Elsie unfroze the gargoyle with a few, whispered words. Jack didn't catch them. He usually had a good ear for languages, but this one was raspy and low and seemed to mainly take place at the back of the speaker's throat. 

Still, it had an amazing effect on the gargoyle. There was a sound of cracking stone. A few shards of granite clattered to the ground. And then it was alive again – the same sleek, grey, hateful shape that had pursued Ellini over the rooftops, its shoulders rising and falling with laboured breaths.

The creature's nostrils flared as it tried to get the measure of the situation, and then it sank – no, it cringed – into a bow at Elsie's feet. It could only have got lower if it had raked up handfuls of earth and dug a hole for itself – and it looked as though this was something the creature was longing to do.

Jack didn't pity it in the slightest, but neither could he spare the energy to hate it like he used to. All his hate – all his everything – was fixed on the owner of the fire-mines, that bowler-hatted bastard who had previously seemed so out-of-reach. The idea that he might be seconds away from learning his name, discovering his hiding-place, fixing his hands around the man's throat, was so beguiling that he hardly dared to breathe in case the opportunity took fright and ran away.

Elsie could sense it, in her innocent way. She was nervous. But she didn't understand hatred yet. And besides, she wanted to know the master's name herself, for the same reason she wanted to know everything: because ignorance upset her.

The gargoyle spoke a few words of the guttural demon language, without raising its snout from the ground, and Elsie translated:

"He says he's not fit to breathe the same air as us."

"Tell 'im he's right," said Jack.

"Um. I'll probably just get straight to the point," she said, with an uneasy smile.

She had no taste for vindictiveness. That was Danvers again. Jack wondered if Dr Faustus had influenced her personality three hundred years ago as much as Danvers was influencing it now.

"I'll ask him who his master was," she went on.

"Are you so sure he's not their master anymore?"

Elsie gave this due consideration. "I don't think they can have a master anymore, now that I'm awake. I'm their consciousness, if that makes sense. I don't rule them, I sort of... reflect them. Do you see?"

Jack didn't, but he was too impatient to say so. He waved his hand in the direction of the gargoyle, who had been snorting patiently behind her all this time.

"Ask him."

The strange hissing passed between them again, like venting steam, punctuated with the occasional English word – in the gargoyle's case, wrapped around an unwieldy tongue that might as well have been made of stone. Jack made out 'Lord' and 'smear', which didn't make a lot of sense until Elsie turned to him with inappropriate excitement and said:

"I was expecting some kind of sorcerer – you know, to be the head of an Order of mystics that employs demons. But he's a business tycoon. He inherited the fire-mines. They made him a peer of the realm for philanthropic donations."

These words passed through Jack's mind in a haze. He scanned them for the name of the hated man and, when he found that they didn't contain it, he set them aside.

"He's not even a new-breed," Elsie continued. "Just a human with inherited interests."

"What's his name?" said Jack, with an irritable swipe of his hand, as though he was trying to wave away the extraneous information.

"Terence, Lord Elsmere."

Jack reeled back from this extraordinary pronouncement. It explained the 'Lord' and the 'smear', but it made no other kind of sense. He went back to Elsie's previous words and tried to unpick them.

"An English Lord-?"

"A peer of the realm," she repeated. "He got his peerage in the New Year's Honours List, for building schools in Rhodesia."

"Schools?"

"I told you, he's a rich business tycoon. I just suppose nobody knows the real nature of his business."

Jack raised a hand. He wanted something to lean against for support, but there were no solid structures out here except bloody gargoyle statues. Stony or not, he didn't want to show weakness in front of them. 

"A man who trades in slaves was made a Lord for building schools?" he asked faintly. 

"Perhaps he did it to ease his conscience?" Elsie volunteered.

Jack stared at her. She was talking as though this was an interesting piece of gossip, rather than a vicious kick in the teeth. The man who had tortured Ellini – people thought he was a hero. He had a title, and probably an estate. He spent his days hunting grouse, sipping whisky and soda. Jack had never thought of himself as an Englishman, and had never expected much from the British Empire, but even so, old Blighty had let him down.

Elsie nudged him. His stunned silence must have been worrying her. "Is there anything else you'd like me to ask?" 

Hundreds of things, Jack thought. Thousands of things. His address, height, hair-colour, the names and proclivities of all his servants. But these would not be difficult to find out. Rich men didn't exactly hide in Jack's world. They had biographies, ancestral seats, liveried coaches. There were more important questions. 

"Tell me... tell me what Lord Elsmere fears." 

Elsie turned her head in his direction, but there were no frown-lines above her blindfold. She probably couldn't imagine why he wanted to know. Except there was no 'why' with her, was there? To her, curiosity was an end in itself. You started out ignorant, and you spent your life trying to amend the situation, by any means necessary.

