Washing a man’s legs and body proves surprisingly straightforward once Charlie gets past the simple fact of his nudity. It is, in the end, rather like cleaning yourself. Baron Naylor is so calm now, he even lets Charlie shave him, very slowly and carefully, until five or so years of premature age have been scraped off his chin. Afterwards, the baron dressed in fresh clothes, his bedsheets changed, Charlie joins Livia by the window. Dawn is breaking, the lawn still grey with shadow, the nearby wood a black square framed by lighter fields.

“Can you see a woman out there, walking out of the woods?” Livia asks in a whisper, then carries on, not expecting an answer. “The servants, the old ones, they have a story about a woman wandering the woods. Lost, they say, living on the edge of them, half in darkness, half in light. They say she is father’s lost soul. His sanity.” She smiles sadly at the windowpane. “But I’ve never seen her, not in a thousand mornings of looking.”

She turns to Charlie then, studies him, frankly and systematically.

“You are shocked, aren’t you? Shocked and disgusted. I can see it here.” She points to where his eyebrows have knitted over the bridge of his nose.

Charlie is silent for a moment, gauging her expression. He knows it is important to give an honest answer.

“No, I am not,” he says at last. “I have been thinking. It came to me just now, looking out the window with you. This is what Smoke is, isn’t it? Smoke is madness. It’s as simple as that.”

When she answers, there is a catch of excitement in her voice. It is as though Charlie has just spelled out a long-cherished thought.

“Plato writes that evil is having a disordered soul.”

She is about to go on, but breaks off instead. She does not trust him yet.

“We never read any Plato,” Charlie tells her. “We only learned his dates.”

Livia chews her lip.

“Father has his books downstairs, in the library. In Greek. He translated some of them. When he was a professor, at Cambridge. I found his notes.”

LIVIA

Livia looks over at the man in his bed, shackled again, placid and vacant. Her eyes fall on the razor on the little table. Charlie has washed and wiped it, and left it open to dry. She walks over, folds it, weighs it in her hands.

“You shaved him,” she says suddenly, as though she has only just discovered the fact. In her head it’s connected, somehow, to Plato, and madness, and sin. He does not quite fathom how. “You have good hands, Charlie Cooper.”

He masks his embarrassment by shaking his head.

“Only because of this,” he says, picking the candy from out under his tongue. It has diminished in size and turned dark, almost black, and looks for all the world like a rotten tooth.