I do not fear anyone’s judgment. You might endeavour to understand me, and I do wish to be understood. But first you must grasp that if you think me some abomination, some kind of monster, you will understand nothing.

No doubt you have seen paintings depicting Hell, and recoiled at the snarling, twisted features of the demons torturing the forsaken. How much more frightening it is to understand that a true demon has a kindly face.

When I look at such paintings, I see only representations of evil and cruelty as though they were entities in their own right. They say nothing of where such evil and cruelty comes from. For this I know: every true demon was once a child, one that knew fear and suffering.

Every true demon learned cruelty and evil at the hands of another.

SEVEN

he ticking of the clock was the only sound as Raven sat in an armchair beside the fire in Dr Simpson’s study, feeling uncomfortably alone. He could not remember the house ever being this quiet. It felt bereft, shorn not only of familiar presences, but of much more besides. Nothing here was as he had imagined it would be, but it was not mere absence that was accentuating his feeling of isolation.

Sarah was married.

He heard the housemaid’s words over and over in his head: She is no longer Miss Fisher, sir. She is now Mrs Banks. What she had conveyed was instantly understood and yet somehow incomprehensible.

Jarvis had shown him to his new quarters, helping him heft his trunk up the stairs. The butler had observed that Raven looked ‘less like a vagrant than when you first darkened our door’. It was hardly the most generous of compliments, but it was as warm a welcome as he had received, the place seeming comparatively deserted.

Raven’s new accommodations were larger and finer than the room he had been given as the doctor’s apprentice. However, part of him wished for the reassurance of its familiarity, or perhaps he merely wished for other things to be the same.

Raven had busied himself by unpacking his things, though he had halted each time he heard the front door open downstairs, waiting for the accompanying boom of Dr Simpson’s voice. Thus far it had not been forthcoming. His new window offered a view of Queen Street Gardens, and he had gazed out each time he heard hooves, hoping to spy the approach of the professor’s brougham.

Eventually he had come down the stairs and asked Jarvis when the professor might be due home.