At first, Ellini was frightened, but that was only because she was thinking in storybook terms. It seemed as though the handsome prince had come to claim her, and she had to live happily ever after, whether she liked it or not.

And was that terrifying because she'd just been looking up at his evil counterpart – Bluebeard or whatever – and thinking she'd quite like to be claimed by him instead? No, perhaps not. Hopefully not. It was because she didn't want to be claimed by anyone – because 'Happily Ever After' seemed like death. Mari Lloyd had got that right.

But when she looked at him again, standing there with his hat in his hands and his eyes misted over, she realized he wasn't the handsome prince. He was just a boy, perhaps no more than twenty. It was funny that she'd never noticed his youth before. Maybe it was because he looked like his music when he was seated at a piano, and his music was timeless and ageless and grand as a mountainside.

Ellini's heartbeat slowed a little. She managed to return his smile. "I suppose I owe you an explanation," she said.

He was still misty-eyed and beaming, but now he blurted out, "You don't have to say anything you don't want to. You just have to be."

Ellini winced at this. Why did she have to inspire all this alarming directness in people? She couldn't abide directness. She much preferred misdirection – something Jack had always been very good at, of course.

"I'll tell you everything," she said. "I'd like to tell someone everything. I've told so many lies and half-truths to so many different people that it's getting quite hard to keep track of who knows what. But if you don't mind, it can't be here and now. I have friends waiting for me." She paused, remembering that she was supposed to dispense with the lies and half-truths. "Well, not friends, but it would be rude to keep them waiting. I'll meet you at The Birdcage in the town square at five o'clock tomorrow. They have a piano in their parlour. Perhaps you could play for me while I talk. In fact, I think that would help."

For the first time, the smile left the boy's face. Perhaps he didn't trust her to come back. It was fairly obvious now that, for all those months he'd spent playing penny-gaffs in London's grimiest suburbs, he'd been looking for her. Now he had finally tracked her down, and it looked as though she was trying to slip away again.

In order to pacify him, Ellini did something very stupid. She made a storybook gesture to the fairytale prince.

"Here," she said, taking off her black velvet choker and handing it to him. "I'd never leave town without this." 

She meant it, too. It was the one remnant of her Charlotte Grey costume, the only aspect of her dress that she didn't allow Robin to dictate. When she wore it, she felt confident and connected to her sisters again. "I'll collect it from you at the Birdcage, I promise." She saw his smile reappear, and added nervously, "I'm Ellini Syal, by the way."

"Elliott Blake," said the young man. 

"Oh yes," said Ellini, realizing with a jolt that she'd heard the name before. "I've read about you." 

It had been back in Oxford – in the days before Robin had been around to hide the papers from her, and the only news she had been avoiding was the progress of Jack's relationship with Mrs Darwin. Elliott Blake, the virtuoso pianist from America. The best thing since Franz Liszt. 

"I, uh... I expect you've read about me too," she added, with some trepidation. 

The young man blinked at her. "No." 

"You haven't?" she asked, hardly daring to believe it. "You haven't read Helen of Camden?" 

"No." He was looking at the ground, red-faced, as if he was ashamed to admit his ignorance. But Ellini beamed at him. 

"I like you already," she said. 

***

She met Robin in the next street – mercifully out of sight of Jack's statue. He must have been coming to look for her. Thinking about it, it had been rather cruel to leave him alone with Mari Lloyd. But Robin understood about cruelty, so he didn't reproach her for it.

They fell into step beside each other without a word, and once again, he spoke as though they were resuming an old conversation.

"The trouble is, she has put her finger on what I would consider to be the crux of the matter. Women do willingly beggar themselves for love. They don't need any persuading. She's right – it's their bodies as well as their society which tells them that's what they're for."

"Robin, we are our bodies," she said, quickening her pace, because she was anxious to avoid a situation where Robin and the fairytale prince would come face to face with each other. "Trying to thwart our bodies' needs is cutting our nose off to spite our face. Almost literally."

Robin gave a thin-lipped smile, as though it was funny to hear this argument coming from her. Perhaps it was.

"All right," he conceded. "But when said bodies are wrecked and exhausted, women look at the smiles on their little children's faces and think it was all worthwhile, and I'm not saying it wasn't, but it seems an appalling waste to me. Don't forget, childbirth kills one in twenty of them. It's not something you've had to consider, I daresay..."

He glanced at her over his shoulder. She would have liked to believe it was a sheepish glance, but he was probably just checking to see if he'd rattled her. 

He knew, of course, that she couldn't have children – that her monthly bleeds had stopped when he'd killed her family, and never come back again. Well, perhaps he didn't know that last bit. Maybe that was why he'd glanced at her. Either way, she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of a response. She was in too good a mood. 

Everything was clear now. She knew how she was going to deal with the two men she'd been dreading seeing again – Bluebeard and the fairytale prince. She was going to pursue a policy of cold, remorseless honesty with both. And somehow, this sorted out every other problem too. It tidied away Mari Lloyd, and her lovely school, and all her annoyingly good points about womanhood.

