Before long the cramps got so bad that Charlie found himself unable to continue. A farming couple put him up when he knocked on their door, doubled over with pain.

“Imagine it, waking under a stranger’s roof, flailing about every time, my heart pounding, thinking I’d been chained again. Scrambling for the chamber pot, wondering whether Julius was there, watching me, lurking in the shadows. The pain passed within twenty-four hours. Then the farmer made me work off the cost of my lodgings.” Charlie shakes his head, turns up his palms, displaying blisters. “A coarse man, always swearing, complaining about rich people, the chickens, his wife.”

They reach Grendel’s house but linger outside, the breeze carrying the river to them, smelling of refuse and rotting fish.

“And after all that,” Charlie finishes, gesturing behind them and meaning the ambush, the mines, the long road to London, “here we are, back with Lady Naylor.”

“We can leave if you want. Just say the word.”

But Charlie can see that Thomas does not mean it. He knows why.

“We have to stay and protect the child.”

“You think so too, then!”

Charlie has only seen the boy for a moment. The first thing Sebastian did was commandeer a room for him, one whose door could be locked. Next thing they knew he had nailed shut the window shutters. Then he left, taking the key. When he returned in the morning, he brought a metal bolt and reinforced the door.

Later Charlie spent an hour at the keyhole, but the boy was outside his field of vision. Only his feet showed from time to time, the tips of his boots, man-sized, too large for him, nobody had thought to help him take them off. A boy of six perhaps. Younger than Eleanor. Alone, confused, slurping air as though through a straw. Once, he rose and raced to the window, his non-face pressed against the slatted shutters, drinking light.

“He does not smoke,” Charlie says to Thomas. “That’s why he is so precious to them. The mask is a respirator. Keeping him from infection.” It is a surmise, but Charlie is sure of it. He repeats to Thomas Renfrew’s account of Baron Naylor’s expedition, how they scoured the world for an “innocent.”

“They needn’t have gone to all that trouble,” Thomas observes. “Here we’ve brought them to Grendel, free of charge.”

“It’s different. The boy must be like the wild woman we met in the woods. After we were attacked in the coach. If so, the boy will smoke soon enough. He just has not caught it yet.” Charlie smiles at the memory of the shy creature who stopped Thomas’s bleeding, her Smoke seeping out of her with the unselfconsciousness of breath. “Do you think they will notice, about Grendel?”