Seven Dials

chapter TEN
PITT THANKED TRENCHARD for his help and left Alexandria with a stab of regret that surprised him. He would miss the balmy nights pale with stars, the wind blowing in off the sea, smelling clean above the spice odors and filth of the hot streets. And he would also miss the sound of music and voices he did not understand, the colors in the bazaars, the fruit. But in London there would be fewer mosquitoes, and no scorpions. Certainly in the coming winter no cloying, sticky heat to make the sweat run down his skin or light that blinded his eyes and made him permanently squint in the sun.

And there would be no more sense of being a stranger intruding in a land where his people were different and unwelcome, and the weight on the conscience of having contributed to the searing poverty. Of course there was poverty in England too. People died of hunger, cold and disease, but they were his own people; he was one of them and not to blame.

There was a sense of incompleteness in his mission as he stood on the deck of the ship, the bright water churning around him and the city already fading into the distance. What could he tell Narraway? He knew far more about Ayesha Zakhari, and she was not at all as he had assumed, which forced him to reassess the whole question of why Lovat had been killed. It seemed a pointless thing to have done, and Ayesha was not stupid.

Above all, he wanted to be home with Charlotte, his children, the comfort of his house and the familiarity of streets where he knew every corner, and understood the language.

It was another three days before he docked at Southampton, and then a train journey back to London which was in truth less than two hours but seemed to drag to the very last minute.

By seven o'clock he was on the doorstep of Narraway's office, determined to leave a note if there was no one in, but wishing intensely to say all he had to tonight, and go home to sleep as long as he wanted, luxuriously, in all that was sweet and gentle and long-loved, without the need to trouble his mind with what he must say or do in the morning.

But Narraway was in and there was no escape from reporting in person. He leaned back in his chair when Pitt was inside and the door had closed behind him. His stare was penetrating but guarded, already prepared to defend against a returning enquiry.

Pitt was too tired, both physically and emotionally, to pretend to any form of etiquette. He sat down opposite him and stretched out his legs. His feet hurt and he was cold with exhaustion and the sudden chill of English October.

Narraway simply waited for Pitt to speak.

"She is a highly intelligent, literate, and well-educated woman of Christian descent," Pitt said. "But an Egyptian patriot who cared very much for the poor in her country and for the injustice of foreign domination."

Narraway pursed his lips and made his fingers into a steeple, his elbows on the arms of his chair. "So a woman coming for a political end, not merely to make her own fortune," he said without surprise. His expression did not alter in the slightest. "Did she imagine that she could affect the cotton industry through Ryerson?"

"It seems so," Pitt answered.

Narraway sighed, his face now filled with sadness. "Naive," he murmured.

Pitt had a powerful feeling that Narraway was speaking of far more than simply Ayesha Zakhari's ignorance of political inevitability. He sat back in his chair as if at ease, and yet his body was not relaxed. There was a tension within him which was palpable in the room. "You said well educated. In what?" he demanded.

"History, languages, her own culture," Pitt replied. "Her father was a learned man, and she was his only child. Apparently he found her an excellent companion and taught her much of what he knew."

Narraway's face tightened. He seemed to understand far more from Pitt's words than the simple facts they referred to. Was he thinking that she was brought up in the intellectual company of an older man, that it was comfortable to her and she was used to both the advantages, and perhaps the disadvantages as well? Pitt wondered if it had been a training for her which enabled her to charm Ryerson without ever seeming to be too young, too unsophisticated, too impatient? Or was it the forming of a woman for whom young men were unsubtle, shallow and with whom she was ill at ease? Could she actually be as much in love with Ryerson as he believed?

Then why on earth would she have shot Lovat? Had Pitt missed something critical in Alexandria after all?

Narraway was watching him. He said abruptly, "What is it, Pitt?" He was leaning forward. His hand was shaking slightly.

Pitt was intensely aware of currents of emotion far beyond the facts he could see. He hated working with a superior who obviously trusted him so little, whatever the reason. Was it for his safety? Or someone else's? Or was Narraway protecting something in himself that Pitt could not even guess at?

"Nothing that seems to have any relevance to Lovat, or to Ryerson," he answered the question. "She was a passionate follower of one of the Orabi revolutionists, an older man. She fell in love with him, and he betrayed both her and the cause. It was a bitter hurt to bear."

Narraway drew in a long, deep breath and let it out silently. "Yes." The single word was all he said.

For seconds Pitt waited, sure Narraway would say more. There seemed to be sentences, paragraphs in his mind, just beyond reach.

But when he did speak, it was a change of subject. "What about Lovat?" he asked. "Did you find anyone who knew him? There must be something more than the written records we have here. For God's sake, what were you doing in Alexandria all that time?"

Pitt swallowed his irritation and told him briefly what he had done, his further pursuit of Edwin Lovat and his army career in Egypt, and Narraway listened, again in silence. It was unnerving. Some response would have made it easier.

"I couldn't find anything at all to suggest a motive for murder," Pitt finished. "He seemed a very ordinary soldier, competent, but not brilliant, a decent enough man who made no particular enemies."

"And his invaliding out?" Narraway asked.