"Anyway," she said, "you're generalizing about women, as usual. Not all of them feel such a strong need to get married and have children. Most of them just do it because they've been told it's their purpose in life. And the urgings of society, we can do something about."

"Can we?" said Robin, half-smiling.

"Of course. Education is the answer, not coercion. Educate women so they can see there are other options for them. And, if they're one of those women whose bodies tell them they need to have children, educate them so that they understand what their bodies are doing, and understand the risks."

"Will that help?" he asked. "Is it better to know you're a slave, even if you can't do anything about it, than think you're free?"

"It's always better to know," said Ellini. She was quite clear on this, although when Robin asked the inevitable 'Why?' it took her a while to assemble an answer.

"Because knowing is the first step to finding a solution," she said. "Or, at any rate, a compromise."

He smiled. It was Robin's usual mean, triumphant smile, but this time it looked as though he wasn't enjoying the triumph very much.

"It's always a compromise with you, isn't it? This whole campaign of revenge against the Wylies – I feel as though you haven't enjoyed any of it. Apart from the moment when you leapt out of the lake," he added thoughtfully. "Perhaps that was enough. It was certainly spectacular enough."

"You're being facetious."

He gave a laugh that was half-happy and half-pained – that slightly hysterical laugh she had sometimes heard when he was joking about his former victims and former crimes. "I love you. Did you know that?"

"Yes, you said," she replied absent-mindedly. "Because you killed my family and that makes you my family. I understand."

"I don't think you do."

"Can we just get on with this?" said Ellini. "I know how I'm going to beat her now. She can keep her school and her pupils – it would be too messy to unpick her old spells now. But I'm going to make sure she never casts another."

"How?"

"Transformation combat – you've heard of that, I presume?"

He frowned. "Isn't it some kind of wizard's duel?"

"That's right."

"But you're not a wizard."

"You are what you read, Robin. And I've read ever such a lot." She turned to look at him, with the slightest, barely discernible glance into the fog at his back. "Besides, I've already won. I won the moment she referred to me as 'Helen of Troy'. Magic is all about stories, remember, and she's placed me in one of the greatest stories ever told."

Robin frowned again. "But Helen has a terrible time in that story, doesn't she?"

"Everyone does," said Ellini. "The point is, it's her story. That's where the power lies. Endings don't matter as long as the story's your own."

***

Jack chattered deliriously to Shikari all the way back to Oxford, with the boy contributing the occasional, very cautious, word of his own. He told him stories about the rebellion in India – about Lord Huth's drinking games, and the stately grandeur of the Rani of Travancore.

The girls had bathed and dressed in the cellar of the ale-house, but when he handed them back into Manda's custody, she still examined them minutely, as though she suspected what had gone on. Jack reminded himself that she could piggyback on other people's emotions, and the sense of jubilant release that he and his girls were exuding probably made Manda's head reel.

This was the happiest he'd been since Ellini's death. For tonight at least, it felt as if it was all gone, as if it had never happened, as though you could chop off the Hydra's head – the head head, as it were – and the whole beast would not only flop obligingly to the floor, it would erase itself from history.

There would be consequences tomorrow. The girls would remember that they had scars, that there were other people they hated besides Lord Elsmere. And they would all have to watch out for policemen at the gates, and read between the lines of newsprint when his death was reported in the papers.

But tonight it was over. He even heard some of them giggling as Manda led them disapprovingly to bed.

That only left Shikari, who didn't seem to want to leave. And the boy was so difficult to read that Jack couldn't tell whether this was due to devotion, or a dastardly plot to assassinate him as soon as he was alone.

He didn't care. Shikari had done magnificently, just like his girls. He wouldn't begrudge any of them an assassination attempt at the moment.

It was dark in the Entrance Hall, because the ivy-shrouded windows prevented any moonlight from getting in. For the same reason, the building was cocooned in silence, except for Manda's retreating steps. Then someone said "Um."

Such was Jack's elation that he had a warm smile even for Danvers and his 'Um's.

"Was everything all right while I was gone?" he asked. "Are the girls in bed?"

"Yes. Um. You have visitors," said Danvers, twisting his hat in his hands. He motioned to the other side of the hall, where the shadows had somehow been managing to hide the bulk of Sam Hastings.

Jack found that he was genuinely delighted. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed him.

"Sammie!" he exclaimed. "It's good to see you! I've had the most wonderful evening-"

"I'm glad to hear it," said Sam, "because it will be your last."

This was just the kind of melodrama he would have expected from Sam, and he was about to reiterate how very good it was to see him, when he realized there was someone standing behind, just visible over Sam's blocky shoulder. The dark was so intense that Jack wasn't misled by her black hair or her long, scarlet-painted nails. He only saw the face from Emma Hope's sketch – the face he thought of as the Grim Reaper's, even though it was nowhere near as skeletal.

"Oh," he said. "Wow," he added. And for the longest time, he couldn't think of anything else to say.