In the cab, Robin was as restless and excitable as a child on his way to the Zoological Gardens. He kept loading and unloading his revolver, shuffling his feet and leaning out of the window.

Ellini kept her eyes on the rain-washed streets and said nothing. His behaviour reminded her of Jack, which was both soothing and aggravating at the same time.

"Well?" he said at last, when it seemed he couldn't bear the silence any longer. "Are you going to make him remember?"

"I've told you, I'd need the blood of the conjuror."

"I think she's the conjuror. The more I look at her, the more she seems like one of Myrrha's pupils. It's the sprightliness, I think. And the slightly disconnected look of someone who doesn't believe other people can feel pain."

"Yes, I suppose you're familiar with that look from the mirror," said Ellini.

Robin grinned. The more she seemed to hate him, the more he seemed to like it, as if he only wanted a hold on her, and didn't care whether it was good or bad.

Still, the grin faded quickly, and he reached a hand inside his shirt – apparently without thinking – to trace the scars that represented each of his past victims. 

"You don't see it?" he mumbled. "I suppose you wouldn't. You've never had to dread all those characteristics rolled into one woman. I'd be very surprised if she wasn't one of Myrrha's girls. And if she is, we'd only have to scratch her to bring Mr Whittaker's memories back." He licked his lips. "Assuming that's what you want to do?"

"I don't know," said Ellini truthfully. "I don't think he's had his ability to care taken away. He felt very sorry for the drowned girl. But he still knows something's missing, and craves distractions to fill the gap. If we leave him like this, he might spend the rest of his life chasing after champagne and women."

"And what a terrible existence that would be."

She ignored him, still keeping her eyes on the wet pavement. "I'll decide when we get there."

Robin said nothing. They both knew she was stalling, desperately putting off the moment when she would have to choose.

Her instinct was that the truth was the truth. The drowned girl had to be remembered, had to be vindicated, even if it caused the living a world of pain. But she was afraid. It wasn't like with Jack. She couldn't just punch his lights out and run away. She would have to watch the realization dawning in his eyes. And, worse still, she might enjoy it.

The cab soon clattered into the leafy suburb of St John's Wood, which was famously an area where rich men housed their mistresses and illegitimate children. All the foliage might have been there to mask unsavoury goings-on, but Ellini still thought it rather pretty. The leaves were rain-soaked and sparkling with moonlight.

Their cabman – who had clearly followed other cabs before – pulled the horses to a halt a little way down the road from the house at which Isabella and Mr Whittaker got out. It was a pretty villa of white stucco, with ivy twisting over it like the black ribbons on the arms of a Charlotte Grey.

She and Robin walked slowly towards the villa, Robin occasionally placing a hand on her shoulder to make her walk slower still.

"The problem is," he explained, "I'm not sure whether she's planning to kill him before or afterwards. If it's afterwards, he won't thank us for interfering even if it saves his life."

Ellini made a face. "You don't paint a very flattering portrait of your sex."

"Have you ever seen or heard anything of men which would lead you to suppose that I'm wrong?"

"John Danvers," she said, but didn't elucidate. They had reached the ivy-tangled villa, and there was light peeping through the shutters of a room on the second floor.

Robin looked up at the crumbling stucco, and then down at Ellini. "Should be an easy climb for someone who's used to scampering over the rooftops of Oxford. I'll take the ground floor and deal with any guards. If she's a friend of Myrrha's, she'll have plenty of disposable males hanging about the place."

"But what if I get up to the bedroom and they're... busy?"

He laughed at her delicacy. "You're another woman, Ellie – I doubt he'd object." He fished a revolver out of his pocket. "Will you take this?"

"Certainly not!"

"Very well. Just remember what I taught you. You're not going to win a wrestling match, not even with her. Your safety is your speed."

With a pang, Ellini thought of Joel, and muttered, "In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed."

"What's that?" asked Robin.

"Ralph Waldo Emerson," she said, trying to surreptitiously wipe away a tear. 

Oh yes, there were some good men in existence. The trouble was, she never wanted them.

***

She scaled the walls without any trouble. All those lovely, moon-gilded trees kept her out of sight of the houses on the other side of the road. The window was a bit more problematic. It wasn't locked, but it clearly hadn't been opened in a long time, and seemed to have sealed itself shut with rust and damp. Ellini struggled with it for a good ten minutes, swearing under her breath, until she finally forced it wide enough for her to squeeze inside.

It was lucky she was thin – and lucky too that the occupants of the room seemed to be distracted.

Her immediate impression – once she'd got past the gagged man tied to the headboard – was that this was the house of a sorceress. But not a very good sorceress. The hermetic symbols chalked on the walls looked like nursery-room copies. Several of the grimoires on the shelves had been proven to be eighteenth century fakes. And, worse still, there was a cauldron, and a glass tank filled with toads and newts, as though this woman had read Macbeth and very little else.

