Livia cannot stop speaking. It’s an open cab, and she has to yell over the noise of wheels and hooves on cobbles, lean forward and halfway across Charlie’s lap to make herself heard. Up on his box, the coachman is making haste; sends his nag flying into corners and keeps craning his neck, too, listening in, or perhaps just staring at her, this gentlewoman with the stringy hair and her two filthy companions. His bowler is rain-dark; it has played feast to many tribes of moth.

“It was as though he had poured petroleum over the floor!” Livia shouts again. “An explosion: contagious. As though it would never stop.”

She raises her chin into the wind, stabs her hands into the air, cutting off some question Charlie has been trying to voice.

“‘A problem of filtration,’ Sebastian said. Separating sin from muck and water. That’s what he has been doing down in the sewers. Creating a giant sieve and collecting London’s Soot! Dredging every cesspool for it, the bottom of the river, two and a half centuries’ worth of crimes. They want to quicken it!”

Throughout her monologue, Thomas sits quietly, only half listening, lost in himself. The urgency of his horror has abated and left behind something duller, slow in its wits. He has been watching his hand, the right one. It has swollen to the size of a club, the fingers so thick they feel fused, all but the pinkie which rides up, crooked, above the others. The blood on the knuckles might be his own or it might be Julius’s. Most likely it is both of theirs, mingled. Blood brothers. As a child he read a book about that, two boys whittling open their palms with a blunt penknife. The coach veers, pushes him into Charlie. His thoughts veer with it. He is conscious that he needs to pee.

Killer. It is a funny word. Not an act: a mode of being. A profession. Some trades, you pass them on from father to son. They say his father killed his man in a rage. One of his tenants. There was slander involved, drink, a tavern. A pewter mug scooped up where it had fallen on the ground. A pewter mug. Smart. His father knew how to protect his hand.

Back home, Thomas used to call those who spoke of it liars. Liars! — turning his eyes on them, Smoke on his lips. They stopped speaking of it in his presence. He wonders now: did he sit there, his father, afterwards, on a stool at the bar, nursing his wrist, his bladder nagging at him like a bad joke? Thomas does not know. The only letter his father sent from prison was a will, stipulating that his son was to inherit his leather hunting breeches and his good lamb’s wool coat. Thomas has never grown sufficiently to fit into either.