Camden Town, 1859: 

It was very sudden. Love lashed out at Robin from twenty paces – practically struck him across the face. He must have staggered, because he felt Montcrieff's limp, languorous hand on his shoulder, and heard him say, "What is it, old boy? Did you have too much champagne at breakfast? Did you see a creditor?"

Robin shrugged him off, and hurried after the girl before she could disappear into the crowd of Camden High Street. He knew Montcrieff wouldn't follow, because Montcrieff never broke into a run for anything, not even opium.

He had no early memories of love to be stirred up. What she awakened in him was unbearably sad instead. It was what might have been, if it hadn't been for Father Volpone, and his patroness, and all the little swipes of viciousness he had suffered since. She reminded him of a girl at the orphanage he hadn't bullied, a pretty teacher whose school he had left before he'd had a chance to get unwholesomely obsessed with her and introduce her to Gram.

He didn't approve – Robin could tell. And this was funny, because Gram had practically become one of his appendages by now. Whenever he saw a pretty woman these days, he could feel the tingling in Gram as much as he could feel it in his own loins – although this was probably because they both knew that, however it went, whether she welcomed or repulsed him, Gram was going to cut her. Robin took his chances, but Gram always got satisfaction, in the end.

Not this time, though. As Robin reeled from the sight of the dark girl, Gram was silent. Robin was conscious of him – when was he not? – but only as a cold, immovable presence in his sheath.

At any rate, Robin followed the girl. She exchanged a few words with this stallholder or that tavern-keeper, so she lived locally, but her smile didn't sparkle with them, and her steps were heavier when she left them, as though they oppressed her. Still, her natural exuberance reasserted itself after a moment alone.

When she stepped into the shadow of a church doorway, he saw her eyes sparkle in the dark, and almost swooned with longing. What was she thinking about – smiling about? How could he make those eyes sparkle on him?

It was, he saw as she went in, a Catholic church. He could tell from the statue of Christ on the cross, wracked with pain, above the door.

And suddenly a sense of foreboding stole over him. He didn't follow her inside.

He tried to get back the poignant sense of might-have-been, and not think about Father Volpone, as he went to rejoin Montcrieff in the High Street. But it was no good. He would need another glimpse of her. And then another, and then another. She couldn't work her magic from a distance, it seemed.

"What was that about, old boy?" said Montcrieff, as Robin rejoined him.

"I thought I saw somebody I knew," he muttered.

"In this neighbourhood?"

"Well, I was mistaken," said Robin testily. "But fashionable people do have legs, Montcrieff, and could easily wander into Camden, if only by accident."

"They'd have to be blindfolded as well as lost," said Montcrieff, with a sniff.

"We're here, aren't we?"

"Oh yes. But we're fashionable and desperate."

"Speak for yourself," Robin retorted. "Anyway, you're not desperate enough to go to the dens in Bluegate Fields."

"Oh, it's too early in the day," said Montcrieff, toying idly with his gloves. "These places have to warm up first. I tell you, I know a house on the other side of Regent's Park where we can smoke in cleanliness and comfort."

They walked on, Montcrieff swinging his gloves and cane jauntily, as if he were just taking the air, and not hunting the poppy.

Montcrieff. Sallow and oblivious. Was he another lesson? Was the patroness trying to teach him something by giving him Montcrieff as a companion? They had become friends quite organically – just by being in the same year and lodging in the same halls at Cambridge. But there was no element of Robin's life that she didn't control, so he supposed she had picked out Montcrieff as carefully as she had picked out Gram.

Still, Montcrieff didn't know about the curriculum of terror – he was reasonably sure of that. Robin was tested a lot. Myrrha wanted him to be always on his guard, which meant enemies leaping out at him on street-corners, or black-clad assassins bursting into the Senior Common Room at King's College, disrupting the after-dinner port and cigars.

After the fifth or sixth time this happened – when Robin had dispatched a group of snarling new-breeds with cutlasses who'd broken up a game of croquet in the quad – Montcrieff, being the only one who hadn't run away, said, "I'm beginning to think you must have done something ghastly in a previous life, old boy."

"I think I must have," said Robin, using one of the dead men's jackets to wipe the blood off his knife.

"It must have been a past life," mused Montcrieff. "You're too young to have done anything much in this one."

Robin stood up and slid Gram back into his jacket. "It doesn't take long to be a scoundrel, Montcrieff. You don't have to have attained years of discretion to do it."

"You do if you're hoping to do it well," said Montcrieff. "There's no scoundrel like an old scoundrel, you know. My uncle Podger said he'd been practising all his life, and only really got it right on his deathbed. He said it was extremely vexing."

