The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour, and Clara felt suddenly exhausted. It took ten minutes to walk here from the station, twenty at the most if the bridge was open and you had to go the long way. Max wasn’t going to come tonight. She sank into the armchair opposite Lotti’s and closed her eyes.

“Perfect solution to what?” she asked.

“Ben has his job,” explained Lotti. “And I have a problem with my dog Federico.”

“The dog you have stolen.” Clara opened her eyes and, seeing Lotti’s expression of terror, felt sorry that she had spoken. “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”

“The thing is,” said Lotti, sounding more subdued, “when my uncle hears about this law, he’ll send me away. He’s much too much of a snob to let me go to the Barton school. So you see, a tutor’s the only way. It’s worth a try. Honestly, even if it weren’t for Federico, I couldn’t bear boarding school again.”

“They shut her in the coal cellar,” said Ben. “All night.”

Clara, remembering her own miserable school days, pressed her lips together.

“Will you teach us?” All of Lotti’s bravado was gone now, and she was almost pleading. “I promise I’ll be good. I would actually like to learn. I had this idea yesterday that I could be an animal doctor. I took a thorn out of Federico’s foot and he looked at me with these big, grateful eyes—he has such beautiful eyes—and I thought imagine doing this all the time! I’d need a proper education for that, wouldn’t I? What would you like to be, Ben, if you had time for an education and you could be or do anything you wanted? Like Miss Clara being a writer and me being an animal doctor, what would you …”

“I’d build bridges.” The answer came from nowhere, but as soon as he said it Ben knew it was true. “And boats. Like Mr. Brunel, the engineer. Nathan took us to Bristol once, to see the suspension bridge he built there over the gorge, and it was …”

He trailed off. Words couldn’t do justice to how Ben had felt, the first time he saw Mr. Brunel’s bridge suspended two hundred and forty-five feet above the Clifton gorge.

Lotti smiled. “That would be a good thing for you, Ben.”

A moment’s quiet settled over the room, and Clara was reminded of the first time she had seen these two, sitting together on the roof of the Sparrowhawk, and the feeling she had had then that anything was possible. Max would like these two, she thought. I like them.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

Chapter Six