She turned back to the gargoyle and spoke some more of those low, rattling syllables. 

The answer came out of the creature's mouth in a rush – so lengthy that Elsie had to translate the first part into English while he was still rasping.

"When Lord Elsmere was a child, his father brought him to inspect the fire-mines he was to inherit. He got separated from his escort and came across a slave-girl, naked and half-crazed. We don't know what was done to him, but he dreads it happening again. He dreads being at the mercy of filthy, naked women in the dark."

Jack's spine straightened. There was a tingling in the pit of his stomach. He had no trouble standing upright now. 

The gargoyle was still speaking, but Elsie had stopped trying to translate. Once again, something about Jack's silence seemed to be puzzling her. The frown-lines were back. Jack decided not to push his luck by asking for more information. 

"All right. Now tell me where to find him."

"Apparently, he lives at his club now," Elsie murmured, half-reluctantly. 

A club. It turned out to be the Athenaeum, one of the many palatial dens of privilege in Pall Mall. But a heavily fortified club – a club that could really revel in the double meaning of that word. There were no supernatural guards, but a whole host of human ones. Stocky valets with revolvers, liveried footmen with ceremonial weapons kept sharpened just in case. Storming it would require the kind of careful planning he really wasn't in the mood for, especially since he'd heard that Ellini's torturer had been rewarded with a peerage.

Some of the clubs in Pall Mall were little palaces, and the one frequented by Terence, Lord Elsmere was no exception. Jack heard about reading-rooms, coffee-rooms, card-rooms, smoking-rooms, gas chandeliers and luxurious ottomans, mosaic floors, doors covered with cloth to mask the noise of their opening and closing. That last bit was the only part he liked. He imagined dragging the bastard from room to luxurious room, the soft furnishings drinking up the sound of his screams.

And, quite apart from the fortifications, there were the consequences of breaking into a place where some of the most exalted men in England hung their hats.

"Breaking into the Athenaeum and killing one of its members," said Brandt, "would bring the full weight of the law down on you. Not just you. On this place. On the girls. We'd have regiments outside the gates."

Jack hadn't been able to avoid consulting Brandt – although he wished, now, that he had. Brandt knew London and, most of all, he knew the establishment. It was his nemesis far more than it was Jack's. It wanted to persecute him just because he existed.

He had also called in Danvers and Shikari. In the end, the conference in Jack's ivy-shrouded office was inappropriately male when you considered who the master had tormented. He ought to be throttled by hands with black ribbons wrapped around them. He ought to have his eyes scratched out by Charlotte Greys – a process which would be made all the more messy and painful by the fact that they didn't have any fingernails with which to scratch.

But Jack hadn't even let Elsie in. He had shut the door in her face. And when she had assumed – because she was Elsie – that he'd made a mistake, or the wind had blown the door closed for him, he had ignored her knockings, and gone on outlining the situation to the men in the room, until Brandt held up his pencil and said:

"Sorry, does anyone else think this is rude?"

He looked at Danvers, who squirmed but said nothing, to Jack's immense – and slightly guilty – satisfaction. Where's all your outraged indignation now? he thought. Being in love changes everything, doesn't it?

From the other side of the door, an aggrieved voice said, "Wait a minute, you can't just use me to gather information and then exclude me from the plan! There wouldn't be a plan if it wasn't for me!"

Jack turned on his heel and wrenched the door open, giving her a smile of pure sunshine. "Well, you're learning lots of new things today, Elsie," he said. "This is called injustice. You might want to get used to it."

He closed the door. Again, Danvers squirmed. Again, he did nothing.

Jack knew what it would look like. The word would get around – especially with Elsie outside the door, feeling hard-done-by. His girls would think he didn't trust them. And he didn't trust them. How could you love Ellini and still trust women to look after themselves? He was guilty of everything they'd be accusing him of. He did think they were too precious to risk. He did think they needed to be treated with kid gloves.

But he hadn't forgotten what the gargoyle had said about Lord Elsmere's fears. He would keep his girls out of the messy process of breaking and entering, but somehow, he would get them into that club, and let them deliver the final blow. 

Jack was well aware that he would have to choose the right girls for this mission – the angriest ones, the ones most in need of closure. Gouging someone's eyes out would give most people nightmares, but these girls already had nightmares. They were nightmares. They ate and breathed nightmares.

"Raiding the Athenaeum would be a national scandal," said Brandt, bringing him back to the here-and-now with a bump.

"Fine," said Jack, through clenched teeth. "We won't raid it. We'll be covert."

