Oxford, three months later:

The Academy on Headington hill was a large, red-brick building, shaggy with ivy and Virginia Creepers. The clock above the front door was swamped in this foliage – so much so that Danvers often forgot there was a clock, and started when he heard the chimes above him, making the ivy quiver. 

He didn't have an office. His office was wherever Jack happened to be – and Jack could get everywhere in the course of a day. He was forever surrounded by people, complaining or petitioning, jostling for his attention, scurrying to him with questions and away from him with a renewed sense of purpose. They orbited him like planets, and he gave instructions to them all, with the blend of boyish enthusiasm, crisp efficiency and abject misery that seemed to characterize all his actions these days.

Danvers's job was simply to follow in Jack's wake, trying to work out which of the numerous instructions he barked out were meant for him.

The Academy had been a charity school thirty years ago: a sanctuary for destitute girls. But then its entire complement of students had been wiped out in the cholera epidemic of the 1850s. According to local legend, you could still see ghostly figures in their school pinafores, playing hopscotch in the courtyards.

Still, it was a suitable home for the slave-girls, because it heightened the poignancy of their story – and my, didn't Jack sell the poignancy of their story! He had persuaded one of his friends at the Illustrated London News to write a piece on their situation. It presented them as wronged innocents – which Danvers would never have disputed that they were – but the kind of wronged innocents the public would approve of, and agree to send their money to.

A charity collection had followed the article and, with the proceeds, Jack had been able to buy the Academy, a place of refuge for the girls until suitable homes and situations could be found for them.

It had been a massive organizational undertaking. But fortunately, Jack had numerous contacts, limitless energy, and no particular desire to sleep.

There was something hysterical about it all. Oh, it wasn't that he didn't care for the slave-girls. He had conceived an affection for them that was almost masochistic, when you considered how cold and proud and violent they could be. You just got the feeling that he needed to be this busy, this recklessly optimistic – that, if he wasn't doing six different things at once, he would go insane.

It had been three months now since Miss Syal's death. Jack seemed to have got a hold of the anger, but he couldn't stop working. And every now and then, he would reach for the shackle at his wrist, as if he was half-consciously trying to squirm out of it, before he remembered that escape was impossible.

Today, Jack was in the Entrance Hall – a lovely, wood-panelled room, made shady and green by the ivy clustering over the windows. He was dictating a letter to Danvers, while Miss Ginniver tried to get his permission to marry her young gentleman, and Miss Carrie clanked and clattered her way through Für Elise at the piano.

Miss Carrie was one of the few girls whose irises, as well as her hair, had been bleached by the flames of the fire-mines. They were now an albino pink, and constantly watering, which made it quite hard for her to see. 

Fortunately, she had expressed an interest in music, which didn't require much vision, once you'd learned your way around the keyboard. Unfortunately, learning her way around the keyboard was proving to be more difficult than they had originally thought – although Danvers, who had a soft-spot for the slave-girls anyway, and more than a soft-spot for anyone who shared Elsie's disability of blindness – was willing to suppose the piano was simply out of tune.

The tuneless piano-playing seemed to bother Jack, though. He kept wincing, and breaking off in the middle of his dictation to offer her hints, so that Danvers had to wade through sentences like:

"Dear Mrs Goldstein, I hope you and your husband have been keeping well – it's supposed to be in A minor, Carrie, you're in C – since I had the good fortune of meeting you in India. Also, you're supposed to play the melody with your right hand and the arpeggios with your left – I don't even understand how you're doing it the other way round."

"Can you show me?" said Carrie, turning her watery eyes up to him.

"No, I can't," he replied, a little too quickly. "Where's your teacher? Danvers, where is Mrs Antonelli?"

Danvers, who had just finished crossing out 'Also, you're supposed to play the melody with your right hand', looked up unwillingly.

"Ah," he said. "Um-"

"I don't understand why you can't show me," Carrie insisted.

"I just can't," said Jack, with the same swift sweetness. He was still facing Danvers, watching his struggles with interest. "I know that pause, Danvers. It means you're trying not to allude to something unwholesome. You've got such a broad definition of unwholesome that this doesn't narrow things down much, but I would guess it's either sex or alcohol."

"How could you-?" Danvers spluttered, but Jack cut him off, with a resigned nod.

"Alcohol, then. I suppose that makes sense, since she's fifty-seven, but I would have been happy to be surprised."

"It's medicinal," said Danvers, a shade defiantly.

"But how can you know about things like A minor and arpeggios if you never touch a piano?" said Carrie, tugging at Jack's sleeve.

