Maybe he could be happy here, with Jack and Zita and Kit. Maybe he could find happiness of a kind. There must be ways to deal with it. Jack swilled the port wine in the crystal glass.

He heard a sob from behind him. Zita. It brought him back to his senses.

‘I will never love you.’

Jack put down the glass and folded his hands together, and once more Tom was struck by the brute strength in them.

‘When I show you your parents, you will want to see more. You will come to appreciate what I have. The power.’

‘I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to see my parents. You showed me my father in the attic, but it wasn’t him, it was an empty thing, a wraith.’

‘I will show them as they were, Thomas Swinton. And then you will belong to me.’

‘I won’t do it.’ His heart was thumping. His tongue felt huge and thick between his lips.

‘Won’t you, Thomas? Won’t you? If you do not come with me, think on what might happen to your friend Zita.’ He pointed his long bony finger.

Tom gazed into the glass box. The silver bracelet was digging into Zita’s skin so hard that she was bleeding.

‘She’ll die.’

‘Come with me.’

‘No, Tom, please!’ Zita’s voice, faint, was pleading.

‘I will kill her if you don’t.’

Tom ran to the glass box and rushed to tear it from its hooks.

‘Do that and I will kill you both.’

Almost sobbing, Tom leaned his head against the cool glass, and Zita mimicked him. Their foreheads met. And for a moment the pair stood there, apparently touching, but separated by malice and an infinity of space.

Jack closed his eyes and began to mutter. The silver bracelet on Zita’s wrist sank into her flesh and a single line of blood dripped down her arm.

Tom sprang back from the mirror. ‘Don’t! Stop it!’

‘I will kill her, Thomas.’

‘All right! I’ll do it. I’ll go with you. I’ll see them.’ He slumped against a bookcase.

Jack drew a deep breath, and the bracelet became loose once more.

‘But I have one condition.’ Tom’s mind was galloping.

‘You have a condition? Well, I appreciate that kind of thinking. What is it?’

‘You free her. You let her go when I come back. And Kit too. You free them both. I give myself to you if you free them.’

Zita was banging on the glass, shaking her head, but Tom couldn’t quite hear her.

The air was thick. Dust swirled in the sunbeams. The eyes of the stuffed crocodile glinted.

Jack put down his port glass and looked at Tom with keen eyes. ‘You would do that? You would sacrifice yourself for Zita and Kit? For a wench and a serving boy?’