"Covert? How can you be covert? He'll be at the centre of a room filled with the most important men in England – country squires and retired Generals who'd think nothing of joining in the fight if one of their fellow members was threatened! You can't get to him, except over their dead bodies. It wouldn't matter, even if you managed to get him without violence – even if you bribed one of the servants to put cyanide in his cognac or something. Violating that place would be a national scandal. A peer of the realm killed in his own club – that's more sacred to the English than their children's bedrooms! It would get back to you. And not just you. The girls wouldn't be able to escape punishment. Hanging or imprisonment at worst, exile or loss of position at best. He knows you're after him, and he's got a better bodyguard than a horde of unkillable demons. He's got England."

"There has to be a way in," said Jack. Nausea and desperation were pounding in his ears now. He hated respectable Englishmen. He hated social niceties. The idea that these things were shielding the man he hated more than any other – more than Robin. The idea that he just had to leave it at that...

And Brandt was, as usual, taking an age to answer him. This was almost the worst moment of his life.

"If you could wait a week or so..."

"Absolutely not," said Jack, raising his voice above the nausea. "The French girl's coming."

Brandt and Danvers shared a glance. They both had pretty much the same expression, but on the face of Brandt, it was fringed with annoyance.

"Well, there's only one way in," he said, giving Jack a long, cool look which failed to cool anything. "You'd have to be invited. A club's guests are as sacred as its members. Get invited, and the scandal would be an internal thing, not a matter for the law courts. They probably wouldn't even admit Lord Elsmere had been killed on the premises."

Jack bit back the abuse he was longing to hurl in Brandt's direction. "Who would invite me?"

"Well, if I've understood the situation correctly, I believe he would, if he thought you had the right information."

It was a moment before Jack understood what he was talking about. And then the whole proposition unfolded before his eyes like some hideous scroll.

"You want me to pretend Ellini's alive and I know where she is," he said, in a tone of dreamy horror. "You want me to negotiate with him – talk to him..."

"You would have had to talk to him anyway," Brandt pointed out. "Or were you just going to cut his head off without any preamble?"

"No, there was going to be preamble, just not the verbal kind."

"I suggest you propose a deal," said Brandt, raising his voice as if to drown out everything Jack's words had suggested to his imagination. "Your information in exchange for the captured slave-girls. Insist that I visit first to make sure they're still alive, and I can tell you the layout of the rooms used by his Lordship-"

"Don't call him his Lordship!"

"Is that any worse than 'the master'?" said Brandt. He'd been in a bad mood ever since the mention of the French girl.

Jack sighed. "How long is this going to take?"

"Well, you say he's obsessed with her. I imagine he'll be eager to hear news of her whereabouts. Call it a day or two?"

"But the French girl's coming," said Jack, almost plaintively.

"She comes for us all, Jack. In a manner of speaking."

***

It was agony to wait. It was torment to plan. It was excruciating to get on with other things. But he did it anyway, for the sake of his girls. One of the most important things that had to be dealt with was the queue of people stretching down Headington Hill, waiting to see Elsie.

Most of them just wanted to touch her. Jack permitted this from fingertips to elbow but, if they started to get creative, he drew out his revolver. She didn't understand, of course. She would have given herself up to every greedy, greasy palm just to learn something. He didn't envy Danvers – although technically it would have been just as easy for Danvers to touch her. The impediments were all in his head.

In the back of Jack's mind – the tiny corner not currently taken up with revenge fantasies – he was worried about the queue of people. Elsie wasn't equipped to be a goddess or a religious spokesperson. She had the look all right – the blindfold stretched over eyeless eyes – but in a smiling face, fringed with marmalade hair, it couldn't do much.

Besides, she didn't know anything. She couldn't remember her old life with Faustus. All she ever did was ask questions, and religious figures were supposed to provide answers. 

But it was her warm, inquisitive nature that captivated them in the end.

He should have guessed it really. New-breeds were... well, they were unwanted children. A whole race of unwanted children. Their fathers, the demons, had disappeared hundreds of years ago. They wanted to know who they were – and so, of course, did Elsie. They recognized a kindred spirit in her curiosity. 

But beyond all this, they wanted some affection. They wanted someone to be interested in them. Elsie walked her fingers over them as soon as they entered the room, in order to see what shape they were. She exclaimed in wonder – rather than disgust – if she encountered something like horns, or scales, or cloven hooves. And she wanted to know their entire life story. People came out of their interview with her feeling as though they'd had their questions answered even though they'd been the ones doing all the talking.

Jack only remembered the first visitor. His mind had been preoccupied with dreams of smashing crystal decanters over the master's head, but he remembered the first woman. She was Romanian – thin as a peg-doll, but bulked out with many layers of jackets and petticoats. She was wearing a headscarf, and Elsie's fingers immediately went to it, tracing its outline and admiring its texture.

"What do you call this, if you please, madam?" she asked – very politely, because Danvers had described the length of the queue.

