“You are lying, of course. Your mother left with Mowgli and you are trying to follow her.” He drops back into the armchair, happy as a clam, leans over to her, grows avuncular, then sentimental, all in the space of three breaths. “But there is something else, is there? You look aggrieved. Wie ein Häufchen Elend. ‘Like a little pile of gloom.’ Come now, you must tell me.”

“Julius,” Livia finds herself saying. “He found us. There was a fight.”

Before she knows it, she has given Sebastian an account, her voice raw with the horror over the thing Julius had become. Sebastian listens intently, his hands wrapped around one of his bottles, pale and fretting now. When she is done, he shakes himself like a man wishing to shake off his doubt.

“A dark angel, you say,” he mutters even though Livia used no such phrase. “Indeed! He’s been imbibing our Soot! And did you know he stole it from us, the rogue? But then, we were all of us rogues. Your mother and I tricked him out of his money. And he ran off with half our precious harvest. Poetic justice, yes?” Without waiting for a response, Sebastian carries on, cryptically, incoherently. “What do you think, though — would you and I have taken to darkness as readily as that? You see, despite it all, I hold with Monsieur Rousseau, not dour Master Hobbes. We are born for the herd, not the jungle, eh?”

He sighs, kicks his slippers off like a schoolboy on vacation, and, content to have settled the point, slouches forward towards the fire in order to warm his stockinged feet.

ф

She pleads with him. “Explain it to me,” she pleads. “You owe us that much. What is Mother doing with the child?” When Sebastian does not answer Livia adds: “You lied to us! You said it would be three days before the infection took hold.”

This last bit rouses the slouching man, wakes his inner pedant. Sebastian sits up.

“Oh no, it wasn’t a lie. It takes between fifty and eighty hours. These things are never precise. It varies with the dose, you see, and how strong the child’s defences are. In Mowgli’s case”—Sebastian pulls out a pocket watch, sits squinting at its hands—“well, he might already be there! There is a test, in any case, a simple test.” He beams, reaches over, tugs at her sleeve. “Those fools outside, eh? Even while they are standing there, freezing, your mother is changing the world. Ha! They are so sure that it must be I who lights the fuse! They don’t expect a woman to have this much pluck.” He giggles, settles back into his chair, drink-flushed and happy. “But hush now, Miss Naylor! I mustn’t say any more. The less you know the better. In case. . You see, it might be another twelve hours. And they may catch you yet and place you under duress.”