"Fever," Pitt replied. "Malaria, as far as I could tell. He certainly was not the only one to get it at that time. There doesn't seem to have been anything remarkable about it. He was sent back to England, but honorably. No question over his record or his career."

"I know that much," Narraway said wearily. "His trouble seems to have begun after he got back home."

"Trouble?" Pitt prompted.

Narraway's look was sour. "I thought you looked at the man yourself?"

"I did," Pitt replied tartly. "If you remember, I told you." He was conscious of how tired he was. His eyes stung with the effort of keeping them open, and his body ached from long sitting in one position on the train. He was cold in spite of the fire in Narraway's office. Perhaps hunger and exhaustion added to it. He wanted to go home, to see Charlotte and hold her in his arms; he wanted these things so profoundly it required a deep effort to be civil to Narraway. "He's given plenty of men, and women, cause to hate him," he went on brusquely. "But we have nothing to suggest any of them were in Eden Lodge the night he was killed. Or have you discovered something?"

Narraway's face pinched tight. Pitt was startled by the sense of power in it. Narraway was not a large man, yet his mind and his emotion dominated the room, and would have, however many people had been there. For the first time Pitt realized how little he knew about a man in whose hands he placed his own future, even at times perhaps his life. He had no idea of Narraway's family or where he came from, and that did not matter. He had never known those things about Micah Drummond, or John Cornwallis, and he had not cared. He knew what they believed in, what mattered to them, and he understood them, at times better than they understood themselves. But then he was wiser, more experienced in human nature than they, who had seen only their own narrow portion of it.

Narraway was a far cleverer man, subtler. He never intentionally gave away anything of himself. Secrecy, misleading, taking knowledge without giving it, were his profession. But being obliged to trust where he could not see was a new experience for Pitt, and not a comfortable one.

"Have you?" he repeated. This time it was a challenge.

For a moment they faced each other in a silent, level stare. Pitt was not sure he could afford a confrontation, but he was too tired to be careful.

Narraway spoke very steadily, as if he had suddenly decided to take control of the exchange. "No, unfortunately not. But our job is to protect Ryerson, if possible."

"At the expense of hanging an innocent woman?" Pitt said bitterly.

"Ah!" Narraway let out his breath in a sigh, his face easing, as if he had learned something of great interest. "And are you now of the opinion that Ayesha Zakhari is innocent? If so, then there is something you found in Egypt that you have not told me. I think this would be a good time to do so. The trial begins in two days."

Pitt felt jolted as hard as if he had been slapped. Tomorrow! That was no time at all. The truth came to his tongue almost as if he had no ability to prevent it.

"I went to Egypt thinking she was a very pretty young woman of loose morals, prepared to use her charm to provide herself with the wealth and comfort she would not otherwise obtain." He saw Narraway's eyes intent upon him, and the faint curve of his lips into a smile. "And I came back knowing she was well-born, highly articulate, and probably far better educated than nine tenths of the men in London society, never mind the women. She is passionate in the cause of her country's economic independence and welfare. She has been totally betrayed once, and may find it hard to believe any man again, no matter what he professes. And yet she has said nothing in prison to implicate Ryerson."

"Which proves what?" Narraway asked.

"That there is something crucial we don't know," Pitt replied, pushing his chair back. "We haven't done very well." He stood up. "Either of us."

Narraway looked at him, tilting his head back a little to meet his eyes. "I do know that Edwin Lovat was a man of profound and corroding misery," he said very quietly. "And neither of us has uncovered the reason for it. It may have nothing to do with his murder-but it makes as much sense as anything else we have."

"Well, I have no idea what it was," Pitt replied. "According to his superiors in Alexandria, he was a man of religious conviction, well-liked, good at his job, and in love with Ayesha, but only casually. It ended before he left Egypt. He certainly wasn't heartbroken-nor was she."

"Nobody is suggesting that kind of passion, Pitt," Narraway said with an edge to his voice; it could have been anything: pain, regret, memory, even dream. "She was beautiful, he was far from home. Since Egypt he has gone from woman to woman, but it was not for love of her. She was just one more."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I've spoken to those in their circle. He saw her several times in London before he bothered to pursue her at all. He was becoming more deeply involved than he wished with another woman. He wanted an escape from entanglement. Being seen to court Miss Zakhari provided it for him. He wanted to chase-he did not want to catch."

Pitt hesitated at the door. He was too tired to think clearly. "Then what was the matter with him? What happened between leaving Egypt and arriving in England?"

"I don't know yet," Narraway answered. "But I am not certain that it has nothing to do with his death."

"And Miss Zakhari?"

"As we have already said, there's something we do not know, something that may bring more than a simple, rather pointless murder with it."

Pitt opened the door and stood with his hand on it. "Good night."

Narraway smiled very slightly. "Good night, Pitt."

IT WAS DARK by the time Pitt reached Keppel Street. The lamps gleamed along the pavement like a string of endlessly reflected moons, dimming in the mist until the last he could see was no more than a suggestion, a luminescence without shape.

