“What is it?” he repeated gently. He took her hand. It was easier to touch her than talk to her. She grabbed him by the thumb with a tightness that he never thought could have come out of such thin fingers.

She led him into Abu’s bedroom. The room had been swept and straightened, the quilts folded and arranged. “He did it himself,” she said. “The servants almost panicked when they saw.”

Abu was gone. He had left a letter on the bed, on a pile of photographic prints.

“May I read it?”

“Please.” She had not released his hand. She raised it up and pressed it hard against her thin dry lips.

The note was very short. It said: “I’ve gone to find the man who took these. Maybe I can do some good this time. We have a chance. Even so, you don’t have to hope, to try.”

The photographs were large and stiff, portraits of child laborers in episcopal industries—glass mines, steel foundries, cotton mills, dress shops, prayer farms. Some were very young. A girl posed next to her thread machine, an endless row of spools, levers, and metal gears. It was spotless, but the girl was dirty, barefoot, her dress torn and patched. Her hair was cut short, so as not to catch in the machine, and her face was smudged with dirt, or maybe just a flaw in the print, because photography was primitive in those days.

She only had ten fingers, and her hands were raw and bruised, yet even so she smiled. All the children in the pictures smiled—gaping laughter from a group of boys in caps, posing at the entrance to the coal pit; fox-faced smiles from prim little girls knitting socks; a wistful, almost guilty smile from a girl standing by herself on a heap of stones in an endless field.

“I didn’t know they started so young,” said Charity Starbridge.

In those days, a photographer focused a reflection on the surface of an acid pool. Then he had to wait for the image to congeal, so that he could lift it out with wooden tongs and spread it between two plates of glass. He could make the prints at home, placing the plates on paper sensitized to light, but the image itself took six minutes to harden in the pool, and if the subject moved too much, or if anything happened to disturb the perfection of the acid’s surface, he had to start again. Thanakar wondered how a photographer could have been in those places for the time it took, before he was arrested. Or perhaps these were official portraits, sanctioned by the bishop, and that was the reason for the children’s smiles.

The last few photographs were different. They were taken in the slums of the city, and one showed the back court of a filthy tenement, and children playing games. One showed a family of Dirty Folk, heretics who worshipped snakes, and they never washed except a few times in a generation, when Paradise rose.