From that moment on, Danvers never entertained another suspicion that Miss Cricket was going to attack him. He couldn't believe the thought had ever crossed his mind. In fact, he was beginning to suspect that they were both just what the other one needed. She had so many questions that she wanted answered, and he needed to be constantly talking to drive the memory of Miss Syal from his mind.

When she was strong enough to venture out of bed, Danvers wrapped her in his dressing-gown and led her to the sink to wash her face. She giggled when she felt the trickle of water over her hands, and tried to investigate where it had come from. She found the tap and poked her finger into it, causing the water to spray out on either side and splash her in the face.

Danvers gently removed her finger – even though she was still laughing – and placed it on the handle of the tap, showing her how to turn it off and on again.

"Where does it come from?" said Eve, when she had stopped and re-started the flow of water a few more times.

"There's a tank at the top of the house. It flows down here through a series of pipes."

"And where does it go?"

"Well, it flows through this drain," he said, guiding her hand to the plug-hole, "into a waste pipe. And, from there, it flows into the sewers, which are sort of underground rivers beneath the city."

"And where do they go?"

Danvers hesitated, realizing for the first time that he didn't know. Did they join up with the normal, overground rivers and flow into the sea? That seemed dreadfully unhygienic. No-one would ever go sea-bathing, surely, if there was sewer-water in the ocean?

He had to answer her, but he couldn't just guess. He didn't know why, but it seemed vitally important that he give her accurate information. It would be a poor reward for all that joyful curiosity if he just fobbed her off with the first answer that came into his head.

"I'll find out," he said, passing her a towel to dry her hands. She was entranced by the rough texture. 

After that, he became addicted to astonishing her. He searched for new things that would delight and amaze her. She was the perfect antidote, not just to his grief, but to his creeping certainty that the world was full of cruel, sordid people who would enslave young women in underground mines.

She walked her curious fingers over everything, even – to Danvers' acute embarrassment – his face and shoulders. The first time this happened, he had cleared his throat and gently removed her hands when they started to slide down his chest.

And then he had been extremely annoyed with himself for doing so, because she hadn't been conscious of any impropriety. She had just been trying to understand what shape he was, with all the joyful curiosity of a child. What would it matter if strangers misconstrued it? Why should she have to curb her exuberance for people who didn't know or understand her?

But she learned very quickly, because, to his vague annoyance, she hadn't tried to put her hands on him again.

She needed clothes – and perhaps some form of disguise – so he went out to the covered market, as soon as he could make her understand how vital it was for her to remain hidden. Once there, he went to Mrs Corder's second-hand clothing stall, and blushed and fumbled his way through the purchase of corset, drawers, gown and petticoat. He deflected any questions by saying that these items were for his sister, who was visiting from Winchester, but had left her luggage on the train. It was disturbing how quickly the lie came to him.

Still, nobody doubted him. They were too busy gossiping about last night's murders and the sudden disappearance of Eve. Apparently, Jack Cade was wanted by the police in connection with one or both of these crimes. Popular imagination favoured him as the murderer, at any rate, because it was well-known that he'd been engaged to the unfortunate young lady who'd been found dead on the steps of the Turl Street Music Rooms.

Mrs Corder said she was taking her baby to work with her every day now, in case he got hold of it and threw it on the fire. Danvers couldn't, in all good conscience, feel happy for the baby, because it had been crying for the past ten minutes, and its mother hadn't so much as glanced at it.

She also told Danvers – with a glee that she assumed he would share – that his former employers, Dr Petrescu and Mrs Darwin, had been taken into police custody that morning.

"For their own protection, apparently. They say Jack Cade's hunting 'em down. I bet you're glad you got out of that place when you did!"

Danvers thanked her and made his way out of the covered market, resisting the urge to glance over his shoulder and scan the crowd for Jack. Dr Petrescu's warning was starting to make a shaky kind of sense.

If Jack had kissed Miss Syal at any point before she died – or maybe she had kissed him, to teach him a lesson – well, then he would be suffering as he deserved, but he would also be angry. Perhaps angry enough to come after Mrs Darwin and Dr Petrescu, for their part in making him forget.

But he didn't know – yet – how angry he should be with Danvers. He didn't know that his salvation had been in Danvers' hands, that it would have taken five minutes for him to break the spell, but that he had, in a fit of anger, thrown Jack's last chance on the fire.

Danvers was about to turn the corner, when he suddenly stopped and hurried back to Mrs Corder's stall.

"Did I forget your change?" she asked, patting her pockets in an absent-minded way. The baby was still crying.

"No – thank you, Mrs Corder," he said, colouring at the indelicacy of the question he was about to ask. "I just – do you happen to know where the water from the sewers goes? I mean, does it flow back into the rivers, or-?"

To his combined relief and embarrassment, Mrs Corder laughed. "Doesn't it just sit there?"

"I don't think so," said Danvers uncertainly.

"Well, to my mind, Mr Danvers, it's not the business of simple folk like us. Let the University men worry about it, that's my advice to you. Worrying's their privilege and their curse."

He stopped at an Apothecary's on Catte Street and bought some henna powder – a very popular cosmetic with the fashionable young ladies of the city, who used it to dye their hair a deep, hell-fire red.

The Apothecary was much more knowledgeable about the sewer-system, and not at all averse to talking about it. He told Danvers that the sewer-water went to a pumping-station at Littlemore, where it was raised onto a 370-acre sewage farm – a patchwork of agricultural land that had been irrigated specifically to be fertilized by the sewage.

Danvers couldn't believe how happy this knowledge made him. It meant not only that he would be able to answer Miss Cricket's questions properly, but that the world of violent, horrible, sordid men had actually put some thought into something.