He opened the door with his own key and stood inside, tasting the moment, breathing in deeply the familiar odors of beeswax and lavender polish, clean linen, and the soft earthiness of chrysanthemums on the hall table. There was no light on in the parlor. The children would be upstairs; Charlotte and Gracie must be in the kitchen. He took his boots off, relishing the feel of his stocking feet on the cool linoleum. He padded down to the door and pushed it open.

For a moment Charlotte did not notice. She was alone in the room, her head bent over her needle, her face grave, heavy hair slipping out of its pins, bright in the gaslight. At that instant the sight of her was more beautiful than anything else he could imagine, more than sunset over the Nile or the desert sky white with stars.

"Hello..." he said quietly.

She jerked around, stared at him for an unbelieving heartbeat, then dropped the sewing on the floor and threw herself into his arms. It was long minutes later, when they heard Gracie's heels along the hall, that they broke apart and Charlotte, her face flushed, went over to put the kettle on.

"Yer 'ome!" Gracie said with exuberant delight. Then, remembering her dignity a little, and lowering her voice to something closer to normal, "Well I'm that glad ter see yer safe. I s'pose yer 'ungry?" That was hopeful. Hungry was back to normal. When he did not answer immediately she regarded him with a shadow of anxiety.

"Yes, please." He smiled at her and sat down in his usual place. "But a cold meat sandwich will be fine. Is everything well here?"

" 'Course it is," Gracie said firmly.

Charlotte turned from the stove, the kettle now on the hob. Her eyes were bright. "Very well," she confirmed, not looking at Gracie.

He caught the tension, the shadow somewhere, the communication in that neither had looked at each other, almost as if the answer was agreed before he had come in.

"What have you been doing?" he asked conversationally.

Charlotte looked at him, but after a hesitation so minute that had he not been watching her closely, he would have missed it. It was as if she had been going to turn to Gracie first, and then decided not to.

"What have you been doing?" he repeated, before she had time to say something less than the truth, which she would then be unable to withdraw.

She took in a deep breath. "Gracie has a friend whose brother seems to be missing. We have been trying to find out what happened to him."

He read her expression. "But you haven't succeeded," he said.

"No. No, and we don't know what to do next. I'll tell you about it... tomorrow."

"Why not tonight?" The question sprang from the nudge of anxiety that she was delaying because something in the story would displease or disturb him.

She smiled. "Because you are tired and hungry, and there are far better things to talk about. We have tried, and not achieved very much."

As if released from waiting on every word, Gracie swiveled around and darted to the pantry to slice the cold meat, and Charlotte went upstairs to wake the children.

They came racing down the stairs and threw themselves at Pitt, almost overbalancing him off his chair, hugging him, asking question after question about Egypt, Alexandria, the desert, the ship, and constantly interrupting the answers. Then he opened his case and gave them all the gifts he had brought, to everyone's intense delight.

BUT IN THE MORNING he raised the question again, when Gracie was out shopping and Daniel and Jemima were at school. He had slept late, and came down to find Charlotte making bread.

"Who is the missing brother?" he asked, accepting tea and toast and fishing in the marmalade pot to see if there was sufficient left to satisfy his hunger for it. Its tart pungency was one of his favorite flavors, and it seemed like months since he had enjoyed crisp toast. He thought there might be just enough. He looked up at her. "Well?"

Now her face was shadowed. She went on kneading automatically. "He was valet to Stephen Garrick, in Torrington Square. A very respectable family, although Aunt Vespasia doesn't care for the father at all-General Garrick, a-" She stopped, her hands motionless. "What is it?"

"General Garrick?" he asked.

"Yes. Do you know him?" At the moment she was no more than curious.

"He was commanding officer in Alexandria when Lovat was invalided out of the army," he replied.

Her hands stopped kneading the dough and she looked up at him. "Does that mean anything?" she said slowly, turning over the idea in her mind. "It's just coincidence... isn't it?" But even as she spoke, other thoughts gathered in her mind-doubts, shadows, memories of things Sandeman had said.

"What is it?" Pitt prompted, and she knew he had seen it in her face.

She wiped her hands on her apron. "I really fear something could have happened to Martin Garvie," she replied gravely. "And perhaps even Stephen Garrick as well. I found the priest that Martin went to in the Seven Dials area just before he disappeared. He works especially with soldiers who have fallen on hard times." She saw the anxiety in his face and hurried on before he could give expression to it. "I went in daylight. It was all perfectly all right! Thomas, he was very upset indeed." She remembered it with a shiver, not for the dirt or the despair, but for the pain that she had seen rack Sandeman so deeply.

Pitt was waiting, stiff, his tea forgotten and going cold in the cup.

"A priest?" he said curiously. "Why? Could he tell you anything?"

"No... not in words."

"What do you mean? If not in words, how? How?" he demanded.

"By his reaction," she replied. She sat down opposite him, ignoring the bread. It would come to no harm for a while. "Thomas, when I mentioned Martin's name he was filled with a horror so great that for several moments he barely recovered his composure enough to be able to speak to me." She knew her voice was thick with the emotion that came back to her in a rush-welling up inside her. "He knows something terrible," she said quietly. "But because it came to him in a confession, he cannot repeat it. Nothing I could say made any difference, even that Martin's life could be in danger." She waited, watching his face, longing for him to be able to take the burden of confusion from her, provide some other way she had not thought of in which she could still help.