He winced, but Miss Ginniver came to his rescue – although Danvers was sure this was the last thing in the world she'd had in mind.

"His name's Jake Harding," she said eagerly. "You know Jake Harding? He'll be able to support me. He has his own fruit and vegetable stall in the covered market."

Miss Ginniver was skinny and sharp-boned, with a tendency to compress her mouth into a thin, impatient line. She liked to say that she 'didn't suffer fools gladly', a phrase which always made Danvers's heart sink.

Jack gave her a sunny smile. "Not now, Geneva."

"It's Ginniver!" 

He waved a hand. "Sorry, Geneva is how I remember not to call you 'Jennifer' – I'd just forgotten there was another step in the process. You wouldn't prefer Ginny, by any chance?" he asked, without much hope.

"Only the other girls can call me Ginny."

Jack winced again, but Danvers supposed he was used to it by now – used to doing everything for a group of women who would never regard him as an equal, never let him into their club. 

It wasn't even that they held him in contempt for killing Miss Syal. In fact, they all took Miss Hope's view on that issue. Ellini had left instructions telling them to go to Jack for help, and she was far too clever to have let someone like Jack kill her if she hadn't wanted him to. They didn't understand what kind of a plan she had, but they had long-since given up trying to understand her. She was Charlotte Grey to them – the essence of sisterhood and self-sacrifice. 

Perhaps they didn't even believe she was dead. Perhaps they thought she would come back to life in their hour of greatest need, like King Arthur. The once and future Charlotte Grey. Danvers found this rather touching, but it drove Jack insane.

"Anyway," he said, with the relentless cheerfulness that had served him so well with these girls, "I'm doing pretty well, considering there are three hundred and fifty of you." 

He gestured out of the window, to a quartet of girls playing lawn-tennis on one side of the gravel drive. "That's Esther Johnson," he said, pointing to the tallest of the tennis-players, "who wants to be a pastry cook. And Marianne Evans, who wants to live in Ireland and have eleven children, for some unfathomable reason. And that's Jane Saunders, pious daughter of the Reverend William Buckleby Saunders. And-" he hesitated, frowning at the last girl, who had a long white-blonde plait running down her back.

Without thinking, Danvers said, "Mary Carmichael."

Jack closed his eyes, as if summoning all his patience. "Did I ask you?"

Danvers said nothing. He would have been outraged – or even apologetic – but he understood Jack's reaction, and understanding always left him at a loss for words. Incomprehension was a lot easier, because he could splutter and shake his head and say things like "How could you?" But, this time, he knew what was bothering Jack, and sympathy turned his tongue to lead.

He couldn't snap at the slave-girls – they had been through too much, and anyway, he loved them, in his harried, exasperated way. But Danvers was not a slave-girl, and worse still, his very existence reminded Jack of everything Jack was not.

What he hated more than anything was that Danvers found it so easy to do the right thing. He didn't necessarily think 'the right thing' was always the best course of action, but he envied how easily it presented itself to Danvers. 

"Read the letter back to me," said Jack, raising a hand to his temple, as if he was trying to massage the anger away.

Danvers knew that this was as close as he was going to get to an apology, so he turned back to his notes and cleared his throat. "Dear Mrs Goldstein. I hope you and your husband have been keeping well since I had the good fortune of meeting you in India."

"Right," said Jack. "Go on: I hear wonderful things about your drawing school for young ladies, and I'd like to recommend a very talented pupil to you. I'd would be most grateful if you could find room for her in your school. If you feel in any way indebted to me for saving your husband's life in India, or if perhaps you'd like to ensure that I never tell anyone the nature of his business in India..."

He broke off. Danvers had stopped writing, and was staring up at him, stony-faced.

"I should do this in person, shouldn't I?" he said, in answer to Danvers's glare. "I can make it sound a lot less like blackmail in person."

"Well, it is blackmail," Danvers muttered. "And I refuse to have any further part in it."

Jack looked fleetingly tempted to snap again, but then waved away his remark, and attempted to wave away Miss Ginniver, who was saying, "So I'll tell him the wedding can go ahead, shall I?"

"I'm redressing a balance of unfairness, Danvers. How would someone normally get into a school like that? By knowing the right people? Having the right parents? Is that fair? But that's the way the world works, isn't it? I can't make it fair, but if I make it unfair on the other side, at least we've got some balance."

He turned the sheet music for Miss Carrie with a flourish, and then rounded on Ginniver, who was already heading for the door.

"I want to meet him," he said, to her retreating back. Danvers saw her shoulders sag.

