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The noise that escapes Dora is like nothing she has heard before. She reaches for the banister, heaves against it. Spots spasm in front of her vision. Then, decided, she pulls herself up, begins to climb the stairs.

“Don’t go up there, missum.”

Something in Lottie’s voice. Dora stops, turns.

“Why not?”

But Lottie just shakes her head, will not answer. Cannot, it seems, and something else begins to hammer in Dora’s chest, her skull. Dora turns again, runs full pelt up the stairs.

Her attic door is wide open, hanging at an angle. From the landing she can already see the mess of clothes in the middle of the floor, and the anger falls from her in one single breath. It is as if everything slows its pace, as if she walks underwater, unable to anchor herself to the ground but somehow, somehow, her feet take her into the room.

In dismay Dora looks at the detritus spread haphazardly over the floor, the open doors of the wardrobe and chest of drawers, the demolished mess of her desk. Beads and wire, all her jewelry supplies, thrown about as if they were nothing more than rubbish.

A cold breeze gently ruffles the curtain at the window and moonlight streams into the room, a beam of white pointing at the floor. She turns her head.

“No. Oh, no. No no no...”

Like a puppet pulled along on a string Dora follows the trail of black-and-white feathers scattered across the floorboards. She raises her eyes. The door of the birdcage hangs precariously off its hinges, and Dora clamps her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob.

At the bottom of the cage lies Hermes, her beautiful Hermes, his elegant neck snapped in two.

Part III.

When all of this—desire and joy and pain—

Has melted and dissolved in stormy rapture

And then refreshed itself in blissful sleep,

You will revive, revive to fullest youth,

To fear, to hope and to desire once more.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Prometheus (1773)

Chapter Thirty-Six

From the east side of the river the journey to the Horse and Dolphin usually takes only an hour but Hezekiah’s leg is a hellish pain and despite the sharp frost in the February air he is sweating profusely through his cambric. Instead, the journey takes him nearly two.

The city, when the sky is dark, lives in different skin. Nose curled, Hezekiah passes down dank, filthy alleys and is surprised to find that even at this dawn hour, harsh laughter echoes from deep within them.

Everything is coated with a repellent gloom. Loose cobbles skip where he upends them with his toe, sending flicks of mud up his trousers. His heel sinks deeply into wet earth. He pulls it free with a sickening sucking noise and still, even now, when there are other more pressing matters with which to concern himself, he worries about the stain.

He tries to ignore the beggars who watch from peeling doorways, pulls his coat tighter together, reels when he sees what he thinks is a body lying at the foot of a three-story facade. Ironic, really, considering where he has just been.

What he has just done.

Hezekiah keeps his head down. He will not think on that. No, he will think of other things, what waits for him back in the bowels of the shop.

The long-sought note sits nestled in his waistcoat pocket—close to his heart—crumpled and ripped and stained with bird shit, but he has it. He pats the pocket, thinks gleefully on what the note has revealed. The fortune under his nose, all this time! And the key to the Bramah safe—the key he keeps hidden within the globe in the dining room—will unlock it! How has he not noticed? How did he not realize? It was Helen’s idea, it must have been, conniving wench that she was. She played him like a fool from the very start. But he has won. Finally, after twelve years of waiting, he has won!

He will burn the note when he is through. And Dora, Hezekiah thinks with vindictive pleasure as he steps out from Hedge Lane into St. Martin’s Street, will never even know. He will ship her off to the whorehouse and be done with her. She will never bother him again.

The Horse and Dolphin is a forbidding-looking tavern with dirty bricks and low-hanging eaves above the door. Loud, unruly laughter trickles into the street and the lowlight from the paneled windows shines sickly yellow on the uneven cobbles. A cluster of doxies loiter at the corner, tiredly calling for sport, and briefly Hezekiah considers it, teases a coin in his pocket.

No, he thinks. There will be time aplenty for that.