Livia finds them. The priest must have fetched her off her stoop. She is upset, angered, frightened by Thomas’s failure to return. But even so she does not step too close to him.

“Charlie didn’t come,” she hisses. “A beggar pestered me for money.” And then: “What are you doing to this man?”

As she says it, Thomas realises that his hand is still clutching the man’s collar. The fingers of his other hand are wet. He has just finished shoving them in the man’s mouth, hunting his cheeks for hidden objects.

“He does not smoke,” he says, shaken. He tries to explain it to Livia. A part of him wants to kneel before this man. Another is angry that he seems such a fool.

Livia listens to his account without moving a muscle. At last she says, speaking to the angel not Thomas, “You are afraid.”

Then she does something for which Thomas is unprepared. He did not suspect her capable of such grace; not here, not at this moment, her lips still jet-black with her Soot.

She steps past him and embraces the angel.

The man giggles nervously. And then he starts crying.

ф

He takes them home. Grendel. “Just like the monster,” he says. He says it happily because Livia is holding his hand.

It’s her doing, this hospitality of his. She has taken to him in a way Thomas cannot quite explain; has stepped into his presence as though into a shelter. One of the first things she has said to the man is: “I wish my father had met you. When he was younger.” And also: “He tried to be like you, just like you.”

But Grendel had only flapped his hands in agitated denial until she desisted and started talking about their journey here and how they are waiting for a friend.

“Charlie,” she explains. “You will like Charlie. Everybody does.”

Her eyes are on Thomas as she says it, showing the only sign of anguish that will pass through them all evening.

Grendel lives a half-hour’s walk away, close by the river. Dark has long fallen and the road is treacherous. They are beset by beggars and prostitutes, by lamplighters with smoking torches, asking for tuppence, offering to see them home.

As they draw closer to the angel’s neighbourhood, the city smells grow worse, offal and mud, the stale, rotten waters of the Thames. The house he leads them to has burnt and adds cold ash to the stink. It looks uninhabitable, but Grendel leads them through the gateway to a crooked, triangular courtyard, then beyond to a sagging building overhanging the riverbank. There are a whole series of low-beamed rooms, but two hold no glass in their windows, and one has a collapsed wall that is growing a thick layer of moss. For all that it is cosy enough, with a gaily painted kitchen table and an ancient stone hearth that Grendel immediately sets to lighting.