How did you set someone free? It was a question that had been bothering Jack a lot recently. Wasn't it a patronizing thing to do, when you got right down to it? Wasn't setting someone free an act of ownership in itself? At the very least, it implied that you knew better than they did.

He wondered if it was also patronizing to herd them together in a grand building and set about sorting out their lives. He tried to take their wishes into account. He interviewed each one of them and asked them what they wanted to be, where they wanted to go. He pulled strings and called in favours to secure them placements that women of their class wouldn't usually have been permitted. But it was difficult to be sure what they really wanted.

Most of all, he got the feeling that what they wanted was to have never been taken to the fire-mines. He couldn't give them that. People said he worked wonders with his threats and negotiations, but he knew better than anyone that the real wonders of life were not open to him. The real miracles were out of reach.

Worst of all was the thought of guarding them. They were angry and afraid, and their tempers flared up easily, but it would be unthinkable to lock them up. He followed Mr Rochester's edict on that: 'If you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat'.

But thank god he was immortal, or the little darlings would have torn him to shreds by now.

He didn't patrol the halls at night – he didn't want to scare them – but he asked Manda to look in on them from time to time, and she said they weren't the most peaceful sleepers. For starters, they were used to hot rocks rather than straw mattresses. And they couldn't get used to sleeping apart. Manda would sometimes come into the dormitories to find that they had left their beds and formed a huddle of girls and blankets on the floor, their limbs intertwined like the twigs of a nest.

They made their own home out of each other. It was how they'd survived. How did you take care of them after that? How did you find a situation for each of them when they couldn't stand to be apart?

Of course, some of them had families to return to. And the ones that did often took two or three girls with them – girls they'd grown attached to, who had nowhere else to go. Some women were even reunited with their children. That had been nice to see. But, if there were husbands still hanging around, Jack would always take them aside and explain exactly what he'd do to them if they raised a hand to their new-found wives – or worse, made them engage in acts they weren't ready for yet.

Oh, he hated the husbands. Sometimes they were quite touchingly tearful to see their wives again, but it made no difference. He despised them. He could see the sense of entitlement shining in their eyes. He knew what they'd expect – what they'd think they were owed – when they got their wives home again.

Jack couldn't have done any of it without the article in the Illustrated London News. That had been his real stroke of brilliance. It had been hard to sell a lot of angry, immodestly-dressed, potentially violent women as angels who'd been cruelly used, but it helped that his journalist friend had interviewed Emma Hope, the most rational and respectable of the lot when she wasn't showing off her paintings.

It had also helped to target female philanthropists – most importantly, in a stroke of luck he was still reeling from, the Rani of Travancore.

As a reward for abandoning the rebel cause in India – the British weren't to know that she had actually abandoned the rebels for not going far enough – the Rani had been permitted to adopt another son. 

It was probably an honour she could have done without, for her own part – she'd had her heart broken too many times to relish the idea of being a mother again – but her subjects needed an heir. If there was no heir, the British would step in, as they had done with so many of the princely states of India. So she had taken in a young boy from one of the families of her court, and – in a bizarrely conciliatory gesture – was sending him to be educated at Oxford.

That was how Jack had come to meet her again. 

Of course, she still held him in contempt. Of course, she still hated him for abandoning the rebellion and leaving India in the hands of the English. Of course, she was reluctant to be drawn into helping another group of ragged, dispossessed people who were not even Indian. But she had taken one look at the slave-girls, and declared – in that wonderful, haughty-but-haunted voice of hers – that they deserved a better protector than Jack Cade. 

She had gone straight to Sotheby's and auctioned her entire trousseau of jewels to raise funds for them.

London had emptied itself of reporters on the night the Academy was formally opened. And, after the Rani had looked over the place, smiled beneficently at the mayor of Oxford, and spoken in a low, dignified voice to the men from Fleet Street, she and Jack sneaked away to the back of the building, leaned against the ivy-covered walls until they were almost hidden from each other, and smoked cheroots in the undergrowth like naughty school-children.

Well, the Rani smoked cheroots. Jack still couldn't touch anything that resembled a cigarette without his stomach heaving. But it did more than heave at the sweet, spicy, Indian fragrance of the cheroot-smoke. He was glad the ivy was screening him from view, because the scent reminded him of happier times, and made his eyes blur with homesickness.

He didn't much like being in the Rani's debt, or not understanding why she had been so kind. All these things combined to make his voice hoarse and thick and stupid when he spoke to her.

"English men took your country, showed contempt for your traditions, killed your first adopted son, and then let you down you when you thought you'd finally met some nice ones. And yet you're still helping them."

"English women have not disappointed me quite so much," she said tersely.

It wasn't an answer. He had seen the snide, red-faced Memsahibs of Calcutta and Bombay. If they had disappointed her less than the English men, it could only have been for lack of opportunity. But he was feeling so in awe of her at the moment that he thought perhaps he didn't deserve to understand her motives.

"I couldn't have got the British out of India," he offered, after a while.

"No. I think even you could not."

There was silence, while the cheroot-smoke played around the tendrils of ivy, insinuating itself into every gap, making another India out of this damp little corner of Oxfordshire.

He was only just now beginning to appreciate that he'd been happy in India. He supposed he'd been happy in Oxford too, with his little, bickering family at the Faculty, all held together by Ellini and the stories she told while reassembling her doll. But that part of his life was still too horrible to think about, so he thought about India instead. Now he had the knowledge that Ellini had loved him – loved him enough to sell herself into slavery – those Indian memories were compulsive and excruciating.

As if she'd been reading his mind, the Rani said, "I remember your Sahiba."

Jack's muscles seized up, but he didn't interrupt her.

"I always thought she was a coward," said the Rani. "She has...pleasantly surprised me."

He didn't respond.

"The girls think she's still alive," she added, in what might have been an apologetic tone. She was so regal, he couldn't be sure.

"Good," said Jack briskly. "Let them think that. It's a nice thing to think."

"Is there really no hope?"

He turned his head, but there was too much ivy and smoke to glare at her – and, in any case, she had auctioned her jewels to help his girls. She had shown him more grace and tact than he'd had any right to expect. He didn't want to shout.

"There is really no hope," he said.