Thomas understands the tears. Children are born in sin. Most babies turn black with Smoke and Soot within minutes of being born, and every birthing bed and every infant crib is surrounded by the dark plume of shame. The gentlefolk and all commoners who can afford it employ nurses and attendants to look after the child until Good begins to ripen in it, at age three or four. Sometimes they make a point of barring the child from all family intercourse until it is six or seven: from love, and so they will not grow to despise it. Smoke is tolerated to the eleventh year: the Holy Book itself suggests the threshold before which grace is only achieved by saints. If you die before eleven, you die in sin and go to hell. But (thank the Virgin) it is a lesser hell than those reserved for adults: a children’s hell. In picture books it is often depicted as a kind of hospital or school, with long, long corridors and endless rows of prim, white beds. Thomas owned such a book when he was growing up and drew in it: drew colour, people, strange walking birds that trailed long feathers like bridal trains. It is the tradition in many of the older families to hire a bond servant when a child turns ten whose only task is to guard the young one’s life. If the bond servant fails, he is put to death. One calls them rooks, these bond servants, for they dress all in black and often trail their own Smoke like a curse.

Julius has given the boys time to digest all this, the weight of little Luke’s death. That lamp whose beam he is steadying must be heavy in his hand, and hot. But he is patient.

“Was Luke alone? In the boat, I mean.”

Collingwood speaks but his answer is inaudible. His tears have ceased now. Even though he still wears his nightshirt, he has been stripped of something these last few minutes, some protective layer that we carry on our skins.

“Come, come, man. Out with it. Who was it? Who was in the boat with your ten-year-old brother when he drowned?”

But Collingwood has clamped up and no word will pass his trembling lips.

“It appears you have forgotten. I shall help you then. Is it not true that it was your father who was in the boat? And is it not also true that he was drunk and slept through the drowning, and only woke when the servants found the boat stuck amongst reeds in a riverbank three miles down the stream?”

“Yes,” says Collingwood, having refound his tongue. He almost shouts it, in fact, his voice an octave higher than it was but a minute ago.

“And,” asks Julius, matching the shout with a whisper, “do you love your father as the Holy Book instructs us to?”