VIII

waits for us, his young apprentice at his side, both standing in a gently rocking skiff. They’ve been roused from their rough beds by the look of them.
    It’s not the type of vessel I’d expected; the barges I usually travel in have a covered section at one end to provide shelter. “No luxuries for servants,” mutters Compton, nudging me on.
    I step aboard, the hood of my cloak well down over my face, and sit with my back to the boatmen. Even wrapped up like this, I can’t quite believe that I pass for a servant.
    We cast off. Out on the open water, it is cold. Cold – after the first few bracing minutes – beyond imagining, the chill reaching inside your clothes like a freezing pickpocket, reaching inside your flesh, frisking your bones.
    As we slide through the darkness, the boatmen steer us along one side of the river, as close to the bank as is safe. The strongest pull of the tide is in the central section of water and it’s running against us. I face away from our direction of travel; by the lantern’s light I watch the water: rushing, rushing the other way, as if fleeing the very place we’re heading for.
    My mind is filled with indistinct pictures of a sickroom, shadowy figures stooping over my mother. I want to go faster. It takes strong men to row us against the tide at any decent speed, and our boatmen are strong – no doubt Compton has given them enough of my money for it to be worth their while making the effort, too. But I wish I could row with them, to speed us on, to get warm and to stop myself from thinking.
    Near Limehouse, as we pass the massive hulks of ships at anchor, Compton tells the boatmen about our change of destination and indicates that there will be further payment.
    “Secret visitor for one of the prisoners, is it?” the older man says. I turn to look at him and catch an unpleasant wink. “Don’t worry, gentlemen, I won’t ask questions. Safer for me not to know, eh?”
    We pass lighters, barges and cranes moored at wharves and jetties, but no other travellers awake like us and moving on the water.
    Until, that is, glancing over my shoulder to try to make out what is ahead in the blackness, I see a boat approaching from the other direction, further over towards the centre of the river. It is a skiff like ours, travelling smoothly with the tide, its lamp illuminating three figures: two boatmen and a single passenger: a hunched figure in a grey hooded cloak like mine, the face obscured in shadow.
    Without reason, I am gripped by a sudden terror of this figure. My eyes are pinned to it, as if it is something monstrous – my mother’s corpse, already stiff, propped up in a sitting position and shrouded by a cloak, being rowed to the underworld on the river of death.
    Since the two boats are moving in opposite directions, there is a tiny instant when we come precisely level, some thirty feet apart, and I see the figure side-on, just a profile view of a hunched cloak and hood, sitting exactly as I am sitting, facing the same way as me, wearing a cloak like mine, the only difference being that it has not turned its head.
    But as the two boats pull away from one another, the figure does turn, shocking me as badly as if a corpse moved. The figure looks at me as if it’s felt my gaze, and the hood falls halfway from its head as it does so. In the swaying lamplight I see a youth, his hair the colour of straw, his eyes so deep-set they’re just two bone-edged shapes of black shadow.
    I want to cry out. Deep in those shadows I sense rather than see a glittering gaze trained directly on me – I sense that this boy, this thing , knows who I am and why I am there and is not surprised: he’s been expecting me.
    I put out a hand and steady myself on the edge of the boat. It is the boy that I have seen before. The boy in the kitchen. The face of the angel on the roof. And perhaps… It is as if in my mind there is a locked room, a door I do not open. Behind it I have hidden the image of a boy that I am terrified to recall: at first as congealed and unmoving as cold meat, then hunched and whimpering: those apparitions that I saw in the Tower, years ago. I only ever saw him from the back, but wasn’t his hair this colour – didn’t he look like this too?
    Mother of God, what is it? A ghost? A restless spirit that has some business with me? Or some incubus, some devil that is not out in the world at all, but in here, in my mind, projecting visions onto the world I see – onto a