinkholes, dead ends, intersections that split the street in confusing ways. Then also, with every step Thomas’s fatigue is mounting, the ache of fever returning to his joints. It isn’t long before Livia stops him.

“We have walked all day. You need rest. There, we can find shelter in that doorway.”