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reason to doubt my word, whether what I promise be good or ill.’
    â€˜I must know your name, sir.’
    Cobie considered. He had no wish to tell the Captain the one by which high society knew him, but he had never hesitated to use another when it seemed more profitable, or safer, to do so. He did so now.
    â€˜I told Lizzie that I have no name. I was born without one. You and she may call me Mr…’
    He hesitated; some freakish whim was urging him to give his true father’s name, Dilhorne. He compromised, finished with a grin, ‘…Mr Dilley. John Dilley.’
    The Captain thought that he knew that he was being lied to. He watched Cobie fling the purse back on the table and pull his sketchbook from the poacher’s pocket in his cape.
    Cobie began to write in it. He looked up and said, ‘Your name is…?’
    The Captain said stiffly, ‘Bristow, Ebenezer Bristow.’
    â€˜Well, Captain Ebenezer Bristow, my man of business will call on you tomorrow. At what time?’
    â€˜I am here from four in the afternoon.’
    â€˜At four-thirty, then. Have some of your financial advisers present. My man will arrange with you whatever needs to be done. The money will come through him. Should you wish to contact me, you will do so through him. You will not attempt to trace me—if you do, you will forfeit what I am offering you. You understand me? I have a mind to be an unknown benefactor.’
    He laughed the most mirthless laugh the Captain had ever heard. ‘That is what you will tell your superiors—the money comes from an unknown benefactor.’
    He tore out another sheet, wrote on that and thrust it at the Captain.
    â€˜That is for you to keep. You will give it to my man when he calls tomorrow. Now you may tell me where you propose to place Lizzie for the time being—so that I may call on her, and satisfy myself that she is being well treated.’
    Stunned by this unexpected bounty, the Captain picked up the paper.
    â€˜Why are you doing this, Mr Dilley?’
    â€˜A whim. Nothing more.’ Cobie was short.
    â€˜And the others? What of them?’
    â€˜What others?’
    â€˜The others mistreated at Madame Louise’s house. Those not so fortunate as Lizzie.’
    Cobie’s smile was wolfish. ‘Oh, you must see that I cannot rescue all of them. But those who run the trade there, and those for whom they run it, will I assure you, pay, in one way or another.’
    The Captain could not quite believe him. In his worldgolden young men did not arrive from nowhere, playing at being Nemesis on behalf of stricken children.
    â€˜You must be rich,’ he said at last.
    â€˜Oh, I am,’ Cobie was affable. ‘Most enormously so. Far more than you, or most people, can conceive. Neither Midas nor Croesus could compete with me. And all my own work, too!’
    â€˜Does it not frighten you? Make you unable to fear God, since you can dispose so easily of his creatures?’
    â€˜Oh, no one does that, Captain. No one is disposed of easily. No, I never dispose…I simply give events a push, or a shove. Avalanches start that way. As for fearing God, I gave that up eight years ago when I began to prefer people to fear me… Now I will say goodnight to Lizzie, after you inform me of her destination.’
    â€˜She will be going to a man and wife I know in Bermondsey who care for homeless children. At 21 Sea Coal Street.’
    He hesitated. ‘You will be careful with her, I trust. It would be unkind of you to give her expectations beyond the station in life to which it has pleased God to call her.’
    â€˜Believe me, I wouldn’t do that, Captain Bristow, sir,’ Cobie told him, ‘even if God was pleased to place her in a pervert’s power, you may trust me not to do so!’
    â€˜But He sent you to save her.’
    The Captain was determined to have the last word, but Mr Dilley was of a different