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time. He could still read the handwritten and illuminated English of his childhood as easily as he could read the scribblings he’d found in Jex’s notebook, even though they were almost two separate languages.
    The thought of the notebook made him lower the lid of the chest again. He knew there wouldn’t be anything in the books of his library that would help him understand what had just happened in the church. If anything, if there were answers, they’d be found in the notebook itself because he was convinced the events were related.
    He felt a slight prickling on his skin, a sixth sense telling him that the sun had broken over the horizon in the city above. He knew how differently the city looked now, but when he thought of it at dawn, he couldn’t help but see the early mornings of his childhood and it filled him with a wrenching sadness, for the mother he’d never known, for the half-brother who’d overtaken him and grown old and died, for the father who’d mourned his death, for the lost world of that other England.
    Will slumped into a chair with the notebook and flicked through its pages. This is what that world had become, Jex and his dogs living in a disused warehouse where once there had been fields, surrounded by light and noise and machines where once there had been tranquility.
    But his mood lifted when he thought of all that had remained the same over the centuries, the city walls, some of its buildings and streets, and above all this church, standing proud like a beacon across time. And the people themselves, some of whom might have stepped with him from his own past, stopping only for a change of clothes.
    He caught a glimpse of the girl’s picture and stopped, opening the notebook to look at it once more. Something about her had enchanted him and he didn’t know whether it was simply her beauty, for she was beautiful in an unhappy way, or a deeper sense that she was a part of all of this.
    He didn’t entirely believe in omens and portents, but Jex had given him a strange and demented sign in the form of this book and his dying words. It implied a destiny, just as the demon above had suggested there were forces that wanted to keep him from that destiny. And if Will had understood correctly, this girl was a part of it, perhaps even the key. If she was the girl Jex had spoken of then Will needed her, and though she probably didn’t know it, she needed him.

7
    The door of the old coffee merchant’s warehouse was clearly her preferred home for the night, but now that Will was looking at her again, he was less certain that she’d be willing to guide him anywhere.
    The girl looked freshly unfriendly, a hostility that seemed turned inwards at the moment, but that he guessed would be redirected at anyone foolish enough to talk to her or try to befriend her.
    Why was she there? he wondered, and what had happened to her that she felt it would be better to live the winter in a derelict doorway? Perhaps there was no particular reason for her unhappiness—he knew himself that sadness never needed to explain itself, and that more often than not, it arrived unannounced and uninvited.
    The unfriendliness was more of a problem. Will wanted to know her name and who she was, but to do that he had to speak to her, and for all the years he had over her, he couldn’t imagine what he might say that would give him any more success than he’d had the previous night.
    Right now, he wasn’t even on the same side of the river. He was standing watching her from the shadows of a gutted warehouse on the opposite bank. He’d been there for close to an hour and in that time she had hardly moved. She sat like someone in a trance of misery, staring out at the darkness as if she could see all her misfortunes there in front of her.
    At first, Will had been hopeful that she might be waiting; even, if she didn’t know it, waiting for him. And he cursed himself for not