"In danger from whom?" he asked.

"I don't know," she admitted. She told him very briefly what little she had been able to learn, and from it what she had deduced. "But whatever Martin said to him, Mr. Sandeman would not-" She stopped. Pitt's eyes were wide, his face pale and his body suddenly rigid as if caught in a moment of fear. "Thomas- What? What is it?"

"Did you say Sandeman?" he asked, his voice catching in his throat.

"Yes. Why? Do you know of him?" Without any clear thought, she felt his alarm as if she understood. "Who is he?" She did not want to learn something ugly of the priest. He had seemed to her a man of intense and genuine compassion, but she could not afford less than the truth, and to turn from it now would avail nothing. The fear would be just as lacerating as anything he could tell her. "Do you?" she said again.

"I don't know," he replied. "But in the army, Lovat had three friends with whom he spent most of his off-duty time: Garrick, Sandeman, and Yeats. You mentioned both Garrick and Sandeman as being in possible danger, or in distress. It is hard to believe that is coincidence."

"What about Yeats?"

"I don't know, but I think I need to find out."

"So Lovat's death did have something to do with Egypt and not necessarily with Ryerson?" she said, but surprisingly there was none of the lift of hope she would have expected only an hour ago.

"Possibly," he agreed. "But it still doesn't make any sense. Why now, years after leaving Alexandria? And what has Ayesha Zakhari to do with it? Lovat didn't want to marry her, it was just an infatuation. And from all I could learn, she wasn't in love with him either."

"Wasn't she?" she said skeptically.

He smiled. "No. She had really loved one man. He was utterly different from Lovat, a man of her own people, older, a patriot who was fatally flawed, and who betrayed her and everything they both believed in."

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, and she meant it. She had never met Ayesha Zakhari, and she knew very little about her, but she tried to imagine the bitterness of disillusion, and the magnitude of her pain. "But surely the fact that Lovat was shot in her garden can't be coincidence?" She looked at him steadily, seeing pity and reluctance in him, and a new, raw edge of feeling about the whole tragedy. She reached across and slid her hand over his.

He turned his over, palm up, and closed his fingers gently.

"I don't suppose it can," he agreed. "But I have to find Yeats, and if he is dead, then how it happened, and why."

"Ryerson's trial begins tomorrow," she said, watching his face.

"Yes, I know. I'll try to find Yeats today." He hesitated only a moment, then, letting go of her hand, pushed his chair back and stood up.

PITT STOOD on the steps in the sun, blinking, not so much at the soft, autumn sunlight as at what the stiff, sad-faced officer had told him.

Arnold Yeats was dead. It had happened less than four years after he left Egypt. He had been posted to India, his health apparently completely recovered. He was a talented officer remarkable for his extraordinary courage. He seemed to know no fear, and his men saw him as a hero they would follow anywhere.

"Brave," the officer said, looking at Pitt with pain in his eyes. "Even reckless. Took one risk too many. Decorated posthumously. Too bad... we can't afford to lose men like that."

"Reckless, you said?" Pitt questioned.

The officer's face tightened and something inside him closed. "Wrong word," he said tartly, and Pitt could not draw him to say anything further. He thanked him and left.

So of the four friends in Alexandria two were dead, one on the field of battle, one murdered, one was apparently missing, and the fourth was a priest in Seven Dials who had been stunned with horror at the mention of Martin Garvie's name.

He turned on his heel and walked straight to the curb, then out into the first couple of yards of the street, his arm waving to attract the next hansom that passed.

The Old Bailey was crowded with people, pressing forward, calling out to each other, complaining and jostling for a place. With difficulty, Pitt elbowed his way towards the front and finally was stopped by a constable who placed himself squarely in his path.

"Sorry, sir. Can't go in there. If you wanted a seat you should've come sooner. First come, first in, that's the rule. Fair enough?"

Pitt drew in his breath to argue, and realized it was pointless. He had no authority to show that would allow him preference. To the constable he would seem to be just another curious spectator, come to watch the fall of a powerful man and gaze at an exotic woman accused of murder. And there were certainly enough of them. He was pressed from behind, his feet trodden on, his back bumped and poked. The constable was keeping his temper with difficulty, his face overpink and gleaming with sweat.

"I'll wait out here," Pitt said.

"In't no use, sir. There isn't going to be no room in there today." The constable shook his head, indicating the courtroom.

"I need to speak to someone who is inside," Pitt replied.

The constable looked disbelieving, but he said nothing.

Pitt went past the court where Ryerson and Ayesha Zakhari were being tried, and stood impatiently in the hallway outside the next one along.

It was an hour before anyone emerged, and he had begun to wonder if he was wasting his time. Perhaps Narraway was not in there anyway. Yet the compulsion remained to wait until the adjournment and watch every person who emerged. Finally the doors opened and a small, thin man with brown hair came out. He looked left and right, then took a step forward. Pitt approached him. "Excuse me. You were in the Ryerson trial." It was more a statement than a question, but the words were out before he considered them.

