When they started, after closing-time in the drained, deserted Baths, their voices echoed against the tiles, making Ellini feel as though she really was underwater. 

Robin took off his shirt, and she was confronted once again with the litany of scars on his chest and arms. He watched her eyes lingering on them with grim amusement, as if wondering whether she was going to faint.

Just for that, Ellini chose the surest way to annoy him – by showing concern for him. "You shouldn't do physical exercise with cuts and scratches like that. You'll reopen them."

He nodded meaningfully at the bandage that was just visible beneath the collar of her dress. She had wound it between her breasts and over one shoulder, because it was the easiest way of putting pressure on the wound. 

"That looks a lot nastier than a cut or scratch," said Robin. "Punctured lung, I'd say. You're going to feel it after a few laps of the running-track."

Ellini didn't ask how he knew. Perhaps it was the way she'd been breathing, or the way she'd been walking. Perhaps he could even smell the blood – that would be very Robin. Instead, she said, "The running-track? I thought you were going to teach me how to fight?"

He laughed. "You have to be fit, Ellie. You'll have to be fitter than most, on account of all the dodging and ducking you'll have to do. Are you used to exercise?"

"Oh yes. Running, mostly."

He grinned and lifted a hand, as if to touch her cheek. He thought better of it, though, and wrenched it back in mid-air, still smiling. "Always was your thing, wasn't it? Had to be."

He told her to strip down to her corset and drawers – which she did without flinching, because she knew he was expecting her to protest. But if he was astonished by her compliance, he didn't show it.

The bandage was more visible now, although most of it was tucked under her corset and chemise. Robin gave it a cheery nod, as though it was an old friend.

"I've seen wounds like that before. I taught Jack how to inflict them. I always thought they were a bit sadistic for his tastes, but then I suppose tastes change."

Ellini didn't look away, but she felt her heart slip down a few notches, realizing suddenly that her whole, sad, stupid story would be obvious to a man who knew what Robin knew. If you knew that Jack had forgotten her – and you knew how she'd left him in Lucknow – and you knew she was recovering from the kind of wound that had been Jack's speciality, once upon a time, then you could build up a fairly accurate picture of events.

"I told you he'd turn violent, didn't I?" said Robin, who had never been able to resist kicking someone while they were down.

"Let's get on with this," she said.

It was difficult. She didn't want to show weakness in front of him, so she pushed herself too hard, only shrugging contemptuously when he suggested she might be tired, and then collapsing into a numb, nauseous heap on the floor as soon as he'd left the room. 

Once, he came back in rather suddenly, pretending he'd forgotten something, and she had to scramble upright and assume a casual pose, as if nothing had happened.

And every time she didn't collapse, every time she sneered at his hand when he went to help her up, every time she outstripped him on the running track, he seemed to grow happier. He couldn't have been impressed. He had worked with some of the fittest, toughest fighters in the world. And Ellini was too determined not to be taken in to speculate on exactly what he was. The only thing she would permit herself to believe – because it was obvious – was that these night-time training sessions were his salvation.

And, in fact, she was very suited to the work. She was used to pushing through her exhaustion, used to waking in the morning with cuts and bruises. Her rooftop exploits had trained her well. And Robin was a perfect sparring partner, because she was never tempted to show him any mercy.

They set up home in Lambeth Palace Road, exactly as he'd suggested, with a troupe of all-female servants who batted their eyelashes at Robin and noted with interest that he didn't sleep with his wife.

Ellini was sure he had chosen female servants to bolster his own self-confidence, but she appreciated it, all the same. She wasn't ready to be surrounded by strange men yet.

He didn't just keep his promise about the separate bedrooms. He actually refrained from touching her at all times, snatched his hand back if it wandered in her direction, and turned round when she was changing. 

She never even saw him touch the housemaids. He slept alone, except for his dreams – but god, they were exhausting enough, even to listen to! The way he thrashed about under the covers, muttering senseless, half-stifled cries! 

In the end, she would usually wake him up and plead for another training session – just another half-hour, she'd almost got the hang of something. And anyway, he wasn't tired – he was never tired. The lamps of thuggery burned at all hours, didn't they?

And he would pretend to be reluctant, but he would always spring up a bit too fast, muttering about the capriciousness of women.

But he was still Robin – still cruel and selfish and suspicious. She pretended not to notice that he followed her wherever she went, or that he always found some way of mentioning Jack when he was in a temper.

And, for all that he seemed determined not to touch her, it was important that she didn't just rely on his good-will. There had to be a way to protect herself if he should decide to revert to his old self again. Obviously, she couldn't fight him off, because he had taught her everything she knew, and would know exactly what to expect, but there had to be something.

For a while, she hadn't known what to do. For the first few weeks, she had watched his every move with twitchy anticipation, waiting for the moment when he would turn on her. But as, every day, that failed to happen, she began to relax, uncoil her muscles, and let her thoughts wander.

She made an inventory of what she still had, after the twin-disasters of Oxford and the fire-mines.

Item, a healthy body, not too worse for wear; item, a functioning brain, much quicker than Robin's; item, a mass of black hair that gets hot when I'm annoyed, and once set fire to the University Church.

