"A person cannot simply disappear!"

"I'm sure you wouldn't say so had you known William. I'd say he'd been built to disappear."

Scandal hung as thick as the tobacco smoke in the dim Marylebone drawing room.

"My mother calls on his mother. She told me he ran away from school once when he was quite old, but turned himself in days later. I'm sure the fugitive life was altogether too much for him!" The speaker's voice was a shade too derisive for the attempted dry humour to work. A knot of identically florid women raised their hands out of propriety, but scarcely stifled their giggles.

"He's probably thrown himself off Blackfriar's. I should have done had I been as wretched as he." One of the men snorted in amusement, and several ladies shook their heads reverently. "Really, Henry, sometimes you are quite un-Christian," rebuked the hostess.

"In any case, I doubt he's taken off this time," said another. "Apparently none of his belongings are missing."

"The police think it's more, anyhow," chimed in Isabelle Inglis, who had a morbid turn of mind and wore a rather reproachable black dress accordingly. "So many people vanishing in these last weeks – and you recall the ghastly body they found last month." She shook her head, setting a precarious-looking pile of copper curls trembling.

"Its throat was missing," supplied the gentleman at her side, his eyes bright with macabre glee. "I've been down in Devon and heard tales like this, but not up here in town before. Down there the locals swear there's a beast of some kind that stalks the moors. Perhaps we have its metropolitan cousin. Some hulking, dark, brooding thing lurking out there even now."

At the fringes of the circle, Arthur watched the ardent looks on their faces with a sense of mild dread. He had never had the displeasure of falling in with a group quite so callous as this.

"I say, we may have been the last people to see him on earth!" The speaker, a young man, sounded positively thrilled.

"It seems a miserable way to spend one's last evening alive," commented Arthur. Immediately he wished he hadn't, and lowered his head as he felt his cheeks start to burn, but the conversation proceeded quite as though he hadn't spoken. Arthur breathed a small, tight sigh.

The weeks left until he was due to return to Edinburgh and finish his medical studies stretched before him almost unbearably. Worst of all, he was miserably certain that he'd brought all of ... this on himself. Had he been tougher, stronger, lived up to everyone's expectations, none of it would have happened. He'd have stuck out the task he set out to do, then returned home in a blaze of glory at the appointed time. So much for that: he'd been at sea for only a few months before he could stand it no longer, so, home to Britain he'd crawled. The prospect of returning to Edinburgh was too embarrassing to entertain, so months of ignominious solitude in dirty, loud London were his penance. He was living in rooms on Baker Street with a stolid youth named Selden, an acquaintance of his father's, who at that moment was leering at Isabelle Inglis and advancing a theory that poor wretched William the poet had blown his brains out after reading his own verse. The Baker Street lease held for another month; however odious his neighbour was, Arthur could scarcely leave him in the lurch with rent due for both of them. No, There was no respectable way out of it. The next month would be a purifying spell in purgatory.

This room, with its dingy efforts at gentility and its milling crowd of pretentious gossips: it wasn't what he'd dreamt of when he left Edinburgh to become a man of the world. There was adventure to be had, getting oneself taken on as a ship's assistant surgeon. Mr. Darwin had started out that way. Mr. Hooker had got all the way to the South Seas and filled Kew Gardens with glorious, exotic plants, among which Arthur liked to stroll on purposeless Saturday afternoons. And what had happened to him? He'd spent three months stitching up whalers in the Greenland fisheries. That had been so intolerable, it had made arrival in London seem pleasant. He'd nearly cried with relief at feeling the ground firm beneath his feet, and breathing air that didn't reek of whale carcass, or slap him in the face with stinging salt spray. The first night, in a modest Euston hotel, he had slept the dreamless sleep of the righteous, relishing the freedom from being perpetually on call to tend the injuries and ailments of hulking seamen who spent every spare moment mocking his Scottish accent or persistent seasickness. "Physician, heal thyself!" If he'd had a penny for every time some brawny fisher had bawled that at him, then broken into hoarse laughter, he'd have enough to pay up his rent and take the next train home. And to associate with a nicer circle than these.

But that was the thing: the appeal of life here had paled faster than the wind-burn on his nose, cheeks and forehead. He was low on money and had little to do with his time. Simply walking the city's streets, as he'd done when he first arrived, was becoming less appealing with each report of an unexplained disappearance or grisly find in the area. He was thoroughly underwhelmed by the efforts of the police, whose every utterance on the burgeoning spree seemed further testimony of their incompetence. That, Arthur suspected, must have been a London thing. The police seemed to be as superstitious and rumour-hungry as the nasty little coterie assembled here tonight. Arthur was sure the authorities up in Edinburgh would never have been so credulous. The whole case, he felt, needed the attention of someone with a modicum of sense. But he'd scarcely met a soul in London who displayed any.

He'd had another hope here: to write, and to spend time among those of a literary bent. There hadn't been a moment to spare at sea, but his head had been filling with ideas and plots and arguments and he relished the chance of having people to share them with. But here, too, he had been disappointed. Most of the fellows he'd met hadn't an artistic bone in their bodies. They were vicious and venomous critics alright, with a startlingly sharp eye for the weak or flawed, but it was quite beyond them to create a thing of beauty.