"Yes," the man agreed. "But it's packed in there. You won't get in."

"What has happened so far?"

The man shrugged. "Only what you'd expect, a lot of police saying what they found. She did it, of course; the only mystery is how she thought she'd get away with it."

Pitt glanced around him at the people still waiting hopefully, as if there was yet some chance of drama in which they could share.

"It could bring the government down in time," the man said, as if in answer to the question Pitt had only thought. "Narrow majority-important minister mixed up with a woman like that. Trouble up Manchester way." He pulled his mouth into a slight sneer. "I thought it would have been more interesting. Defense lawyer's got nothing. I might come back tomorrow." And without waiting he pushed past and disappeared into the crowd.

Pitt moved closer to the door so he would have a better chance to see Narraway, if indeed he was inside.

As it was, he very nearly missed him and only caught up as Narraway moved across the hall towards the steps to leave. He looked at Pitt with momentary irritation, thinking he had been bumped into by a stranger, then he recognized him and his face sharpened with attention. "Well?" he demanded.

"What happened in there?" Pitt countered.

Narraway stopped and faced Pitt, his eyes wide. "You came here to ask me that?"

There was a dangerous edge to his voice, and Pitt saw the lines of strain etched deep into his face. He was holding control of himself with an effort. They had failed to help Ryerson, and again Pitt was reminded sharply that for some reason deeper than anything he understood, it mattered intensely to Narraway. Was it simply failure that hurt him, or was there a personal wound to do with events, feelings in the past of which Pitt was ignorant?

Narraway was waiting.

"I came to tell you that Arnold Yeats is dead," Pitt replied. "He was the fourth soldier of the group of Lovat's friends. Lovat was murdered, Garrick is missing, and Sandeman has become an obscure priest in the back alleys of Seven Dials."

Narraway stood quite stiff. "Indeed? And how do you know this?"

"I asked the War Office!" It was the obvious answer. Then he realized that Narraway was referring not to Yeats but to Garrick and Sandeman.

"Keep your wife out of it, Pitt," Narraway said in a low, careful voice, his face pinched. He ignored the flash of responding anger in Pitt's eyes. "She is the only one who has connected Lovat, Garrick, and Sandeman, so far as I know. And I still have no idea what we are dealing with." He reached out and took Pitt by the elbow, his fingers gripping hard, pulling him out of the melee towards a doorway to the side.

"It's going badly?" Pitt said. It was barely a question.

Narraway leaned against the door arch, but his body was rigid; there was no grace in it. He looked too tense to remain in any position long. "They are not here to see proof of guilt or innocence," he replied bitterly. "They take the guilt for granted, and I think the jury probably does as well. It is about whether the government can survive the scandal. It is the same instinct which makes people go stag hunting, or shooting wild animals-the spectacle of seeing something with more grace and power than themselves dragged down. They haven't the ability to create, only to destroy, and that is more intoxicating than nothing at all."

Pitt looked at the anger and helplessness in Narraway's face, and again was almost submerged in his emotion. "Are you saying it is political by accident or by design?" he asked.

Anger filled Narraway's eyes, then disappeared. "I don't know!" he said with a note of desperation.

"I don't believe Ayesha Zakhari is guilty of the stupid murder of a man she no longer knew or cared about," Pitt said miserably.

"And if her intention was to bring Ryerson down, in whatever way she could?" Narraway asked, his black eyes hard and angry.

"She came as an idealist, believing she could improve her country's economic independence," Pitt said with complete conviction. "That is not so unrealistic."

"I am as familiar with Egyptian economic history as you are!" Narraway snapped. "And it was the expansion under Said Pasha, then Khedive Ismail, and the return of American cotton after their civil war, which crippled them and forced Ismail to abdicate in '79 and opened the way for us to take the control we now have. If Ayesha Zakhari is as well-educated as you say, surely she must have known that even better than we do."

Pitt had no answer. They were caught in a morass of facts which made no coherent story, except one of impulse and stupidity, and that was not what he wanted to believe.

"You had better follow it," Narraway said quietly, already half turning away, almost as if he did not wish Pitt to see any hope in his face. "Be in my office at seven in the morning," he ordered. "Day after tomorrow." And he walked away, leaving Pitt alone.

Pitt learned all he could about Arnold Yeats, but it added nothing to his understanding of Lovat's death, or anything that had happened to him in Egypt, and there was no connection that he could see with Ayesha Zakhari. Nor was there anything in Morgan Sandeman's military record or his decision to leave the army and enter the priesthood which seemed to have any relevance. The only fact Pitt remarked with any interest was that the friendship which had been close in Alexandria appeared to have disappeared altogether after their return to Britain. But then, had they written to each other, he would not have known.

THE DAY THAT PITT left early to keep his appointment with Narraway, Charlotte also went out, but in the opposite direction. She did not tell Gracie where she was going, because she did not want to place her in the position of having to tell Pitt something less than the truth, should he return before she did.

She caught the omnibus to Oxford Street, and from there walked south as far as Dudley Street. She hesitated a moment, trying to remember exactly which way Sandeman had taken her. It was towards the circle of Seven Dials itself, but not all the way. She started off along Great White Lion Street, and turned left up the alley. It looked different in the morning light, somehow paler and bleaker, as if it were under a layer of dust.