Still, she obviously had some magical talent, because there was no doubting now that she was one of the Willis. A daguerreotype, depicting a group of respectably-dressed women, with Myrrha at its centre, was mounted on the wall next to the bed.

The redhead herself was down to her corset and drawers. She was standing over James Whittaker, who'd been tied to the headboard, with a long, curved knife in her hand. But when she saw Ellini, she turned – mad and sudden as a scattering shoal – and lunged at her instead

This was what finally convinced Ellini that she hadn't walked in on some kind of amorous game, but she was still slow to dodge. The redhead's knife sliced into her skirts, narrowly missing her thigh. 

Ellini raised her knee and knocked the woman backwards while she was still trying to extricate her knife, but the redhead barely seemed to feel it. She leapt back, just as lithe and shiny as ever, and seemed to take stock of Ellini for the first time.

"Are you his new little madam?" she crooned. "Did he tell you what happened to the old one?"

"I'm not anybody's little madam," said Ellini, in what she hoped was a soothing voice. There was a revolver on the bed-side table next to Mr Whittaker, but it seemed the redhead didn't want to use it. Perhaps a gun was too impersonal, or not arcane enough for a lover of newts and grimoires.

"But I do know what happened to the last one, yes," said Ellini. "And I rather think you're as responsible as he is." She gestured towards the daguerreotype on the wall behind her. "You're one of Myrrha's pupils. You did this to him. Why kill him now when he's done everything you wanted?"

The girl lunged at Ellini again, this time burying her knife in the leather spine of one of her grimoires. She tried to tug the knife free, swore, and then abandoned it, instead grabbing Ellini's head and driving it back against the bookshelves.

It was the thought of being concussed by fake grimoires, rather than any instinct towards self-preservation, which made Ellini stagger away. She fell against the door, but managed to dodge Isabella's next punch and kick out at her knees the way Robin had taught her.

"You're the very worst thing to me and my sisters," said Isabella, getting up without much difficulty, and giving the knife – which was still protruding from the book-case – an absent-minded twang. "A woman who defends them, humours them, leaves them free to defile some other poor innocent."

Ellini dodged her fist again, and then hitched up her skirts and kicked her in the face. It was wonderful – Isabella was just the right height, not like Robin, who made her feel as though she was doing the splits every time she tried to kick him. 

She was bleeding at the nose when she got up again, and paid Ellini the compliment of shouting for her cronies downstairs.

But there was no answering cry. Robin must have dealt with them already. And now he was almost certainly having a smoke on the stairs, leaving Ellini to deal with things on her own. He was a heartless teacher.

"Is it because the girl killed herself?" Ellini persisted. "Are you trying to avenge her?"

Isabella spat in her direction. "I hold her in as much contempt as I hold you. But since he'd served his educational purpose, and proved us right yet again, I don't see why he should spend his days in a bar, drinking champagne, without so much as a troubled conscience – as though we'd done him a favour. That's what I can't stand."

Ellini was silent, because these were almost exactly the thoughts that had gone through her mind in the cab on the way here. And, though she was ashamed to share the sentiments of a Wylie, she didn't see why he should spend the rest of his days in a bar, drinking champagne, without so much as a troubled conscience, either.

Isabella lunged at her again, and she kicked her in the face again – mechanically this time, without a trace of enjoyment.

"We're going to untie him and reverse the spell," she said simply. "That will be punishment enough."

Isabella dragged herself to her feet, her face as red as her hair. "You deluded little simpleton! Do you really think they have our feelings?"

Ellini wasn't sure if she really thought this, but she seized on it as the only thing that might make her different from the Wylies, and said "Yes."

She didn't think about the implications of that 'yes'. She didn't consider what it might mean in terms of Jack, and what she'd done to him. She made it her policy not to think of Jack at all, if she could help it.

"I'm not asking your permission," she said, when Isabella continued to glower at her. "It must be obvious to you by now that there's nothing you can do. Stay there and observe – that's what the Wylies like to do, isn't it? Stay there and see whether men have feelings or not."

She turned her back on the girl, and started to work away at the knots that bound Mr Whittaker's hands to the headboard. There was a certain amount of hissing and shuffling behind her, but she ignored it on the basis that the girl's knife was still stuck in the book-case, and the gun was on the bedside table, right in front of Ellini.

It was obviously a mistake, because the moment she managed to free Mr Whittaker's right hand, he snatched up the gun and fired it over her shoulder.

Ellini shut her eyes in dread, and listened for the sound of a falling body. When it occurred, it was much closer to hand than she would have expected. The girl must have crept up with another knife in her hand. Surely Mr Whittaker wouldn't have shot her unless she'd been armed?