"I wish I'd met your uncle Podger on his deathbed," said Robin. "I think I would have been a heartening sight. He would have seen that it is possible to get it right before the age of twenty, and then he would have died happy."

"I rather think he would have died cursing you, dear boy."

Robin shrugged. Lots of people had died cursing him. The funny thing was, he'd been cursed before he'd ever met them.

"Do you think the game's over?" he said, making a half-hearted effort to stand up one of the hoops that had been knocked over in the brawl.

"Oh yes, I should think so. When the barbarian hordes invade the pitch, that's generally the signal to adjourn."

"Then let's go and get a drink."

"But what about these fellows?" said Montcrieff, prodding the nearest corpse with the toe of his boot. "What are we to do with them?"

"Just leave them here. They get taken away eventually."

"By whom? The resurrection men?"

"I don't know. My part in the process ends with the killing, I think."

"You say that as though it's been organized!" Montcrieff protested.

Robin stopped and looked back at him. He was suspicious of Montcrieff's ignorance – or feigned ignorance, if that was what it was – but he enjoyed it all the same.

"It has been," he said mildly. "It's part of my education."

"You mean to say you can read Classics with a module of murder on the side?"

"I can," said Robin. "Your parents were probably too respectable to have it suggested to them."

"And are there others? Pursuing the same-" Montcrieff waved a hand uncomfortably, "-course of studies?"

Robin smiled. "Oh yes, there are others. Pray you never meet them, Montcrieff."

***

It wasn't hard to bump into the girl again and make it look as though she'd done the bumping. She walked around with a glorious, half-focused look, clearly making up stories in her head.

Robin chose the steps of the church as the best place to collide with her. The first place he had seen her glitter to herself. 

She went in every morning to do chores for the nuns in the adjoining convent. Her mother watched her like a hawk – restricted her movements as though having a beautiful daughter was the same as having a savage dog, and it would be antisocial behaviour to let her out – but she had a bit of a blind-spot for the church, so he decided that the only way to get to know the girl would be by masquerading as a priest. He would seem safe that way. She might open up to him. 

He knocked into her on the church steps, three sweaty, agitated days after he'd first seen her. She was carrying an armful of folded clothes – she often mended things for the nuns, it seemed – and they tumbled down the steps as he collided with her.

There was a strange thrill in that: pristine white linen, fresh from a church, falling into the puddles and soot of a London street.

"Beg your pardon, si- Father," said the girl. She had been about to dive after the clothes, but now she looked at him, flushed and puzzled. What had she seen first, he wondered? His handsome face or his dog-collar?

"No matter, child. Run along with you."

He was rather pleased with that: dismissing her as if he wasn't dying to detain her. He wondered how bold she was.

"Excuse me, Father," she said, twiddling her fingers, "but are you here to see Father Brent? He's just this minute gone out in the landau to the Bishop's Palace. I think he won't be back until evensong."

"Thank you, child," said Robin, smiling at this unsolicited information. He decided to unbend a little and help her gather up the scattered clothes. "And how do you find Father Brent?" he added. "Does he take good care of you?"

"Yes, Father," said the girl. But she didn't elaborate, which meant she was just being polite. Probably an older cleric, then.

"He has a reputation for being quite a scholar," said Robin. "We trained at the same seminary, though obviously not at the same time."

He was pleased with that too – the 'obviously', the slight motion of his arm as he said it, as though he was inviting her to contemplate his young, vigorous frame.

"Do you have a parish nearby, Father?" she asked. What a bold girl she was.

"I'm – between parishes right now," he said, giving her a subtle smile. "In fact, I just got off the boat from Rome this morning." He made sure she knew that there was extra information there, and that he was not going to give it to her. "Good day to you, child," he said, to underline the point. "I'm sure we'll be seeing each other again."

"Yes," she said, as if suddenly remembering herself. "Good day to you, Father. Thank you, Father."

Robin was ecstatic with that first meeting – with the way he had intrigued her. When he met the others – Father Brent, and the Mother Superior of the convent – he drip-fed them information in exactly the same way. Within a week of his arrival, everyone was convinced he was an inspector from Rome, with orders to root out corruption.

He got to know Ellini – for that was the girl's name – in excruciatingly brief instalments. There was always someone nearby to call her away, and if it wasn't her family, it was those nuns. Everyone else could see them together without batting an eyelid, but the nuns seemed to feel that a priest's celibacy had to be guarded, rather than taken for granted. It probably came of their having a better acquaintance with priests.

