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underneath, and pulled out a tobacco tin from an inside pocket. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it. Inhaling for what seemed like a very long time, he tilted his head back against the back wall of the cabin. It was then that Clara saw the deep scar on his neck, just under his beard-line, running almost from earlobe to earlobe. The scar was perfectly semicircular in shape, except for a hiccup caused by the Adam’s apple. It was punctuated all around by other scars: cross-shaped white dots where someone had crudely stitched the gaping flesh back together. The dots looked as if buttons had once been sewn there and fallen off unnoticed.
    ‘What happened to you, sir?’ Clara asked.
    He exhaled smoke until it hung around his head like a fog. He stared up at the ceiling, blinking his gleaming, bloodshot eyes.
    ‘Happened?’ he murmured absently.
    ‘Someone hurt you, sir.’ She pointed at his neck, almost touching him. He smiled but didn’t respond.
    ‘Was it robbers, sir?’
    Again he smiled. ‘You might say that.’ He took the deepest possible puff of his cigarette, making it glow fierce in the dimness of the cabin.
    The hansom rattled on. Through the window on her side, Clara saw a landmark she recognised from that lost period of her life when she used to meet with another lady’s maid called Sinead at a tea-room near Charing Cross Station. She knew where she was now, more or less. It wouldn’t be very long before they were back in St Giles, so she started rehearsing what her parting words to Mr Heaton ought to be, whether she should affect a breezy tone or a solemn one; whether a third apology might melt him or whether she’d milked contrition for as much as it was worth; whether she ought to suggest that they attempt to do this again next month, despite her honest intention never to clap eyes on him again. Just when she was deep in thought, debating the wisdom of perhaps giving him some sort of kiss on the cheek the instant before sprinting to her freedom, he spoke again.
    ‘I was in the Battle of Peiwar Kotal.’
    ‘How terrible, sir. Was that in India?’
    ‘Afghanistan.’
    Clara had never heard of the place. Admittedly her schooling had been scant and she’d entered into service almost immediately afterward, and her mistress, for all her wealth, knew nothing about anything. Clara strained to recall if Mr William Rackham, her mistress’s husband, had ever uttered any informative pronouncements about Afghanistan in her earshot. But thinking of the pompous windbag who’d dismissed her with a damning letter of reference – a letter of reference so poisonous that she’d spent more than three years trying to get decent employment with it, only to be driven to her current line of work – made her deaf, dumb and blind with anger.
    ‘I don’t know much about history, sir,’ she said.
    He flicked his cigarette out of the window. ‘It was last year, actually.’ Turning his face close to hers, he examined her features as though evaluating, for the first time, her desirability as a woman. ‘You think I’m an old man, don’t you? I’m younger than you are, I’ll wager.’
    ‘I wouldn’t wager against you, sir.’
    He broke off his gaze and slumped back in his seat. His melancholy pout and wispy beard struck her, all of a sudden, as boyish. He was fine-boned and slender, after all. Whatever he’d endured in battle had added ten, twenty, thirty years onto his age.
    ‘How did the war start, sir?’
    He chuckled, an ugly sound. ‘The leader of the Afghans, Shere Ali, made friends with a Russian gentleman. Our government decided that this friendship was not in the interests of our empire. So several thousand men, including myself, marched from India to Afghanistan. When we reached the Peiwar Pass, we were met with an army of eighteen thousand Afghans.’
    ‘Oh, heavens, sir: what a terrible defeat you suffered.’
    He laughed again. ‘Defeat? On the contrary: we won. That is, Her Majesty’s army