“How about love, then? Can it exist? Real love, here in the meanness of the city?”

“Sure it does. Got a baby girl. Clutch her to my chest so hard each morn, we smoulder like embers.”

“Here,” says Thomas, and gives him all his remaining coins. “You earned it. You may be the wisest man in the whole of London.”

“Sure I am. And in the whole Empire besides.”

ф

Thomas returns late-morning. A nod and a look is enough to draw Charlie out of his melancholy. The moment is as good as any: Mrs. Grendel is out bartering for food, Sebastian is building his sewer, and Grendel has gone to tell the priest he shan’t be coming to work for a few days.

Livia watches them assume their roles: the burglar and his assistant. A confidence man is what the newspapers would call him: someone who can charm the petticoats off a schoolma’am. The beauty about Charlie is that he does not even realise his own gift.

And indeed it proves easy. Charlie simply enters the kitchen, sits down on the side of the table that will ensure her mother’s face is turned away from the hallway and the door to her own room. It must be, Livia finds herself thinking, that her mother is bored. It cannot be easy being stuck here, waiting, surrounded by her stroppy daughter and her friends. She could do with a bath, a walk, a horse ride around the estate. But Lady Naylor is a gaoler now.

A gaoler cannot leave his gaol.

“You know about Grendel,” Charlie begins, frank and guileless in his guile. “Sebastian said he told you last night.”

“Yes, he did. I should have noticed it earlier, I suppose, but my mind was elsewhere.”

“Aren’t you shocked?”