"A stergar, little mother," said the old woman.

"To keep your head warm?"

The old woman explained quite willingly. As a foreigner, she had probably been asked this question many times before.

"It means I am married, little mother. Married women cover their heads. For modesty."

Elsie touched her loose marmalade locks nervously. "It's immodest to show your hair?"

The old woman leaned down and whispered, "It gives men sinful thoughts."

Elsie laughed delightedly. "How kind of you to think of them!"

That was her all over, Jack thought. She didn't mind what people believed as long as she could see the logic behind it. Everyone was all right by her, as long as they explained.

The old woman herself had only asked three questions – three questions which would be echoed by almost everyone who trooped in through the Academy's gates that morning.

"How did you come back to life?"

"I don't know," said Elsie, with an easy shrug, as though she didn't consider it very important.

The old woman appeared to accept this. "Did you intend the new-breed race to be created?" she went on.

Elsie didn't have to think about this either. "No."

"Do you love us?"

Elsie's face broke into a smile. She looked as though she hadn't known the answer to the question until that moment, but now she knew it with all her heart. "Yes," she said.

Jack would have found it lovely if he'd had any mental room to spare. But, as every one of them came in, as they bowed or kissed the hem of Elsie's skirts, he stood in the corner and thought about what he would do to Lord Elsmere.

He had thought about this a lot, even before he'd known the bastard's name. It was a safe, satisfying place for his attention to wander – and, heavens knew, he didn't have very many of those. 

He was excited. He had the kind of butterflies in his stomach that he usually felt when sunset crept up on him unexpectedly, and he realized he would have a chance – just the smallest glimmer of a chance – to see Ellini in the Indian room.

And, when the last of Elsie's visitors had been safely escorted off the premises, and sunset really did creep up on him, he didn't go to bed. He leaned against the doorframe and looked at the bed for what must have been a full half hour, but he didn't want his rage to be diluted by a sight of Ellini, even though it was unlikely he would see her at all. It had been weeks since she'd last come. He was starting to wonder whether he would see her again before the French girl caught up with him.

***

Brandt came back the next day, his brows knitted together with worry. He had obviously just come from the Athenaeum, because he was wearing his best suit and ascot tie. It was a mystery to Jack why Brandt didn't treat respectable society with the same contempt with which it treated him, but then Brandt was a mystery anyway.

"He only let me see two of the girls," said Brandt, laying his briefcase down on Jack's desk. "It looks as though they've been treated well, for prisoners. Caviar and claret is probably the humblest fare the club's kitchens can afford, so there's still some flesh on them, and no noticeable bruises-" He saw Jack wincing, and stopped. "Sorry, but I thought-"

"I want to know," said Jack. "Don't spare me. Don't soften it either, if he's hurt them."

"It's possible he has, but not physically. He's too afraid of Charlotte Grey. He thinks she's watching all the time. When I told him you had information about her whereabouts, he said 'you mean her everywhereabouts'."

"Poetic little fucker," said Jack, resisting the urge to kick furniture across the room.

"The prisoner I didn't get to see-"

"Let me guess," said Jack, motioning him into an un-kicked chair. "Anna Kitty Curlew."

Anna Kitty Curlew had been stolen away from her family and brought to the fire-mines when she was twelve. It had made an impression on her, and not just the ordinary scars-and-nightmares kind. She had grown up since, of course, but only physically. She still chewed her hair and held her breath until she was purple in the face if she didn't get her way.

She had white-blonde hair just like the other girls – an abundance of curls piled up on her head like a mound of whipped cream. Where she was different from the other girls was in her belief that they had all deserved what they'd got. She thought women were corrupt and lustful. She had crushes on the gargoyles. She'd volunteered to be Charlotte Grey almost as often as Ellini, just so she could feel the cleansing lash of their whips.

In a way that was difficult to pin down, Jack was afraid of her. The pink cheeks and girlish mannerisms – the ribbons she wore in her hair – they were an echo of Myrrha. The mania for suffering was an echo of Ellini. She was impossible to control, and yet he couldn't hurt her. If he hurt her, he would have failed his girls. He would have failed Ellini, even though he had obviously – unmendably – failed Ellini already.

Brandt had been watching him closely while this horrible train of thought chugged through his mind. Eventually, he cleared his throat, and said, "You're thinking Anna wanted to be taken?"

Jack shook his head. "It doesn't matter. I'm still going to get her back."

"Even if she doesn't want to go?"

"She's not right in the head! She can't be trusted to want anything."

"I'm fairly sure that's what Lord Elsmere would say."

"Oh, did I say I was different from him?" Jack demanded, placing a hand on his chest as though protesting his innocence, even though he was actually doing the opposite. "I'm not different from him. The only difference is, I'm going to win."