He took a house, furnished but long-disused, opposite the lock-side cottage, and paced through its rooms, not so much inhabiting the place as haunting it. He stole from window to window in search of a glimpse of her. He never unpacked. The furniture remained under its dust sheets, like ghostly icebergs. He never lit any fires, because he was sweltering with love and impatience as it was.

He kept up his debauched life with Montcrieff in the evenings. It was better than trying to sleep, and it gave him some measure of control to charm barmaids and tavern-girls, even though he could no longer make love to them. He could barely see them, his attention was so taken up with Ellini. But Gram made sure they swam into focus, because Gram had his own needs, and – for some reason that Robin didn't understand but was quite relieved about – Ellini Syal left Gram cold.

He went back to Camden in the mornings – mostly with a dreadful hangover – and burned.

In a way, he was enjoying himself. He was quite taken with the pining, because it felt important. He couldn't be just another thug – just another soldier – if he could feel this way about a woman. But, in another way, he was smarting with impatience. He kept having to share her. He realized he had only ever preyed on women who'd been outcasts – or at least unprotected, for one reason or another. He had never really understood the conspiracy of having neighbours, a family, a social circle – how they all banded together to keep young women away from young men. Ellini Syal was deeply embedded in a community, and he longed to take his knife and prise her out of it.

Why didn't he? That was a difficult question to answer, but he thought it had something to do with the dark glitter he had seen in her eyes when she'd stepped into the doorway of the church. It came back occasionally, but not for him. Oh, she liked him, he knew that. She would always roll her eyes when her family called her away – except when Sita called her away – and give him a lovely, philosophical smile, as if the prospect of talking to him uninterrupted had been too much to hope for anyway.

But it wasn't the same. That glitter had been passion, and the smile was just partiality.

He wanted her to glitter for him – he wanted to be everything to her – but he didn't know how. Carving a bloody pathway through her friends and family seemed too crude. Cutting her with Gram seemed unthinkable. But being patiently present, wooing her over a period of months – or even years – was equally unthinkable. He was going to explode if he didn't get her whole heart and soul delivered freely into his hands in a matter of seconds.

And this strange paradox – of choosy impatience – made him miserable. He couldn't eat. He couldn't turn to other women for comfort. His nightmares were even more full of teeth and prickles than usual. Sometimes he would black out in a bar in Bluegate Fields, and wake up on the floor, sticky with blood and booze, and be terrified – beyond terrified – that he had yielded to his impatience and taken her.

She reminded him of higher things, and he knew you couldn't get at higher things with a knife. He just had no idea how you did get at them.

***

It was Christmas Eve. They had been to midnight mass, and Robin had escorted the two Syal girls home, which the nuns said was a special distinction, for they were poor as church mice, and everyone knew their father was a heathen.

Robin hadn't met the father yet, although sometimes he fancied he saw a pair of dark eyes at one of the upper windows when he was pacing about his frozen rooms, sweltering with love.

He let himself into the rooms now, navigating between the icebergs of sheet-draped furniture. They seemed lumpier than usual, but perhaps that was just because he was impatient to get to the window, and see the Syal girls taking off their shawls and bonnets by candlelight before anybody thought to draw the curtains.

He reached the window, put his hand on the ledge to steady his eagerness, and felt the intrusion before he saw it. Gram sang in his sheath, and Robin spun round, drawing him out, pinning the shadow up against the wall behind him.

Then he felt a chill spreading down his arm. Gram wanted blood, but he knew – even before Robin knew – that this throat was not for cutting.

"Well," said Myrrha. "I'm pleased you haven't forgotten everything I taught you, anyway."

That moment of recognition – the way his muscles screeched into reverse – was worse than the first shock. With anyone else, he would have sailed through the motions of killing them as though it were a dance, but now he stopped jerkily and felt his own weight. It was all concentrated in the pit of his stomach, in a hot, cramped block of fear. For a moment, he thought he was going to pass out, but Gram kept him on his feet. 

"It's been a long time, Robin," she said, gently taking his wrist and lowering his arm, because he was incapable of doing it himself.

It was incredible, the physical effect she had on him – the way she made his palms sweat and his head swim with nausea. For a while, he had thought he was in love with her. There was a smell of rotten sweetness about her, like dying flowers, but you never smelled it unless she wanted you to. When she crept up on you, she was as scentless as she was soundless, but once she had engaged you in conversation, she seemed to relax a little, and let the tendrils of that scent creep around the room. 

They unfurled for him now, and wrapped themselves around his throat. He took a deep breath, but that just made his head swim even more.

