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Cook exhibit in Bullock’s Egyptian Hall, and evidently astonished to encounter Henry here.
    Properly indoors, Alger declines a drink. He likewise declines the divan and lowers himself onto a chair, the carved back of which he declines to use for support. His indignation of manner is theatrical, his real indignation having been exhausted, Henry can guess, over the temperature of his tea at breakfast. Ignoring Henry, who stands by the mantel, he addresses himself to Clement. “I was in London town, as it happens, yesterday. Having made my way here to tend to the business affairs of my sister-in-law, as prearranged. My meeting was with a solicitor at Lincoln’s Inn.”
    Henry offers his uncle a sober, attentive countenance. “We had just settled nicely into our affairs,” Alger goes on, “when a letter arrived informing us that this young chap’s mother had been summoned to Great Marlow on a matter of great consequence and urgency, and asking if I would present myself there on her behalf. Your sister is prostrated, Mr. Mollot, as you can imagine. She is entirely unable to travel. And so I took myself to Great Marlow, anticipating bad news and, upon my arrival, hearing worse. And now, after a day of to-ing and fro-ing and exhausting the horses to no avail on the Great West Road, I find the lad on your premises. Well, Mr. Mollot, whatever your intentions in sheltering him, I must inform you that my sister-in-law has conferred on me the responsibility of paterfamilias. No slight towards you, I’m sure, Mr. Mollot, no slight at all intended.” His next observations are broken by throat clearing. Henry hears
my brother
,
safe from this
,
God’s grace
.
    “Sheltering him?” asks Clement. “Safe from this?” “Ah?” says Alger, sitting back then with satisfaction, casting his eyes about Clement’s drawing room, every surface of which, Henry sees now, is felted with dust. What he took for laurel wreaths stencilled on the wallpaper are circles of mould. “He’s not told you,” says Alger. “He’s not had the courtesy to enlighten you as to the true circumstances of his visit.” He takes up the vial hanging from a chain on his bosom and painstakingly extracts two peppercorns to chew as a tonic. “Our mutual nephew,” he says, looking directly at Clement, his eyes glittering, “has been sent down. From Great Marlow. By royal edict.” “Sent down?” cries Clement. “Royal edict?” Henry is still standing by the fireplace. “My mother. My mother, where is she?” he asks, chagrined to hear his voice revert to the treble notes of boyhood.

THREE
    here was a war on that year, and a naval blockade that left the English with only their own corn to eat, and then the crops failed. But Lyme Regis did a respectable domestic trade. That it was a port town at all and not a squalid fishing village was down to its sturdy, black-haired citizenry, who, hundreds of years in the past, had hauled stones from the beach to build a massive breakwater the shape of an elbow, turning an inhospitable stretch of Lyme Bay into a harbour. For centuries, the weight of those stones and their affinity for each other was all that held that breakwater together. The Cobb, they called it, and by the time Mary was a girl, it was a wide, tilting road capped with massive blocks of dark limestone from the Isle of Portland, with the revenue office and the isolation hut built right onto it.
    Mary often followed Marine Parade west along the shore to the Cobb, to buy fish. And often she walked out past it with her father, to collect on Monmouth Beach. There the walking was perilous, the stones a queer shape and neither small enough to be called shingle nor large enough to bear the flat of a boot. It was a common boast of smugglers washed up there in fog thatthey knew their bearings by the shape of the stones, but that was not such a feat; Mary would have been able to do the same.
    The Devil had made Monmouth Beach on a wager, people always said. Mary