Well - there had been William. William, Arthur had hoped to know more of. His poetry – it hadn't been exceptional, by any means ("Except exceptionally bad!" The legacy of the whalers' teasing had left him quite a mental Greek chorus). In truth, it really had been bloody awful. But it had been quite clear how much writing meant to the man, and how he'd cared, and felt, and needed to give expression to his deepest feelings. Even a bad poet is still a poet. Arthur would have been glad of a kindred spirit.

Yet somehow he'd never managed to become friendly with the man. Arthur himself was not an assertive soul, and William was so reticent he was practically in camouflage. Arthur could hardly blame him. The resemblance of the men of their group to playground bullies was quite astounding, and they had William firmly in place as their victim. The young poet would scarcely have been likely to greet this softly-spoken stranger, living with one of his worst tormentors, with much warmth or welcome. Besides, William had seemed altogether turned in on himself: his mother was sick, Arthur had heard, with consumption, and William had the full burden of her care. Whenever Arthur had managed to approach, William had been leaving, and he didn't feel able to call at the house with William's mother indisposed.

Altogether, Arthur had begun to feel as trapped in this great city as he had aboard the tiny whaling ship. He had nowhere to go, no one to talk to, and the number of things here that nauseated him was surprisingly comparable to shipboard life. Then, worst of all, there was the last detail of his predicament – perhaps the most crushing thing of all, and the greatest obstacle to the friendship he'd hoped to build: he and William were love rivals. Or so Arthur phrased it when in a dramatic mood. Most of the time, he was quite able to see that their rivalry was futile. He loved, he suspected, in just the same way William did: from afar, with literary, courtly passion, and without even the slimmest chance of having his love returned. Nonetheless, he'd adored Cecily Addams since the moment he set eyes on her – at least, that was how he embellished it, in the glorious version of the affair in his own head. He was twenty one, for pity's sake. He had been at sea for months, and, despite the wretched circle's implications, his tastes most certainly did not run to burly whalers. He discovered straight away that William loved her too, and though for a while he entertained uncharitable thoughts about William's prospects, he was man enough to realise that his own were probably identical. He did not surrender his feelings for Cecily: he would take those with him to the grave, and love her afterwards in his departed soul (he'd come up with that by himself too, and was rather proud of it). But neither did he take to hating William. In fact, he'd begun to imagine them as oblique fellows, united in their adulation, and had truly meant to strike up a proper friendship. Of course, there wasn't much possibility of that now.

In the parlour of whoever's sorry townhouse this was, Arthur felt himself overcome with a useless tide of misery. There wasn't a soul in the room with a shred of pity for poor William, there wasn't a hope in this life that a woman like Cecily would cast a kindly look his way, and there wasn't a place in this wretched city where he could go and feel at home. He felt a bitter desire to go out straightaway into the streets, and walk in the dark, and take his chances. He began to seek a way out through the crowd.

"And what about you, Miss Addams? What do you make of this affair, now that it has struck so close to home?" Arthur found himself feet away from the squarish form of Henry Inglis, massive in his ugly suit and uglier demeanour. He was standing closer to Cecily than anyone might have thought proper, and almost leering behind an ill-trimmed moustache. Cecily, to her credit, lowered her eyes and looked away. "It was you to whom he last spoke, was it not?"

At Arthur's left, Isabelle Inglis – the daughter of Cecily's interlocutor – caught the arm of her friend Alice Cunningham and cast her a pained look.

"He's terribly vulgar sometimes," whispered Miss Cunningham.

"He does not improve," concurred Miss Inglis. "It is only a year since mama died and he's quite bent on marrying again. He makes these obnoxious approaches constantly: Miss Caldwell last month, Miss Edwards before that. It embarrasses me so. Did he never care for mama at all?" She sniffed theatrically. "Sometimes I just wish he'd drop dead," she confessed.

Arthur looked away from the girls just in time to think he saw Cecily's dark eyes flash, with anger or spirit or something else he could not quite name. "It's such a beautiful evening," she told Inglis, in a strange and level voice. "We've dwelt long enough on this sad topic, and I don't care to take a carriage home alone. Perhaps you would walk with me, Mr Inglis? Admire the setting sun?"

The widower's eyes seemed to bulge in anticipation. "It would be an honour, Miss Addams," he responded in obsequious tones.

Arthur shuddered as the favoured gentleman sent for their coats. Inglis couldn't see the beauty in a setting sun if it was accompanied by an explanatory guide. How could Cecily step out with this hideous man, when she'd never cast the likes of him the vaguest glance? He went and fetched his own coat and hat, and, without ceremony or goodbye, left the gathering moments after the ill-matched couple.

In the street Arthur was brought up abruptly by the evening's glory. Cecily's appreciation was well deserved. Above the blackening silhouettes of the London skyline hung a battlefield sky, drenched in colour and piled with ominous clouds. The highest heavens were a thickening blue and the lowering sun set the clouds' bellies alight with orange and silver flames. The last of the sun spilt along the broken horizon, a thick swathe of rich blood red.