It was not because he loved her, but because he belonged with her. Because she'd created him. Perhaps that was even stronger than love.

"I've had things to do, and haven't been very attentive," she went on. "I know it's my fault, but I had thought you were capable of using your head just a little bit more than you have done. I took my eyes off you for two minutes, it seems, and you had to go and fall in love."

Robin did not believe she had taken her eyes off him for two minutes, but he was still paralysed, and couldn't say so. 

It occurred to him for the first time that she might be jealous of Ellini. Somewhere in the course of his terrifying education, he had picked up the idea that he was being trained to be Myrrha's husband. But this had never been borne out by her behaviour. She had either treated him like a fond, crooning parent, or an exasperated aunt. And, when he'd been sixteen, she had turned up at his lodgings in Sicily with two prostitutes in tow, saying, "It is time for you to know women, and know how to please them. I would expect nothing less of you."

Eventually, Robin regained control of his voice and muscles. He put Gram back in his sheath – he seemed treacherously glad to be out of the picture – and said, "How did you-?"

"Oh, Montcrieff told me," she interrupted.

"But Montcrieff doesn't-" He stopped. Suddenly, his eyes were drawn back to the lumpy, sheet-covered chair by the door. It occurred to him that it was too lumpy to be an unoccupied chair.

"He knew more than he thought he did," Myrrha argued.

Robin had been under this woman's tutelage for too long to be shocked. "Did you – torture him?"

Myrrha gave a crooked smile. "How would I do that? By hiding his opium pipe? It's far easier to interrogate the dead than the living. The living tell you what they've consciously observed, but the dead tell you what they've seen. And they never lie. What could they hope to gain by it?"

Robin thought that, if he ever died, and was called upon to answer Myrrha's questions, he would lie just for the hell of it.

"So you are in love, are you?" she said. It seemed halfway between a question and a taunt.

"Perhaps."

"And you haven't done anything about it?"

Robin sensed the danger there. She hated him to be indecisive, just as much as she hated him to apologize. "I've been waiting to consult with you," he said, in a lie that was so brazen, it brought a smile to her lips.

"Have you? Well, that was clever of you, Robin, because I have a number of ideas."

He shook his head, not quite understanding. He assumed she wanted him to kill Ellini – or, at best, abduct and then kill Ellini – in order to get her out of his system. But he didn't want her out of his system. Would it be suicidal to say so?

"I mean to keep her," he said – much braver than he felt. "I want-" His lips tried to clamp down on the sentence before he could utter it, but Myrrha helped him. She always knew what he was thinking.

"You want her to love you."

To his surprise, she didn't laugh. She gave him a look of pouting, maternal sympathy, just as she had when he had killed Miller with that shard of glass. The scar was still in his hand.

"Oh, my little boy. Can she love you? A woman like that? Being a killer is like being a ghost, you know. You can walk beside the normal people every day of your life, and never really touch them."

Robin stared at her. This was not the first time she had voiced his innermost fears, almost word-for-word. He was starting to realize that dread whispered to him in Myrrha's voice now. Despair smelled of rotting flowers.

"But it isn't hopeless," she said, stroking his cheek with a cold hand. "I can help you. I can show you my greatest secret," she whispered. "The way I won your love. Do you want to have this woman in a boring, everyday way, or do you want to command her? Do you want to own her, the way I own you?"

He breathed out slowly, as understanding began to take hold. Gram – who was always quicker than his own brain – glowed in his sheath, as if with approval.

Myrrha was still talking. "Do you want to impress her?" she said. "Do you want her to feel your influence the way the tides feel the moon?"

She went on pressing her point home, but there was no need. She'd already won. Robin knew better than anyone the kind of devotion that terror could inspire. He knew, too, that he'd never have anything else. A girl like that couldn't love him, however much he tried – however long he waited. And he couldn't wait, because he was dying for her.

"She'll be yours far more than if she'd just fallen in love with you," said Myrrha. "She'll be yours because you will have created her."

He wondered, when he was a little older, whether Myrrha had ever read Frankenstein. Whether she realized that you could resent your creator, and nurse a rebellion against them that swept you both away. When he was older still, and discovered more about her, he learned that she must have realized this, because she had done exactly the same thing herself.

But it was funny, wasn't it, how the resentful creature always did try to visit its wrongs on other people? Frankenstein's monster had wanted to make a female, who would have been just as shunned, cursed, and tormented as he had.

It would always happen. It would keep going round and round: hate-love-hate, until someone had the strength to break the cycle. And Robin had always known – long before he'd read the book or made the realization – that it was not going to be him.