After a moment, she turned round, half-scowling and half-laughing. "Oh no, I'm not letting you do that. I saw the way you spoke to Catherine's fiancé-"

"He still married her, didn't he?"

"Only because you said you'd kill him if he didn't! You said you'd kill him if he hurt her, you'd kill him if he left her, you'd kill him if he made any demands on her on their wedding night. What was there left for him to do?"

"Be the perfect husband?"

"Mr Cade, he was terrified. How is a happy marriage supposed to result from that? I don't want my husband to be terrified. I don't want him to marry me because he thinks he has to."

"I understand your objection," said Jack, turning the sheet music back so that Carrie could start the movement again, "but you must understand that I will kill him if he does any of these things, and it would be unkind not to warn the poor man."

"Do you have the slightest idea how hard it is to meet someone when you're a charity case?" Ginniver demanded. "When the whole world has read about your various humiliations? When it's common knowledge that you're damaged goods and you're under the over-zealous protection of a murderer?"

Here, Danvers stepped forward. "Now, really, Miss Ginniver, that's taking it too-"

But Jack held up a hand and shook his head, for all that he'd flinched when she had said the word 'murderer'.

Fortunately, there was too much going on for him to dwell on it. Miss Carrie, who'd been clattering fitfully through Für Elise while they'd been talking, suddenly slammed her fists down on the keyboard, wailing that she'd never get it right.

Jack turned back to her and made soothing noises. It really was incredible, the grim, weary, patient, fatherly love he had conceived for them in the short time since they'd been placed in his care. As usual, he was half-soft and half-exasperated, telling her that all she needed to do was start in A minor – and, no, he couldn't show her, but it was right there under her fingers, and where the hell had Mrs Antonelli got to?

Miss Ginniver just stood there, tapping her feet. Danvers got the feeling that she was resisting the urge to roll up her sleeves and play Für Elise properly herself.

"Jake Harding," said Jack at last, when Carrie had started making another tentative attempt at A minor.

It was some moments before Danvers realized that Jack was talking to him. When he finally cottoned on, he started leafing through the stack of papers he was carrying, dropping one or two pages in his haste. 

"Jake Harding," he muttered, finally coming to the right sheet. He read a few lines, and then hesitated. "Um-"

Jack snatched it from him and read, "Arrested last June for lewd behaviour in a public place."

"Oh that," said Ginniver, with a dismissive wave of her hand. "He told me all about it. It was just a bit of fun – a birthday party that got out of hand."

"I want to meet him," said Jack, with a chillingly patient smile. He waited until she'd finished rolling her eyes, and then said, in a slightly softened voice, "What about you? Are you ready to be someone's wife?"

Miss Ginniver narrowed her eyes. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"You like to pretend nothing happened, don't you?"

She drew herself up, with some dignity. "I'm no different from what I was before I went into those caves. Monsters don't have the power to change me."

Jack raised his eyebrows. "Well, I can't fault your attitude, but I can fault your accuracy. You are different. If it changed me to hear about it, imagine how much it must have changed you to live through it." He turned back to the piano, and said, "Carrie, how many times was she Charlotte Grey? I can't imagine her just sitting back while other people dithered and moaned about it."

"You have no idea about anything!" Ginniver snapped, before Carrie could answer. "About any of it!"

"That's what I'm saying," said Jack calmly. "It divided your world into 'us' and 'them'. Your young man is 'them', just as surely as I am. Can you live with him?"

Ginniver held his gaze for a second, and then stormed out, crashing into Mrs Antonelli just as the old lady was sidling back in. 

"Watch where you're going!" Ginniver shouted, and then took her feelings out on the door, by slamming it so hard that the panes of glass rattled.

Jack immediately switched tack to meet the next problem. His life at the Academy was a series of threats and negotiations, but they all started with the same winning smile.

"Mrs Antonelli," he said, skipping up to her, "can I invite you to do your drinking inside the building? I promise you, you don't have to share. It's just that Carrie misses you when you're away. And I'm sure you want her to be as talented a musician as you are."

Mrs Antonelli must have been rattled by the collision, because she curled her lower lip and muttered, "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

Jack's smile vanished. Danvers placed a restraining hand on his shoulder, but this turned out to be the wrong thing to do yet again, because Jack rounded on him and hissed, "You know what? I don't need you to tell me not to hit a fifty-seven-year-old woman. I am not that far gone yet."

He turned back to Mrs Antonelli, his smile just as wide, but a lot less friendly. "The whole world is a sow's ear, Mrs Antonelli. You don't give up."