It all seemed smaller.

How many steps had they taken? She had no idea. Anything she thought now seemed too far.

A man bent over with a misshapen body was moving towards her. There was no malice in his face, but something in his lurching gait frightened her. She made an instant decision and started away from him, towards the nearest doorway.

It proved to be a shop of some indeterminate sort. Piles of clothes lay on the floor, smelling stale and moldy. Several boxes perched awkwardly on each other.

"I'm sorry!" she said hastily and backed out, swinging around and almost bumping into a fat woman with a white face and eyebrows so sparse as to lend her expression a bald, surprised air. "I'm sorry," Charlotte repeated, and pushed past her and outside.

Now she had lost her bearings altogether. She turned all the way around, slowly, and tried another door. She was shivering, although it was not cold. Her hand was raised to knock, then she changed her mind and decided simply to open it. She realized the woman was watching her, standing so close now that if Charlotte were to step back she would bump her. She felt cut off.

She put her weight against the door and it swung open. Relief washed over her as she saw the vestibule and the long hallway beyond. Please heaven, Sandeman was there. If she was caught alone with the woman behind her, there was now no escape. That was ridiculous. The woman was probably coming for help, just as she was herself.

She went so rapidly across the stone floor to the next door she was almost running. She had closed the second door and was starting towards the big fireplace when Sandeman came out of the scullery, his face curious and welcoming, until he recognized her.

"Mrs. Pitt." He dried his hands on the rough cloth he was carrying. His skin looked red, as if the soap had burned him. "What can I do for you?" His voice had denial in it, and his face was already closed.

She had expected it, and tried to forewarn herself; even so, something inside her sank. She had intended to smile, but it died before it reached her lips. "Good morning, Mr. Sandeman," she replied quietly. "I have come back to you because circumstances have changed since we spoke before." She stopped. She knew he did not believe her. For Tilda's sake she was prepared to tell him more of the truth now, even to add a force to it she would not have before.

"Mine have not," he replied, meeting her eyes without flinching. She was struck again by the inner strength of him, as if within his mind there were an island of absolute knowledge untouched by the comings and goings of chance or other people's passions. "I am sorry," he added, to soften his refusal.

She continued only because it would be absurd to have come this far and then leave again without trying harder than this. "I did not expect you to have changed, Mr. Sandeman. But since I last saw you my husband has returned from Alexandria, and told me..." She stopped. The color had drained from his skin. When she glanced down at his hands, they were clenched so tightly on the rag he was holding that the folded edge of it threatened to leave marks on his flesh.

She seized the chance. "And told me a great many things he learned while he was there regarding Mr. Lovat's service in Egypt, and other things..." She did not wish to be specific, in case it allowed him to realize how very little she really knew. "Mr. Sandeman, I fear Martin Garvie's life is in danger. I had a very senior gentleman from Special Branch warn me that I was concerning myself with affairs of great danger and I should leave them be, but I cannot do that when I might have the key to saving someone. I fear they will allow Martin Garvie to be killed because he is of no importance to them."

Sandeman's eyes were enormous, as if staring at something that transfixed him. "Special Branch?" His lips seemed dry. "What have they to do with Martin Garvie?"

"You must be aware that Edwin Lovat has been murdered. It is in all the newspapers," she replied. "And that an Egyptian woman is on trial at the Old Bailey. Even here in Seven Dials the running patterers will be talking about it. It's a big scandal, because a major politician is involved. It could even bring the government down."

"Yes," Sandeman agreed quietly. "Of course I heard people talking about it. But it is another world from here. It's a story to us. Nothing more." He said it as if he were trying to believe it himself, pushing it away so it was not his responsibility.

Charlotte felt her brief advantage slipping out of her hands, and she did not know how to get it back. A tiny flutter of panic stirred inside her. She must try something or he would refuse her again and then it would be too late. She remembered what Pitt had said about the fourth friend. "Mr. Yeats is dead too, you know," she said abruptly.

He looked as if she had struck him. He opened his mouth and drew in his breath with difficulty. She knew she had told him something he had not known, and that it wounded him deeply. There would be time for her to be guilty about it later; now she must drag out of him whatever it was that Martin Garvie had confided in him. She was about to speak, and something in his face warned her to stop.

"How... how did he die?" he asked awkwardly. He was seeking information from her now, and he was aware of the irony of it.

"In battle," she replied. "In India somewhere. Apparently he was very brave... even reckless." She stopped, seeing the last trace of color bleach from his skin.

"Battle?" He clung to the word as if it was some kind of desperate hope. "You mean military action?"

"Yes."

He looked away.

"Please, Mr. Sandeman!" she said urgently. "My husband is clever and determined. I expect he will find out what it is you know, but it may be too late to help Martin Garvie-or Mr. Garrick, if they are together." She was not sure if that was wise, or if she had gone too far and betrayed her ignorance. She saw the indecision fighting in his face, and her heart knocked inside her in the tension as she waited.

