“Seen him? No. Only in a dream.” He hesitates, tilts his head with the thought. “I sometimes wonder whether I dreamt him even at Renfrew’s. The stuff of nightmares. And how he pleaded to be saved!” The next moment his eyes are back on hers. A naked gaze.

“You are looking for Thomas, aren’t you?”

It is she who blushes.

“Has he gone out?”

“He realised he needs a pencil and paper. To copy your mother’s plans. Will you believe the Grendels do not have a single pencil in the house? So he borrowed some money from Mrs. Grendel. Or stole it, maybe. When he gets back I am to distract your mother while he searches her room. He thinks she and I have rapport.” He hesitates, swallows the trace of accusation that surfaced in his last phrase. “She tried to seduce me last night, didn’t she? To her cause. I knew it but was seduced all the same. She is very clever.”

“Yes. She tried to seduce me, too.”

“Livia,” he continues, without transition. “Please. You and I, we need to—”

She turns to flee. “Not now, Charlie. Later,” she whispers. “I promise.”

But by this time she is already out the door.

When she walks past the room a little later she sees him standing by the window, his hands shoved out into the rain.

ф

The rain falls hard and perpendicular, unharried by wind. Thomas is soaking wet before he finds a stationer’s. It appears London is in little need of paper. He stops at a butcher’s to ask for some wrapping paper and a stub of pencil, but the man is so suspicious of his request and accent that he won’t sell him anything, not for all the money in the world. Annoyed, but happy too to be out and about, alone with his thoughts, Thomas ventures beyond the familiar streets between Grendel’s flat and the church into a part of town unknown to him. Everywhere there is the bustle of people: noise and mud, the air oddly clean, London’s emotion picked off by the rain.

Before long he reaches a complex of old, dilapidated buildings of such enormous size that they form a hamlet unto themselves. Like the house Grendel has made his home, more than half the structure appears to have burnt down, though here the smell of ashes has long been absorbed into the city’s stink. Despite the fire, a thousand people appear to be living in its medieval shell; have improvised walls with lumber and plaster-stiffened cloth; have opened stalls, a tailor, a carpenter, a quack selling tonics of laudanum and fermented bitters. Thomas walks the length of the building before realising what it used to house. WESTMINSTER CLOTHES AND RAGS, a painted sign proudly announces above the narrow entrance of a shop. A Jew is tending to it, wearing a fur hat, his sidelocks swinging limply in the rain.