LYING IN THEIR BED AND WATCHING THE LACE PATTERNS CAST across the ceiling from the streetlamp outside, Sebastian sensed that Elisabeth had an inclination to talk. So he stirred a little, to signal that he was wasn’t asleep.

“Are you awake?” she said.

“I suppose,” he said.

“Frances tells me that Robert’s teacher has been talking about finding him employment again.”

The last time he’d raised the subject, she’d had no enthusiasm for it. But now her tone was optimistic.

“That’s encouraging.”

“Yes. It is.”

Sebastian said, “I wish someone could say where he’d fit in. I know he’s good for something. If I didn’t know the boy was troubled, sometimes I would think him a genius.”

“He’s no longer a boy.”

“If he were merely slow, employment would be no problem. There’s many make a living with a shovel or a broom that can barely speak their own names.”

“He isn’t slow.”

“Anything but,” Sebastian agreed.

After a moment, Elisabeth said, “I do have a strange feeling that all’s going to be well.”

Given her recent moods, Sebastian was surprised to hear this. “What’s caused that?” he said.

“Nothing I can begin to explain.”

Then she began to explain.

“I went up to see the little girl. The one I told you about? The one whose drunken father came in and threatened the nurses. She’s a beautiful child, the way so many consumptives are. Large eyes and a lovely transparent complexion. She said that she hoped her sisters won’t cry too much when she’s gone.”

“Who told her she’s dying?”

“No one’s had to. She just knows. We understand nothing, Sebastian. We don’t know where we’re going or why. We think that what we know is all there is. But sometimes you just get a sense of what’s beyond it. And that can take your breath away.”

They lay there in silence for a while. And then he felt her leg against his own. He laid his hand on her stomach, and she rose to press against it; and from there the journey of intimacy took its familiar, though of late less frequent, course.

Afterward, they said nothing. Within minutes, she was breathing deeply and he knew she was asleep.

Sebastian could not sleep. Normally his work did not prey on his thoughts. But this case was different.

He found himself constructing a rough sequence in his mind. How old was Grace Eccles now? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? Evangeline would be the same. Their ordeal had taken place two years after Sir Owain’s return from his South American expedition. Then a gap of years in which deaths and disappearances had certainly occurred, but none that drew so much notice as these present murders.

Something troubled him. He could construct a narrative in which Sir Owain roamed his estate in search of the beasts that lived on in his mind. But try as he might, Sebastian could not reconcile this narrative with the indecencies that had been practiced upon the victims.

Perhaps he simply lacked the necessary education in man’s psychological complexity. He certainly knew of man’s capacity for harm, and he’d heard rumors of soldiers abroad whose actions beyond the sight of God and country were a disgrace to their flag and their uniform. But try as he might, he could not quite believe it of the man he had met.

Evangeline had returned to London, and was somewhere close. One way or another, he would find her.

After that afternoon’s visit, he even had an idea for how he might go about it.

Perhaps the nature of these beings is best made clear by saying that they correspond very closely to the dragons, unicorns, and griffins, and to the horned, hoofed, and tailed devils of our own folk-lore.… The one common quality which these animals have for us is that they are all fabulous and non-existent. But our knowledge of this fact is derived entirely from science. The Indian, being without even the rudiments of scientific thought, believes as fully in the real existence of an animal as impossible as was ever fabled, as he does in that of animals most usual to him. In short, to the Indian the only difference between these monstrous animals and those most familiar to him is that, while he has seen the latter, he has not himself seen the former, though he has heard of them from others. These monstrous animals, in short, are regarded as on exactly the same level as regards the possession of body and spirits as are all other animals.

EVERARD F. IM THURN,

Among the Indians of Guiana:

Being Sketches Chiefly Anthropologic from the Interior of British Guiana

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1883