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run. She hadn’t always got away.
    Eveline sneezed, glared at the fan, and put it back. More reluctantly, she took off the amber beads and let them slide back into the glimmering heap on the dressing table.
    “Any good, that Stepney place?” Ginny said.
    “No. But she wants to hear it anyway. Don’t you tell her I said where I was going, you know what she’s like.”
    “’Sif I’d blab,” Ginny said.
    “ I know that. She doesn’t. You seen that thing she’s got now? What is it?”
    “I don’t know and I don’t care, ’slong as she don’t aim it at me.”
    “Ain’t you even interested? ” Evvie said.
    “Why? If Ma wants me to know, she’ll tell me. You’re too curious, Evvie. You always got to pick and poke and try to find out stuff that en’t nothing to do with you. Get you in trouble, that will.”
    “Ma says ‘A long nose’s kept many a thief out of clink,’” Eveline said.
    “Unless it’s her business you’re poking it in. Besides, since when do you give ha’pence what Ma says?”
    “Ginny?”
    “What?”
    “If Ma thought someone’d made one of us, what do you think she’d do?”
    The girls looked at each other for a moment, Ginny cradling her useless arm in her other hand. “You been made?” she said.
    “I think so. Maybe.”
    “You told her?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Don’t be daft, Ginny. If I hadn’t and he’d followed me here, or the peelers turned up...”
    Ginny was silent for a moment, chewing her lip. “I dunno,” she said eventually. “She likes you, Evvie, she thinks you’re smart, but if you’re a risk...”
    “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
    “She wants out. At least, she says she does.”
    “Yeah she said about retiring. Again. Talks about it a lot, these days.”
    “What d’you suppose will happen to us?”
    “We’ll be setting up on our own, I guess. Anyways, I’m going to be stuck here for days. Once she lets me out, though, you want to go see a mentalist? Cumberland’s on at the Egyptian Hall next month.”
    Eveline never passed up the chance to watch a stage magician, even sometimes going so far as to buy a ticket.
    “Oh, no, them people give me the creeps.” Ginny gave a not entirely exaggerated shudder. “’S unnatural, is what it is.”
    “He can’t really read your mind, you beef-wit.”
    “Why go, then?”
    “Because he works things out about people. It’s clever.”
    Eveline had not the slightest interest in Spiritualism (to be fair to Cumberland, neither did he – except to debunk it). But stage magic, the deceptions of eye and hand and mind, those she found very interesting indeed.
     
     
    E VELINE, HAVING JUST spent a frustrating hour trying to get Saffie to understand her ABCs, or her As, or what a book was for, other than pulling about, had given up and was sitting with some mending crumpled in her lap by the upstairs window that gave the best light. Mending bored her, but she was neat-fingered, and had managed, the last time she was in a theatre where a magic show was on, to sneak backstage and obtain a magician’s stage-coat. She was now attempting to adapt its internal construction to a jacket of her own. Secret pockets, capacious but inconspicuous, she thought were an excellent idea – though she had no plans to stuff a live pigeon in one. Not unless she found a use for it.
    “Hello, Lady Sparrow.”
    Liu was perched on the windowsill, grinning at her.
    “Bugger it, Liu, you made me stab meself. Look!” She held up a bleeding finger.
    “I am desolated.”
    “You’ll be worse if Ma catches you up here. Are you off your chump?”
    “You missed our appointment. I thought perhaps you had found more congenial company. But instead you are locked away. I have brought you one of those disgusting pies you like.”
    “Ooh, I could just do with that. Thank you.”
    He passed her a pie, wrapped in a handkerchief. She shook it out, and the little green jade fox tumbled onto her lap. “What’s this?”
    “A