Charlie does not come, not at dawn, nor at noon, nor yet at dusk, when she waits for him on the steps of the church until London has sunk into darkness and people bar their houses against the night. Grendel walks home with her, the streets full now and misty with Smoke. Back in his room, Thomas lies as she has left him. Mrs. Grendel tells Livia he woke long enough to struggle into his coat and insist on heading out to meet Charlie. When she assured him that Livia and her husband were fetching Charlie even as they spoke, he collapsed back on his blankets and fell asleep at once.

“Let him rest,” Mrs. Grendel says. “He is healing. Gathering strength. It’s the last stage of illness. Two more days and he’ll be right as rain.” She speaks as one familiar with the sick. At their feet Thomas lies like a dead thing, rancid in his sweat.

Livia draws up a stool and sits with him. It is, she tells herself, an act of duty, towards Charlie as much as Thomas. And yet there is more to her gaze as she studies his curled-up form, the bold lines of his face, the blue-black mark that crawls out of the crater of his wound and insinuates itself into his cheek. She sits, feet planted a yard from his chest, the room still around her, cooking smells drifting from the kitchen. Sits, half-conscious of a question. Her hands in little fists. When she shifts, minutely, her back is stiff with tension.

The silence weighs on her, is like a blockage in her thoughts. She needs to speak to learn what she is thinking; finds comfort in the fact that he cannot hear.

“Charlie did not come today,” she says, so quietly it sounds only within her, the words a movement of her jaw. “I’m worried about him.”

She crosses her legs, uncrosses them, disconcerted by the warmth of thigh on thigh.

“And yet I was scared of his coming. Isn’t that strange?”

Scared, she thinks now, because he will bring something. The memory of the mine. The taste of his skin: two tongues at odds, sparring, breaching the guard of the other’s lips. They shook hands when they last parted.

“But I was scared of something else too. Scared that he would know.”

She holds her breath, listens to Thomas’s breath, deep if uneven, the hint of a whistle marbling each exhalation.

“Something happened, did it not, Thomas? Between us? Yesterday. In the muck of that street.”

As she says it, she knows it is true. Something did happen — not just in the alley where she lay beneath that stranger’s grope but before, on the road, at the creek, perhaps, while she was cold and wet, off guard, or later, in the night shelter of a chapel doorway, when he breathed his warmth into the nape of her neck.

Thomas noticed her.