“It’s too late now to harness the horses,” he explains, both in accusation and apology. “You were expected at three. Even then, the light would have been bad. It’s quite a ways, you see.”

“Then we’ll stay the night,” Charlie suggests reasonably.

The man nods, bends for their luggage, hesitates.

“There is no inn.”

“And the waiting room?”

“Locked.”

“Then where will we—”

The man sighs, picks up the suitcases again, leads them down the platform steps and across the station yard. Here the horse stables form two shabby rows, shielded from view of the travelling public by a high brick wall. No streetlamp lights their footing here, and as they make their way down the alley in near darkness, Charlie becomes eerily aware of the animal eyes looking down at him across the stable gates, his ears alert to the shifting of hooves and the sudden shakes of horses’ heads; the exhalations of hot air; the smacking of lips and meaty tongues. When a horse bares its teeth not a foot from his ear, they catch the little light there is: crooked, yellow teeth like stubby fingers, sticking out of colourless gums. Startled, Charlie stops. Thomas bumps into him, swears, then places a hand on his shoulder.

“Spooky, eh?”

“Just lost my footing,” says Charlie, thinking that this is what it must feel like to have a brother. An older one, willing to stick up for you in times of danger.

They arrive at a door that the coachman wedges open with some difficulty. Inside, the scene is lit by a single tallow candle. The room is tiny, smells of hay and horse. Three men sit propped up against the wall, smoking cheap little pipes; two others are stretched on the freezing ground under shabby blankets, resting, sleeping, or dead, it is impossible to say. Nobody speaks: not to welcome them, not to communicate with one another.

“The coachmen sleep here,” Baron Naylor’s man informs them. “I’m not supposed to— That is, gentlemen don’t usually come here.” He sets down their luggage on the little floor space there is, unwraps his scarf to free a throat marked by an old burn scar. “But I don’t know where else—”

“It’ll do,” Charlie says, and Thomas sits down wordlessly, then spreads his coat out underneath him. The room is so small that once Charlie has joined him, they lie wedged between the prostrate men and the smokers. Charlie’s face rests not an inch from the hand of a stranger. It is a large hand, with a tattoo in the wedge of skin between thumb and index finger, and knuckles blackened by either dirt or Soot. The tattoo is some sort of picture. Charlie cannot make it out until the hand spreads itself upon the wooden floorboards like an animal seeking purchase for a leap. A mermaid, bare-chested, smiling.