Come to think of it, it would probably be a good idea to prise her eyelids open and see how composed he looked, and where the gun was pointing now. But she had barely managed this when the bedroom door was kicked open and Robin dived in, punching Mr Whittaker so hard that the ropes binding his other hand to the headboard snapped. He toppled off the bed, the gun skidding away across the floorboards.

"He wasn't going to shoot me!" Ellini protested – although, in truth, she wasn't sure of this. "He was trying to protect me!"

"My mistake," said Robin, trying to shake the feeling back into his hand. "I wasn't expecting to hear a gunshot. Women don't use guns against other women, so I thought she'd stashed another guard in here."

"Women don't use guns against other women," Ellini muttered, getting down on her knees to see if anything could be done for Isabella. "Is that because our nerves are too frail?"

"No, it's because guns are too quick. Too merciful. When a woman wants to kill another woman, she likes to take her time."

Ellini didn't reply. There was most definitely nothing that could be done for Isabella. Her eyes were open – which was to say that the membranes which closed over her eyeballs when she blinked had stopped halfway across, and would never meet again. The bullet had hit her in the heart.

But she was clutching a knife, which at least meant that Mr Whittaker had been trying to save Ellini, rather than firing in a fit of pique. It was the same knife that had been lodged in the book-case – you could tell because it was still embedded in the spine of one of those great grimoires. Isabella must have taken the book off the shelf, opened it up to expose the blade, and been about to skewer Ellini on it too, making a rudimentary kebab of stupid literature and stupid girl.

James Whittaker dragged himself across the floor towards them, struggling to take the gag out of his mouth. His eyes were wild and glazed at the same time, like a prehistoric beast trapped in a glacier. He had probably never shot anyone before, and there was a suggestion of concussion about his movements.

Ellini saw all this, but she still shrank away from him when he crawled towards her. In his haste to get to his feet, he grabbed hold of her skirts, and she drew back in disgust, as though she was afraid he might soil her dress. She was pretty sure Robin had seen this, because his eyes were exultant when she risked looking at him again.

She couldn't show mercy to these men. They disgusted her. But perhaps, looking at James Whittaker, mercy was not what he needed. After all, he'd had the truth taken away from him. He'd been lied to, and fought over, and patronized. Perhaps if she treated him, not as a prisoner to be condemned or reprieved, but as a man in control of his own destiny, it would be merciful enough. 

He was still on his knees, and it seemed to Ellini as though her momentary flash of revulsion had sobered him. He said, "This is about the drowned girl, yes? You both... seemed to think I knew her."

"Yes, sir, you did know her," said Ellini, kneeling down beside Isabella again. If she had no compassion, she could at least have respect. "You were engaged to her. This woman, or one of her confederates, would have invited you to play a little game. They would have been very respectful. Perhaps they praised you for overcoming the class-divides that might have separated you from your fiancée. Perhaps they said 'a love like that could stand up to anything, couldn't it? And you can prove your love is true love if you take part in our little test.'"

"What test?"

"It's very ancient, and very cruel," said Ellini. "They take away all a man's memories of, and feelings for, his beloved – the theory being that, if you can fall in love with her again, without memory or attraction, then you were truly meant to be together." 

She took off one of her gloves and dipped a finger into the pool of blood that was starting to spread underneath Isabella. She then began drawing letters on the floor, just where the moonlight could reach them. After a few seconds under the moon's concentrated glare, the letters started to steam.

She had never unpicked someone else's spell before, but she knew the theory. She had read about it in Myrrha's library at Pandemonium. And kneeling there on the floor, with James Whittaker watching her from one side and Robin from the other, she didn't doubt that she could do it. It would simply be unthinkable to fail.

"I'm going to put your memories and feelings back," she said. "I'm afraid that's non-negotiable. What you do with your knowledge is up to you. I'd advise you to try and make some amends to the poor girl's parents, but it's only a suggestion. Everything's up to you now."

She tried not to look at his eyes as she muttered the words of the spell. She tried to remember what she'd seen in Jack's eyes, in that infinitesimal slice of time between kiss and brass knuckles. But she had never been entirely sure.

Mr Whittaker didn't scream, or even sigh. When she risked a glance at him, he seemed to have folded in on himself, as if he was trying to contain the memories, or the horror, or whatever he might have been feeling in that moment.

She didn't stay to find out. She got to her feet and muttered something to Robin about going outside for some air. 

And she was almost – but not quite – out of hearing when Robin bent over the man, who was still hunched up on his knees as if trying to stifle some unbearable explosion, and said, "You shouldn't have picked the redhead, mate. You made 'er angry."