His eyes flickered and he looked away from her, down at his hands. "I don't think there is much you can do to help," he said flatly, and there was terrible pain in his voice. "Even if I told you all that Martin said to me, I believe we are all too late."

The coldness in the room ate into her and she found she was shivering, her body tight. "You think that Martin has been murdered as well? Who next? You?" she challenged. "Are you just going to sit here and wait for whoever it is to come after you too?" Her voice was shaking with anger, and fear, and a sense that she was fighting alone, in spite of the fact that she was so close to him she could smell the carbolic in the soap he had used, even though his hands were dry. She jerked her arm out in an aimless sweep. "Don't you care enough about these people to want to save yourself? Who is going to look after them if you don't?"

He looked up at her. She had touched a nerve.

"It's your job!" she said wildly. It was not fair, and not really true. She knew nothing about him and had no business to make such a statement. If he had been angry with her she would not have blamed him.

"Martin had heard of me," he said very quietly, but as if deep in thought, not faltering as though he might stop. "I have befriended many soldiers who have fallen on hard times, drink too much because they have thoughts and memories they can't live with and can't forget. Or because they don't know how to fit back into the lives they had before they went to war." He drew in a long breath. "It may be only a few years for the people at home, whose lives are much the same every day, little dreams. For them the world stays the same."

She did not interrupt. It was irrelevant so far, but he was feeling his way toward something.

"It isn't like that in the army. It can be just a little while, but it is a lifetime," he continued.

Was he speaking about Egypt, about himself, and Stephen Garrick, and Lovat? Of all the lost and hopeless men he ministered to here in the alleys of Seven Dials?

"Martin tried to help Garrick." Sandeman stared at the floor, not meeting his eyes. "But he didn't know how to. Garrick's nightmares were getting worse, and more frequent. He drank to try and dull himself into insensibility, but it worked less and less all the time. He began to take opium as well. His health was deteriorating and he was losing control of himself." Sandeman's voice was sinking. She had to lean towards him to catch the words.

"He couldn't trust anyone," he went on. "Except Martin, because he was desperate. Martin thought perhaps I could help, if Garrick would come to me... or even if I went to him."

"Why didn't you go?" she asked, hearing the edge to her voice she had not meant to allow through.

He was too deep in his own thoughts to be stung.

"Just because he lives in Torrington Square instead of a doorway in Seven Dials doesn't mean he needs your help any less!" she accused him. "He was obviously in his own kind of hell."

He looked up at her, his eyes hollow. "Of course he was!" he grated. "But I can't help him. He doesn't want to hear the only thing I know how to say."

She did not understand. "If you can't help nightmares, then who can? Isn't that what you do for these men here? Why not for Stephen Garrick?"

He said nothing.

"What were his nightmares?" she prodded, knowing she was hurting him, but she could not stop now. "Did Martin tell you? Why couldn't you help him face them?"

"You say that as if it were easy." Anger lay just under the surface of his voice and in the stiff lines of his body. "You have no idea what you are talking about."

"Then tell me! From what you are saying, he is sinking into madness. What kind of a priest are you that you won't hold out a hand to him yourself, and you won't help me to?"

This time he looked up at her with rage and impotence naked in his face.

"What help have you for madness, Mrs. Pitt? Can you stop the dreams that come in the night, of blood and fire, of screaming that tears your mind to pieces and leaves the shards to cut you, even when you are awake?" His whole body was trembling. "What can you do about heat that scorches your skin, but when you open your eyes you're covered in sweat, and freezing? It is inside you, Mrs. Pitt! No one can help! Martin Garvie tried to, and it has sucked him into it. When he came to me, his fear was for Garrick, but it should have been for himself as well. Madness consumes not only those afflicted, but those who touch it as well."

"Are you saying Stephen Garrick is insane?" she demanded. "Why aren't his family treating him? Are they too ashamed of it to admit that is what is wrong with him?" It was beginning to make sense at last. Many people denied illness of the mind, as if it were a sin rather than a disease. Had it been cholera, or smallpox, no one would have hidden it. "Have they taken him to an institution?" She did not mean to have raised her voice, but it was out of control. "Is that it? But why Martin as well? Why couldn't he at least have written to his sister and told her where he was?"

His face was filled with pity so deep it seemed the pain of it wounded him as if he would carry it long after he had finished trying to make her understand it. "From Bedlam?" he said simply.

The word struck a shiver through her flesh. Everyone knew of the hospital for the insane that was like a house of hell. The name of it was an obscenity, an abbreviation of Bethlehem, the most holy town, the asylum of dreams, and this was the prison of nightmares where people were incarcerated in the torture of their own minds, screaming at the unseen.

She struggled for a moment to find her voice. "You let that happen to him?" she whispered. It was not intended as an accusation, at least not entirely. She had admired Sandeman; she had seen a compassion in him too deep to believe indifference in him now, for any reason. What she had seen was real, she had felt it in the dignity with which he had regarded the drunken man the day she had found him.

He looked at her with hurt for her judgment of him, and defiance. "How could I have prevented it? We each have to find our own salvation, Mrs. Pitt. I told Garrick what to do years ago, but I can't make him do it."

