It was a nice piece of binding, in blue cloth with printed boards and a number of tipped-in illustrations on slick paper. He’d bought it at Wilson’s on Gracechurch Street, billing it to his employer. He opened it at the copyright page. Due in part to the scandal that had driven its author from town and from London society, the book had sold in its thousands and was now in its fifth impression.

He closed up the desk and then moved to the doorway.

“Good night, Frances,” he said.

She laid the fancy work in her lap. “Good night, Sebastian.”

Before going upstairs, he moved toward Robert’s room with the book in his hand. It was “fancy work” of a different kind. As fiction, it would be a commendable account of a fantastical expedition to a far-off land. One that had involved perils and wonders, tragic loss and heroic survival. The maps and doctored photographs would have enhanced its grip on the imagination.

But Sir Owain had insisted it was no fiction. He’d even been prepared to take the Royal Society to court for casting doubt on his word. His vigorous defense had led to a public accusation of fraud and the equally public destruction of his reputation. He’d sued the Society and several newspapers, and lost every action.

And now here he was, withdrawn from public life, struggling to preserve his liberty and to retain control of his fate and his finances.

Sebastian tapped on Robert’s door before going in. Robert was writing. His bed was covered in slips of paper, all crammed with lines in his neat hand.

“I thought you were reading,” Sebastian said.

“I’ve read my serial. I’m not ready for anything else just yet.”

“I know what you mean,” Sebastian said. “It doesn’t do to rush onward. It’s nice to stay in the tale.”

“At least for a while. My favorite time of the day is when I’m waiting to go to sleep. I like to just lie there and think.”

“What about?”

“Things,” Robert said.

Sebastian knew that he made stories of his own, but he wouldn’t share them. Sebastian had sneaked a look at some of his writings, once. It was all gangs and pirates and Martian war machines, jumbled together in a single tale.

Sebastian said, “I have a job for you. It’s worth a shilling or two.” He handed over Sir Owain’s book and said, “Tell me what you think of this. Have you read it before?”

Robert turned it around and looked at the title.

“No,” he said.

“The author would have us believe that it’s a true account of his adventures. He travels to the Amazon, and his party is attacked by monsters unknown to science. He speaks of members of his expedition being discovered, torn by beasts. See if you can tell me the point where the truth ends and his fantasy begins.”

“All right,” Robert said.

Sebastian had half-expected him to argue. It wasn’t often that Robert read a book. It was periodicals that fascinated him. To his mind a book was a dead thing, fixed, detached from real time.

The boy laid the volume aside and returned to his writing.

“Good night, Robert,” Sebastian said, and Robert murmured something that Sebastian couldn’t hear. He didn’t take his eyes from the page.

ELISABETH WAS sleeping when Sebastian went upstairs. Or at least, her eyes were closed and she didn’t open them. He undressed in the dark and lay down beside her. She was turned away.

He wondered how the world must seem through Robert’s eyes. He could not imagine it. Elisabeth’s hope had always been to see Robert take his place in ordinary human society. But now Sebastian sensed a reluctance in her whenever there was any real suggestion of letting the boy go. As if she wanted to see him stand, but would not risk seeing him fall.

His request had been a serious one, not meant simply to indulge or occupy the boy. Robert’s knowledge of such fantastical literature was detailed and comprehensive.

Sebastian stared up at the ceiling until shapes started to form. Then he closed his eyes.

The shapes did not go away.

In the forests were various beasts still unfamiliar to zoologists, such as the

milta

, which I have seen twice, a black doglike cat about the size of a foxhound. There were snakes and insects yet unknown to scientists; and in the forests of the Madidi some mysterious and enormous beast has frequently been disturbed in the swamps—possibly a primeval monster like those reported in other parts of the continent. Certainly tracks have been found belonging to no known animal—huge tracks, far greater than could have been made by any species we know.

FROM THE MANUSCRIPTS AND LETTERS OF

LT. COL. P. H. FAWCETT, DSO, FRGS

WRITTEN 1909–1925

COLLECTED IN

Lost Trails, Lost Cities

, 1953

SEBASTIAN HAD RETURNED THE MOVING-PICTURE CAMERA AND its developed roll of negative to Stephen Reed, but he’d retained the positive copy. He now had the film roll in his pocket, wound tight in its wrapping of stiff paper, and a number of questions about its content that the fairground people hadn’t been able to answer.

Kelly’s London directory listed several film companies. Most of them were out in the suburbs, but there was a cluster of office addresses in Warwick Court. This was a stone’s throw from the records department of King’s College Hospital, where he intended to begin his inquiries about the medical training of the disagreeable Dr. Sibley, and from the Inns of Court where Evangeline Bancroft had let slip that she had employment.

As it turned out, the King’s College records had all been boxed up and sent across the river, ahead of the hospital’s relocation to Denmark Hill. That would have to be a job for another day. The shortest way to Warwick Court from here would be through Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

The morning was cold and dry. Lincoln’s Inn was a walled enclave of legal offices and chambers made up of town houses, alleyways, and green spaces. The grander chambers had large ground-floor rooms with chandeliers. The others packed in their lawyers from ground to gables, like warehouses of litigation. The adjoining fields were actually a fashionable square with a public garden, like a parade ground to the barracks of a lawyers’ army.

A high wall and a gatehouse separated Lincoln’s Inn from the actual fields. He stopped by the gatehouse and spoke to the porters and other servants of the inn, but none recognized Evangeline by name. As he cut through, looking this way and that on the off chance that he might spot her, black-robed “benchers” flitted through the gardens in their twos and threes like carrion birds, crossing on their way to the Courts of Justice; strollers moved more slowly, and sometimes got in their way.

Like the hospital, Warwick Court was a disappointment, but also a lead onto more promising things. The court itself was little more than a glorified alleyway on the north side of High Holborn, ending in a tall cast-iron gateway with yet more lawyers beyond it. The alley’s buildings were wedding-cake heavy with carved stone features and fancy Victorian brickwork.

In a second-floor film sales agency office that he picked at random, he explained his needs and was given an address and a note of introduction. The address was for the Walton Film Studios, the note of introduction to a Mr. Cecil Hepworth.

He was urged to “tell Cecil that Joe sent you, and sends his regards.”

“I’M LOOKING for Mister Hepworth?” Sebastian said.

Cecil Hepworth’s Walton Film Studio was so close to the Walton High Street that a two-minute walk out of the center had taken Sebastian some way past it. Walton on Thames, just a twenty-five-minute train ride out of Waterloo, was part riverside boating village, part office workers’ suburb. Along the river were inns, moorings, and great rafts of empty rowboats herded up against the banks awaiting weekend rental. Beyond the main street of shops and public houses spread a semirural outskirts of villas and smallholdings.