Thomas is too tired to argue. The doorway is ripe with smells but deep enough to allow them to disappear into its shadow, even to lie down, using their arms for pillows. For a moment the muck that seeps through his coat and shirt makes Thomas gag. Then exhaustion wipes the feeling from his mind. What remains is the cold. Even out of the wind, heated though it is by the furnace of London’s sin, the night is near-freezing. Against their will, they are forced to huddle close, back pressed against back, each keeping the other awake with their shiver. The floor of the doorway is uneven from use. It dips at the centre. Late at night, not explaining himself, Thomas turns around to take Livia in his arms and mould his chest, knees and legs against her frame. It is warmer this way. Her hair smells of coal, sweat, and peaches. It is the peaches that trouble him as he drifts off to sleep. Dawn brings noise and the acrid smell of fresh Smoke. They roll apart like disgruntled puppies and stiffly resume the road. Behind them, their doorway remains empty, the door locked, the house unmarked and ordinary but for the lopsided contour of a cross that declares it a chapel.

ф

They walk in comfort with each other, two steps apart. Some truce appears to have been struck between them in the course of the night, almost a friendship, dispelling the tension of the previous day. It fills Thomas with hope. In a few hours — the next morning at the latest — Charlie will re-join them and all danger will have passed, this strange, dimly sensed trap laid for them by the road. In the meantime Thomas gives himself to London. In the thin light of morning it seems different to him than it was when he first came here. Or rather, he is different, has shed both school and uniform, become one of the crowd. Already the streets are choked with wagons and people: farmers bringing sheep to market, costermongers, morning drunks, factory workers marching to their shift. The Smoke is light yet, dissolved in yellow fog, tugs at Thomas in ways not entirely unpleasant, gives rise to unruly feelings he does little to suppress. Next to him, Livia walks more guardedly, suspicious of this haze, yet gawking, too, at this sea of people whose steady current carries them along.

They find the square by midmorning. There is no scaffold there today, no soldiers, no hangman, no rabid mob. Even so the square is crowded enough that all movement becomes a matter of negotiation, of space claimed and yielded, shoulders brushed, weights gently shifted. London is a place where people touch. It strikes Thomas as a succinct definition of its sin.