He was almost skipping on his way home through Christchurch meadow. Even the sight of the shattered glass case where Miss Cricket had stood, embalmed and snarling, for three hundred years, couldn't take the spring out of his steps.

He slowed his pace when he came to the dead trees that flanked the glass coffin on either side. Yesterday's prayer-leaves had been torn down and were littering the meadow as if autumn had come early, but a new crop had sprouted in their place, and these were surprisingly unified in sentiment. They said:

Little mother, please come back.

The only variations on this theme were the ones that said:

Little mother, please punish the men who took you.

Little mother, please grant us vengeance.

And, rather ominously:

Little mother, grant us strength.

Danvers wondered what would happen if the city's new-breeds were to discover their little mother in his apartments, wearing his dressing-gown and nothing else.

Worse still, they were so desperate for her return that, if they found out she was alive, he wasn't entirely sure they wouldn't kill her, embalm her, and throw her back in the glass case simply to have things return to normal again.

It was a sobering thought, and it slowed his footsteps on the way back to his rooms in St. Aldates. But once he was home, there were more crucial things to worry about – such as how he could dress her in her new corset and drawers without looking at her naked body. And how in the world you were supposed to lace up a corset anyway. They were certainly more problematic than shoe-laces.

He did a clumsy job, squinting guiltily through half-closed eyes, but it didn't diminish her exuberance. Perhaps she had sensed his nervousness, because she giggled unstoppably the whole time, asking him what corsets were made of – whether they were like armour and were unpiercable by arrows.

"Well, why not make them into armour?" she said, as he tugged half-heartedly at her laces. "If you're going to squeeze your womenfolk into these restrictive tubes anyway, why not make them arrow-proof?"

"Because nobody should be firing arrows at respectable ladies!" Danvers protested.

"Ah, so they are armour," said Eve triumphantly. "Wearing a corset identifies you as a respectable lady, so no-one shoots an arrow at you."

"Um," said Danvers, thinking of the horrible stories you often read about the things done to missionaries' wives in Africa or India. "That's not quite right..."

"Well, it should be one or the other," said Miss Cricket, with a sniff. "How are women to protect themselves otherwise? From what you tell me, they're rather vulnerable."

Danvers seized on this gratefully as one of the few questions he didn't have to answer. Instead, he explained about the sewer-system, which made her giggle even more, because she could see he was at pains to phrase everything delicately. Really, if she hadn't been so adorable, he might almost have called her cruel.

When he had finished dressing her, he made her lean over the sink and used the henna powder to dye her hair. He watched the water run over the nape of her neck and talked – in vague terms – about the necessity for concealment.

"We'll say you're my sister, visiting from Winchester. You'll need a name."

"I've already got a name," she said, spluttering as the water ran into her mouth.

"Little Cricket is not a Christian name," said Danvers primly.

"Can a demon be a Christian?"

"I don't see why not. Some of the Djinn in the Arabian Nights are Mahomedans. In any case, a name like Little Cricket would arouse suspicion."

"But I like it."

"Well, we don't have to lose it entirely," said Danvers. He thought for a moment, watching the henna-brown water run off her hair and down the plug-hole – and from there, into the sewers, and then a pumping-station, and then a sewage-farm, as he now knew.

"Perhaps we can keep the initials," he suggested. "You could be Lillian Claire, or Lucy Catherine – L.C., you see." He stopped, and then smiled. "Come to think of it, L.C. is a Christian name on its own. What do you say to Elsie Danvers?"

Miss Cricket repeated it a few times, in between splutters. It seemed to meet with her approval.

Oddly enough, they didn't talk about the danger, or whether or not she was staying with him. It was obvious to them both that she had nowhere else to go, but there was also another factor – equally obvious, but harder to articulate. She was in danger. Or she was a danger. She was afraid of something. Or she was afraid of herself.

And this fear was visible even in the excess of her joy. The more fascinating things she discovered – the more she giggled and gasped – the more perilous everything seemed, to both of them.

Danvers wondered whether this was because he was getting attached to her, and his new-found bitterness was warning him how badly it could end if he allowed himself to care for someone again.

***

It took a few hours, and it ruined all his towels, but Elsie Danvers was eventually standing before him – with hair of a deep marmalade colour, a corset that had been tied much too loosely, and a gown that was quite respectable, if a little out of date.

By that time, it was dark. You couldn't see the lights on her skin very well in the day-time but, at night, they really came alive. It reminded Danvers of his first trip to the Planetarium in London – how he had stared up at the glowing constellations mapped onto the ceiling, and wondered how the universe could be so vast, and he so tiny.

Except that Elsie's constellations moved. They wandered about of their own volition, sometimes surfacing like a blush on her cheeks, or glittering on her earlobes like diamonds. They broke apart and then re-formed in different patterns, without much sense of order, but with an unerring sense of the spectacular.

It was partly this – the feeling that she was a helpless little girl and an awe-inspiring goddess at the same time – which made Danvers so insistent about the sleeping-arrangements. She pointed out that the bed was quite big enough for both of them to sleep side-by-side, but Danvers could only say that this would be 'unseemly'.

Elsie appeared to struggle with the word. She repeated it a few times, and looked as though she was tempted to start giggling again. Instead, she said, "But there's no-one here to see how it would seem. There's nobody to be seemed at. You and I don't have to worry about how it seems, because we know how it is."

Danvers said nothing. He did indeed know how it was. He knew how it was a great deal better than she did. He knew that he was a man, and, however tenderly he might feel towards her, however keenly he felt his responsibility for her, his flesh was crying out for her, and it mustn't – it mustn't – be allowed to get its way. This was one of the reasons why he couldn't whole-heartedly condemn Jack. And why he became very depressed whenever he thought about Carver and the gargoyles in the fire-mines. He knew that they were all part of the same woeful fraternity.