She nods, pulls away the blanket and displays her naked flank without shame. The scar is an ugly thing, rises mottled from her skin.

“He damaged me. When he cut me. I am almost as broken as you.

“It would be best if we both were dead,” she carries on. “We will give people ideas. Renfrew’s ilk.”

Then Berta is there, walks over to the bed and pulls the blanket back to cover her.

“You go on, die,” she tells Lady Naylor. “My son needs a father.”

ф

We spend the rest of the night at Mowgli’s bedside. The boy drifts in and out of sleep. His face is serious. At times he cries with some internal pain, quietly, not wiping the tears. I do it for him. He does not flinch at my touch.

In the periods when he sleeps, Berta and I talk. I try to describe to her what happened. Berta is not interested.

“I shot a man today,” I tell her. “I shot milady’s son.”

“What does it matter now? It’s over and done with. Mowgli’s here.”

“Miss Livia called me a monster. And then she would not look at me, not once.”

“She is young,” Berta says. “She has a narrow view of life.”

I nod, unconvinced.

“It’ll be dawn soon. We should get some sleep.”

But we stay. Mowgli wakes when light starts filling the room. His temperature is down, he is alert. Berta bends to him slowly, afraid she will startle him. His arm comes up, cautiously, his little hand grabbing at her face, her nose. It withdraws and displays between his index and middle fingers the little wedge of his thumb. Berta raises her hand to her face as though looking for her nose; mimes finding nothing there, only a blank; stares in mock terror at the boy’s raised-up thumb. He does something miraculous then. He giggles. And grabs for her nose once again.

Emotion pours out of Berta. It pours out as a sob, as pale, hazy Smoke. The child sees the Smoke, waves at it, finds he can dance shapes into it with the movement of his fingers.

And I?

I sit there abject, smiling, yearning to feel as they do; contented and removed.

BAPTISM

BAPTISM

He looks like a statue.”

“Like a saint. At prayer. Only, you know. Crucified.”

“And evil.”

But even as Charlie says it he realises it is not true. Julius is kneeling, arms out, his mangled face drooping halfway through the bars. It isn’t just that Thomas’s fists have cut loose his features. The Soot has come off where his temples and ears have slipped through the bars, along with something more substantial than skin. Livia is right then. Julius looks like a saint: whittled from a block of charcoal, or black burnt wood. Brittle to the touch.