They say it’s a family photo so Newton has to be included, even though he isn’t in costume and everyone has been merely polite to him all evening. He looks across at Maude, who has been jollied into a kind of feathered head-dress. She is in the same trouble he is, he thinks, cast out onto one end of the family group, while he has been cast out on the other. The middle is taken up by the young, the rich, the amusing and the important. Some of his cousins are all four at once. Liv is right in the centre, of course, newly-wed but still flirtatious. She flicks her legs up onto the couch, making room for Laurie to lie down on the floor beneath her. Laurie isn’t family, but he is always there and, as Newton knows Liv would say, ‘three hundred times more interesting than Newton’. He doesn’t think Laurie is at all interesting but he’s certain the feeling is mutual.

Philip has squeezed in behind Maude and is leaning over the back of the couch and over Liv to pull on Laurie’s collar, saying something about straightening up. Newton watches as Maude has little option but to shuffle a little more to the left. Liv shrieks with laughter at something Laurie has said and looks over her shoulder at Maude, saying ‘It’s so delicious, isn’t it?’ Maude’s face brightens with her best smile as she agrees. Only Newton is still looking when her face falls again, revealing how tired she really is. She glances over at him, and his heart booms as their eyes meet. There is a second when he thinks that any artifice is gone between them, that they are locked in a look that says they know exactly how the world works and what it thinks of them, but they are still worth something. But then she gives a little shrug and a tiny smile and she looks to the camera, playing her part in the family gathering as she always has.

In the great green room there was a couch and a small table and a lamp and a very expensive ergonomic chair, the kind that is supposed to make you grow taller by three inches when you sit in it. Or something. Maybe not exactly that. I’d been going to the green room for almost three months, twice a week. It was a dark mossy green, which I supposed was in the calming section of the colour chart, far away from the angry, knife wielding reds and eye burning sun yellows. I lay on the couch (it’s very traditional) and Dr Coffin (yes! His real name!) sat in the chair. Sometimes I lay there just looking at the quality of the decorating, you know, where the green walls met the off white cornice. Very straight lines. Mesmerising. I could get caught up for endless minutes thinking about the man (most likely a man) with his steady hand and paint kettle, up a ladder, or maybe on stilts, or on a movable scaffolding rig, taking pains to get the line just right. Dr Coffin was a patient man. Though he was paid at the end of the hour regardless so I guess it might have been as much smugness as patience. I besmirch him. Unfairly. He really wanted to help.

(Inspired by a phrase in a column in Time Out, with thanks to Goodnight Moon.)

Newton Branch took a sip of his tea and place the cup carefully back on the table. He was alone in the parlour, and had been ever since his arrival twenty minutes earlier, though some unseen hand directed a tea tray be brought to him. The girl who brought it was new, held upright by the crispness of her uniform, her neck shrinking away from the stiff collar, and when she set down the cup and saucer there was a noticeable rattle. Newton had smiled at her to say thank you, but he had forgotten he was in England, and the terrified girl had simply lowered her head even further.

He was chasing a hat box all over London, and he had come to a standstill. Perhaps the hat box knew it was being chased and was deliberately hiding. He drummed his long fingers on his thigh, and considered getting out his book, but uncertainty of the reaction of the host kept his hand away from his jacket pocket. Laurie wouldn’t worry, of course. He’d just do it and fling the darn thing over his shoulder when the hat box finally showed itself.

Newton tried to remind himself that the person and the hat box were separate things.

His thoughts tripped back to Laurie, and to the ever following Philip. They had what his Grandmama would call swagger. They behaved as if they owned every room they walked into, though perhaps that was true often enough to warrant it. Newton shrank into the walls of any room that tried to hold him, his efforts at joining the conversation always too quiet or too loud. It was incredible that they were at all related. Not for the first time, Newton considered the possibility of being a changeling, swapped in a moment of hospital madness by a Nurse out of her head on laudanum.

As his confidence in himself once more plummeted, the door opened and the hat box came in.

“Maude,” he said, standing up, feeling a moment’s relief that he did so without tangling his limbs.

“Oh sit down, dear Newton. Liv will be down to see you in a minute. I just delivered her new hat and she’s preening. Is that tea?”

Newton’s mouth flapped. They always assumed he was here for his cousin, trying to preserve the familial bond in his fathers stead.

Maude sat down in the chair opposite his, and rattled the tea pot lid. “Yes, I do believe it’s tea, and hot too.” She smiled up at him. “Well, come, sit down, and tell me all about the museum.”

Newton obeyed, unable to stop himself.

There was no room for being tired. Hilary ran down the stairs into the cellar, grabbed the torch from the top of the dryer. No need for the main light. At the back of the cellar she ran a hand over the makeshift top they’d put on the old kitchen units, units that David thought only concealed half used tins of paint and a tub of random nails. She pulled the long screwdriver from the cupboard and set to pulling the kickboard off from under the cupboards. David had never even noticed it appear. Why should he? One last wrench and it came off. So easy. How simple it would have been for anyone to do it.

She dragged the bag from under the cupboard, strangely surprised to see that it looked the same as the day she had shoved it under there. The top was dusty, and she hesitated, looked back up the stairs to the cellar door, and then pulled the zip. It was all still there. £38,539 in cash, one handgun and Victor’s finger, vacuum sealed in a jar.

From their spot on the hillside they had a perfect view of the city walls. There was one gate to the north and another to the east. The south and west were on the coast, impenetrable aside from the small port, which was, of course, fiercely guarded.

“How are we going to get in?” Jen asked.

Evelyn hunkered down, ran her tongue around her teeth. “I don’t know yet. How did you get out?”

“I hid in a group of field women.”

“Do you know which gate you took?”

“The north, I think.”

“And they go back the same way?”

Jen looked across at Evelyn. “Yes. Every night. Surely…You’re too tall. And your coat, they’ll recognise the coat.”

“Not if it’s in a bag, stuffed with straw.”

“We haven’t got a bag. Or any straw.”

Evelyn stood up. “I do not know why the Gwithon thinks you and your brother are worth all this trouble, Jen, but heavens help me, if you do not try to keep your mouth shut at least some of the time you will never make it to her table. We will make or find a bag. We will find straw, or corn, or lavender. We will find a muddy field and we will make our hands and faces dirty, as if we toiled all day. We will find a group of field women heading home for the night and we will join them, making conversation as we walk, and we will pass through the gate. Do you have any other objections?” Evelyn began to walk down the hill, her long coat flapping. “Come on Jen. Every tick tock of the clock…”

“Your bow! Our things!” Jen called out after her.

Evelyn waved a hand in the air and kept walking. “Belton will take care of them.”

Jen looked at the dog. “I don’t know how you put up with her.”