They do not listen, caught up in their struggle over who can be trusted to risk his freedom. By the time they understand what she is saying she is halfway across the square. She turns once, to shake her head and forbid pursuit. It is Charlie who holds back Thomas. Rational, principled, disciplined Charlie. Trusting her. Treating her as his equal.

She is grateful and disgruntled all at once.

ф

The doormen never try to stop her. She raises the hem of her skirts and pushes past them, ignoring the tipping of their hats. From the corner of her eye she sees one of the watchers stir. She wonders whether there will be another one, lurking in the semidarkness of the reception hall. A concierge mans the high wooden desk. She waves him close, so she can avoid being overheard. Coquettish. And wonders did she learn it from Mother or from one of the girls in school; or is it simply in her blood?

“I am here to see Mr. Ashton,” she confides. “A surprise visit.”

The young man takes in her filthy hair and splendid dress.

“I am a family friend,” she adds.

The concierge appears reassured by this. Not the words, she realises, but the accent. The tones of the nobly born. The smell of sweet is on his breath.

“It is very late, miss.”

“Indeed. But his light is burning. I saw it from my trap.” She pauses, moves her face closer to his. “He will be most grateful that you let me through.”

The concierge shifts his sweet from one cheek to the other; locates a timbre at once flirtatious and shy.

“In that case, miss, go right on up.”

The man does not provide her with a room number, assuming perhaps that she has been there before and knows the way. But the hotel’s layout is easy enough to understand. She ascends to the second floor and then matches the door to the light they saw from down below. Room 14. Her knock is soft. Part of Mother’s outfit was a new pair of deerskin gloves.

Sebastian does not open the door at once. She can hear him shift inside, approach. A long hesitation, his breath curiously laboured. When he finally opens up and sees her, his tense face floods with relief.

“Miss Naylor!”

He pokes his head around the doorframe, squints down the corridor to see if she is hiding other callers, then yanks her in by the wrist. No sooner has he locked the door than he releases her, staggers, drops his weight into an armchair. Sebastian is wearing a paisley-patterned smoking jacket. Each of its pockets is bulging with a bottle.

“And here I thought they had finally grown sick of waiting and had come to take me away! Die Stunde der Wahrheit, ha! The pliers and the rack. But instead it’s you, wearing a dress!” He laughs, slips a hand onto one bottle, uncorks it, and takes a long swig.