Lillian cocked her head in the direction of the doors. “Go on, then,” she said. “I can manage here.”

“No,” Evangeline said with a half-serious smile. “This is all the fun I ever have.”

At nine o’clock they set about collecting and stacking chairs; most of those remaining began a halfhearted effort to help and then discovered the time with surprise.

Emptied, the big room took on a more melancholy character. It was said that when Tussaud’s had vacated these rooms for its new premises, the entire move had been carried off in a single weekend. Sheeted figures on the floor, when prodded, had proved not to be the mannequins they appeared, but exhausted members of the staff.

“Now go,” Lillian urged her when the stacking was done. “I’ll stay and find the caretaker to lock up.”

So Evangeline went, thinking wistfully of her rooms and her bed and a novel from the Boots circulating library. Out into Baker Street, past the studios of Elliot and Fry, the Court photographers next door, imagining as she always did the great and the good who daily crossed the pavement she was passing over now. Usually she’d have a companion for her journey back to Holborn, Lillian or a lady whose husband worked in the advertising office at the Daily Mirror building and supported their cause. But in the lady’s absence, tonight Evangeline walked out alone.

There was some traffic on Baker Street, much diminished at this hour. So much had changed in the few short years since she’d come to London. Most of the hansoms were disappearing, supplanted by motor taxis. Horse wagons were still used for deliveries, but fewer of those as the months went by. Where would all the animals go? Wherever they went when their usefulness was done, she supposed, only not to be replaced. Theirs would not be a happy fate. Grace Eccles couldn’t take them all. It would be the tanner’s knife and the bone merchant’s cauldron, rather than grazing out their days in a field.

And in a moment that struck her as both absurd and sincere, God grant them Grace, she thought.

It was then that she heard a man’s voice call out, “There’s one of them.”

AFTER A LONG WAIT FOR HIS TRAIN IN WALTON STATION, SEBASTIAN walked home from Waterloo. There were no messages at the pie stand, but he stopped and exchanged a few words with a couple of cabmen. By now Sebastian was a familiar enough figure to have earned himself a nickname; to the cabbies he was the Bedlam Detective.

Walking on in the late-evening darkness, he thought about trick films and puppets. Something had been said about the tinker having puppets. About how children would bring him rags, and he’d make the puppets dance for them.

But a trick film? That seemed like the least likely explanation of all.

Frances was sitting before the fire, her clenched hand raised to touch her lips, gazing into the flames. The room smelled of coal smoke, along with the ever-present smell of moldering wallpaper that hung around the suite of apartments. She didn’t seem aware of him at first. He stopped to look at her; and in the second or more before she registered his presence, he had the sense that her innermost thoughts would be within his reach, if he were only to ask.

But then she looked at him; and when their eyes met he smiled briefly and found some reason to look away as he spoke to her, much as he always did.

“Where’s Robert?” he said.

“In his room,” she said, “reading the book you gave him.” And then she returned her gaze to the flames.

ROBERT SAID, “I can’t do what you asked for.”

“That’s all right,” Sebastian said. “I know it was difficult.”

“It’s not a matter of being difficult,” his son said. “You asked the wrong question.”

“Did I,” Sebastian said.

Usually as tidy as a bug collector’s cupboard, Robert’s room was in some disarray. But it was disarray with a purpose, as Sebastian could see. Spread out across the bed were a dozen or more of his magazines, arranged in some kind of significant order. Some lay open, others had pages marked with slips of paper. There were books close to hand as well, and he had a notebook in which he’d been writing. Sir Owain’s memoir carried even more annotation slips. By the looks of it, Robert was still only halfway through.

Sebastian said, “And what question should I have asked?”

“It’s not a matter of where truth ends and fantasy begins,” Robert said. “You should have said where fact ends and fantasy begins. If that’s what you wanted to know.”

“Isn’t it the same thing?”

“No, it’s not. Mother’s like a spring flower. That’s not strictly a fact. But it is true.”

The phrase sounded familiar. “Where’d you hear that?” Sebastian said.

“I heard you say it once.”

And it was true, he had. He remembered now. In another life entirely.

Robert went on, “In the book, the narrator’s party is dogged by all these various trials and they see terrible destruction along their way. He listens to the stories of the natives and draws conclusions about the causes. He imagines these great creatures and then he looks for the evidence. What you’re calling his fantasies are actually how he pictures his fears. So they may not be factual, but to his mind they represent the truth.”

“Read on,” Sebastian suggested, picking up one of Robert’s older dime novels and looking at the cover. “He becomes more explicit.”

“I hope he does produce some monsters,” Robert said. “A dinosaur or two can gee up a tale no end. There’s not a single one in Along the Orinoco, and it’s all the poorer for it.” He looked up. “Will there be dinosaurs?”

“Not exactly,” Sebastian said, and held up the story magazine. It was issue number 130 of the Frank Reade Library, dated April 3, 1896. Authorship of Along the Orinoco was credited to “Noname,” as well it might be; a glance inside showed the lines to be brief, the language vigorous but rudimentary.

“Where did this one come from?” he said.

“I brought it with me. From home.”

He meant Philadelphia. Laying the magazine down again, Sebastian said, “I can see you’ve been researching the subject.”

“You said you’d pay me a shilling or two for an opinion,” Robert said, reaching out and returning the issue to its proper place in the order. “If I don’t put in the effort, how else am I going to form one?”

“All I’m trying to resolve, Robert, is whether the man who wrote that story believes it to be his actual experience.”

“You want to know if he’s intending fiction or deception.”

“Exactly.”

“Is this for your Lunacy work?”

“It is.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Because I can no more trust in his answer than I can believe in his book.”

Robert turned around and reached for a bound volume that lay on top of a stack of others on his bedside table.

He said, “This one’s called Among the Indians of Guiana. It’s exploration, not fiction. Mister Everard Im Thurn says of the Guiana Indians that they make no distinction between their dream lives and waking lives. If a man dreams of being hurt by his neighbor, he’ll go round and punch him the next morning.”

“Trust a savage not to understand the difference.”

“They don’t believe there is a difference. But their thinking is quite sophisticated. In their world it’s the spirit that’s responsible for the deed, not the body. And the spirit can live in all kinds of forms and cross from dreams to life and back again.”

Reaching into his pocket, Sebastian said, “So a man gone native may lose his sense of what’s real. That’s worth a shilling.”