Before Renfrew can answer the coach hits a pothole and throws them out of their seats. In a second everyone’s awake, jumbled, pushing themselves up, away from awkward contact with their teacher. Charlie waits for the conversation to resume, but it doesn’t. When he looks outside, he sees an owl sitting on a moon-washed hedge, its eyes fixed on his and ringed by fine light feathers that give its stare a look of callous wonder.

ф

They arrive. As they clear the last hillock, the school lies beneath them, dormitories, schoolhouse, and shed forming a black cross in the wet snow, the dark brick evading the eye’s attempt to impose details. The boys need no prompting to file inside. They head for the dormitory; some fling themselves down without undressing, an eerie silence in the room where whispers, laughter, little squeals mark bedtime on any other day. Charlie waits for half an hour after the last candle has been blown out, then gets up and sneaks into the bathroom. Thomas is already there, sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, his back slumped against the wall. Charlie slides down next to him, the tiles very cold under his bottom.

“Me first or you first?” he asks.

“You,” Thomas says. Charlie is unprepared for how weary he sounds. More than just weary. Resentful. Sick of life.

“Unless you’d rather not. It can wait till tomorrow.”

Thomas shifts enough to find his eye. “You want to talk, Charlie, and I am your friend. So let’s talk.”

He does not say: That’s the price we pay. For friendship. But it’s there in his voice.

It sickens Charlie that friendship should have a price.

THOMAS

Charlie tells me. About the miracle he has seen. And I tell him what I was up to, back there on the market square. An accounting, you might call it; honest as two Dutchmen settling up. Then we go to bed. Neither of us reacts in the way the other needs him to. Charlie wants me to be excited; to spin theories with him; devise a plan to return to London, sniff out his man.