“Dr. Aschenstedt. You are drunk!”

“Yes,” he beams. “Plum brandy, from Poland. And this here is laudanum. For later, you see. One cannot question a sleeping man.” He jumps up from his chair once more, strides over to her, confides. “You see, I am a revolutionary, Miss Naylor. A Robespierre! (Only better than Robespierre, because what a blockhead he turned out to be!) But alas, my dear — I am also a coward. Positively a coward. Lily-livered! It is almost shameful.” He giggles, stamps his feet. “But sit, my dear, sit. Here, why don’t you drink a little glass?”

It’s a two-room suite, fashionably furnished. The door to his bedroom stands open, the bedding is unmade. Its presence only feeds Livia’s feeling of disorientation. Not long ago this would have been unthinkable: standing in a hotel room with a man, a drunk, alone in the night. Even the week in the mine seems licit by comparison. That was an adventure. This is the stuff of dormitory whispers and banned French novels. It is, for girls of her station, the very centre of the Smoke. She picks her way through the books and papers that litter the floor and cautiously takes a seat. The fireplace is burning. Black husks of charts, letters, and notes are floating in the hot air above the flames.

Sebastian follows her gaze, jumps over to his desk, takes up a sheaf of papers and is about to feed them into the fire when something distracts him and he starts reading them instead. He catches himself, flushes, drops the papers on the floor.

“You see I have been busy. Hiding evidence! In case. . but of course, what does it matter now? Still, you never know. .” He stoops, picks up the papers once more but again fails to place them on the fire. “The trouble is, these records are precious. Letters, articles, drafts of learned essays. The next frontier of science! Besides, they’ve already searched the room. The hotel porter let them in, the swine. No man’s a hero to his valet, eh?”

He mutters to himself, totters, then looks over at her with sudden interest. “What about you though, Miss Naylor? What in the devil’s name are you doing here?”

Livia has her lie prepared; practised it on the way up the stairs and readied it for the moment he opened the door. Then Sebastian scattered it with his drunken antics. Now the words come haltingly and are belied by a blush.

“I’m afraid things have gone wrong, Dr. Aschenstedt. Mother has been arrested and you are being watched. We have Mowgli. You must tell me where to take him. It is our only chance.”

He blinks, suppresses a burp, dismisses her words with a flap of his hand.