She pictures it; imagines an aquarium as dark as her mustard jar, and a child’s open vein fertilising its mucoid tar. “The Great Quickening — you are making Juliuses!” she whispers, as though infected by Sebastian’s incoherence. Then — that part of her mind quite separate from her anger — she notices something in the fireplace: quite literally a scrap of hope. She drops to her knees, heat flushing her face.

“I just cannot fathom it,” she says, no longer hopeful for an answer, wishing only to distract him, her fingers sorting through hot embers. “All along I thought you would end the Smoke. Why this? Release more darkness into the world? The streets will run with blood.”

He takes a swig from his bottle before answering and emerges in a new stage of drunkenness: sadder, sentimental, sleepy.

“Blood?” he repeats as though suddenly unfamiliar with the word, nods off, eyes slowly closing, a baby after his feed; then jerks upright with a thought: “And did you know that in France, at the height of the Terror, they built a temple to Reason and a new type of clock designed to tame the irrationality of time?”

Drunkenly, dreamily, he begins lecturing her on the beauty of the decimal system and the division of the earth’s daily revolution into tenths. But Livia is no longer listening. She rises, stills the madness of her pulse.

“You won’t help me find Mother,” she speaks into his flow of slurry eloquence. “Then I must leave.”

She says it simply, despair replaced by purpose. A shred of paper is burning in her fist.

ф

Sebastian helps her, unexpectedly. Gathers himself up from the floor, the plum brandy finished, fetches his hat but not his coat, and offers to lead off the watchers to ensure her escape.

“A perambulation! Ein Spaziergang. Why shouldn’t a man go for a midnight walk? If they pounce,” he continues, “I have this,” patting the bottle of laudanum poking out of his smoking jacket.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” he announces, opening the door and pressing his coin purse on her as though in thanks for an illicit assignation. “In a newborn world!

“Black rain,” he confides, half shivering. “I have been dreaming of black rain. The wind blows northerly tonight. In from the sea!”