She was about to correct him, say that it was Martin Garvie she was thinking of, then she realized what he implied. "Are you saying that Stephen Garrick's madness is his own fault?" she asked incredulously.

"No..." He looked away, and for the first time she knew he was lying.

"Mr. Sandeman!" Then she was uncertain what she could add that would help.

He raised his head to meet her eyes. "Mrs. Pitt, I have told you more than I want to, just in case you can help Martin Garvie, who is a good man seeking to help someone in far deeper pain than he can understand-and he may suffer for it... terribly." There was a plea in his voice. "If you have the power to reach anyone who can get him freed, before it is too late... if... if that is where he is."

"I will!" she said with more passion than belief. "At least now I know something, somewhere to begin. Thank you, Mr. Sandeman." She hesitated. "I... I don't suppose you know anything about Mr. Lovat's death, do you?"

The ghost of a smile crossed his face. "No. If you ask me to guess, I should think it is exactly what it looks like-the Egyptian woman killed him, for whatever reason of her own. Perhaps it goes back to something between them in Alexandria. I thought at the time that he did her no injury, but perhaps I was mistaken."

"I see. Thank you."

This time he did not offer to walk with her as far as the street, and she left alone, determined to find Pitt as soon as possible and tell him where Martin Garvie was, and persuade him to get him freed, whatever it required to do it.

ALL AFTERNOON SHE BEGAN and half finished tasks in the house, stopping every time she heard a footfall, hoping it was Pitt returning, so she could tell him.

When he finally did come home, as usual he walked in his stocking feet down the passage to the kitchen, so she did not hear him until he spoke. She was so startled she dropped the potato she had in her hand, and spun around to face him still holding the peeling knife.

"I know what happened to Martin Garvie," she said. "At least I think I do... and to Stephen Garrick. Thomas, we have to do something about it. Immediately!"

His expression darkened. "How do you know? Where have you been? Did you go back to Sandeman?"

She lifted her chin a little. If they were going to have a disagreement about it, or worse, it would have to wait. "Of course I did. He is the only one who knows anything about it."

"Charlotte-" he began.

"He's in Bedlam!" she interrupted.

It had the effect she had intended. His eyes widened and some of the color drained from his face. "Are you certain?" he said quietly.

"No," she admitted. "But it fits all the facts that we have. Stephen Garrick suffered terrible nightmares, far worse than ordinary people's, and they went on even when he was waking, delusions of blood and fire and screaming. He had uncontrollable fits of temper and weeping." Her words fell over each other. "He drank too much to try to rid himself of whatever it is that tormented him, and he took opium. Martin Garvie knew all about it, because he was the only one who could help him. But he was losing control of the situation, and he went to Sandeman to ask his advice, but there was nothing Sandeman could do either. And it was shortly after that that Stephen Garrick, and Martin, left Torrington Square early in the morning, without proper luggage, yet did not leave London in any way that we can trace. And the carriage returned to Torrington Square within a few hours, so either they traveled on by public means or they did not go far."

He stood still, turning over in his mind what she had said. She saw the gravity in his face. If he was going to criticize her for going back to Seven Dials, it was going to be long after this was dealt with.

"Can we get him out?" she said quietly. "Martin, at least, doesn't belong there. I know he may have gone originally to help Garrick, but he wouldn't have done it willingly without letting Tilda know. That proves there is something badly wrong."

"Yes, it does," he agreed, but she could see he was still deep in thought. "But we must be careful. Someone had the authority to place Garrick there. That can only have been his father."

"For Stephen Garrick, yes, but he had no right to put Martin there!" she protested. "At least not morally. I suppose he's a servant, so legally-"

"Yes... I know that," he interrupted. "But we must be careful."

"Get Mr. Narraway to do it!" she said urgently. "At least to be there. You need Stephen Garrick because he was in Alexandria with Lovat, and now that Yeats is dead as well..." She trailed off. A hideous thought was filling her mind and she could see it in his eyes also. "Do you think that's why his father put him there?" she whispered. "To protect him? Is someone from Egypt after them all? Are his nightmares actually terror?"

"I don't know," he replied. "But it is possible..."

She heard the unhappiness in his voice. "You don't want it to be her-do you?" she said gently.

"No... no, I don't. But it looks more and more like it. I heard what happened in court today." His face filled with distaste. "I don't know if it is what Ryerson wants, but his defense is doing everything they can to blacken Lovat's name. I suppose it is to cause reasonable doubt that there could be many others who wanted to kill him. I can't see it doing much good. Ayesha Zakhari was at Eden Lodge. Surely anyone else who killed Lovat out of passion would hardly follow him around at three in the morning into someone else's garden."

She realized as he said it that he was admitting a kind of defeat. He had not wanted Ryerson or Ayesha to be guilty. He had performed every contortion of reason to argue another solution, and had at last run out of the power to delude himself any further.

"I'm sorry," she said gently, putting out her hand to touch him. "But let us at least save Martin Garvie?"

"Yes... yes, of course. I'll go and find Narraway now. Thank you for that." He smiled bleakly, taking her hand and holding it with exquisite gentleness. "I'll deal with the issue of your going back to Seven Dials later." And he kissed her very softly before he turned to leave.