The last two seemed to promise help against Robin, so she set about developing them. She experimented with her tinder-box hair. Did it have to be touching an object in order to set light to it? Could she put out the fire as well as starting it? Did the hair retain its powers after it was cut off?

Of course, there were lots of accidents. She set fire to her bed-sheets half a dozen times, but she told the housemaids it was because she'd been smoking – a habit that her husband despised, and so could only be done in the privacy of her bedroom.

Within a month, she had found that she could start vicious, ravenous, unextinguishable fires just by looking at something, although this tended to work better when her hair was loose. 

Since the power seemed to come from her hair – like Samson's – she resisted all Robin's suggestions that she get it cut. She let it grow as long as it would, and enjoyed the idea that, if she were Rapunzel, her prince would have to be fire-proof before he could intrude on her solitude in the tower.

***

"Now, let's address the question we've been tip-toeing around," he said one night, when they'd been working for about a month, and her wound had almost disappeared into her increasingly-resilient flesh.

Ellini scowled. She didn't like addressing any questions. She still hadn't told him about Oxford – although she had no idea how much he'd found out on his own. There were letters, certainly, that arrived for him over breakfast, when she was still stretching away the aches and pains of the night before. She suspected he had informants watching Jack. But since she still wasn't sure how she would react to any news of him, she never asked for information. 

She found that she and Robin knew each other so well that they could get by with a minimum of communication – which was why this threat of addressing questions disconcerted her so much.

They were in the boxing-ring at the Lambeth Baths, which she had come to think of, over her weeks of training, as a sunken city, just recently emerged from the sea. The dumb-bells and the vaulting horse had a brooding, alien look in the light of the paraffin lamps they brought with them after dark.

They were practising what they always practised, when he wasn't making her run or skip or think her way into the mind-set of a knife-thrower's assistant. He would try to hit her, and she would duck and dodge and wait for the moment when he overbalanced, or dropped his arms, or left himself exposed. Then she would take him down with a minimum of force. Her favourite way to do this was with the quick, efficient, sinew-crunching kicks to the jaw which she was already proving quite adept at. She longed to try these out while wearing boots, and not particularly on someone other than Robin.

"Eventually," he went on, ignoring her sour expression, "this admirable crusade against man-haters will bring you up against Myrrha. And I won't be much help to you there."

Ellini dropped her haughtiness for long enough to be curious. He was usually as determined not to discuss Myrrha as she was determined not to discuss Jack. And she had never been sure – never absolutely sure – that Myrrha had gained his affections by magic.

"What makes you think you won't be much use to me?" she asked.

"Myrrha can control me. If you end up having to fight her, you'll be doing it alone. Now, if your only goal is to humiliate a few men and then destroy yourself, I don't suppose it matters that much..."

He trailed off, watching her almost hungrily. She got the feeling he'd been wanting to ask this for a long time. But he didn't wait for her answer. Evidently, the look on her face was answer enough. He clenched his jaw in disgust and lowered his hands. Ellini, not knowing what else to do – and mindful of the fact that he had told her to use every advantage she got – tried to punch him in the face.

"No, no, no, no, no," he said, catching her arm as it shot out. "Impatient. Reckless. What do I have to do to convince you that you're not a wrestler or a circus strong-man? You're a stick-thin little girl and, if your opponent catches you, he keeps you."

He let go of her wrist – threw it from him, as though he was still disgusted, and then turned to put his shirt back on. He was obviously still annoyed about what had happened before the attempted punch, although Ellini wasn't really sure what it was.

"Are you angry with me?"

"No," he muttered, without unclenching his jaw. "I'm not angry with you, I'm angry with myself. I let myself get so excited about this. I thought there was finally something you wanted out of life." He shrugged on his shirt, hiding the notches from view. "But it's always a suicide mission, isn't it, Ellie? You do so much flirting with death, I'm surprised the two of you aren't married by now."

Ellini scowled at his back as he walked away. She didn't want to concede that he had a right to be angry with her. It was her life, and she should have been able to end it if she wanted. She hadn't made any definite plans, anyway – that was practically optimism for her! And what did he know about any of it? He didn't have to live with the wrenching sensation in her chest every time she thought about Jack or the elemental – the poor, poor elemental – that she had stabbed out of its fleshy cage.

But he did have the nightmares. And perhaps he ran his hands over the notches because they were wrenching at him too.

"It's not that exactly," she said, with a peevish sigh. "I hadn't planned to kill myself. I think I can beat Myrrha – I mean, I've certainly read as many books as she has, even if I don't have as much practical experience. It's just...it doesn't matter if...if things go wrong."

Robin stopped. She couldn't see his face, but his fists were clenched into little balls. Obviously, his first instinct was to shout – no, his first instinct was to murder, and he was having to suppress that all the time, but shouting wouldn't have been far behind. Still, he didn't yield to his first or second instincts. Without turning to look at her, he seemed to quiet down and grow thoughtful, uncurling his fingers and tapping them against his thighs.

"All right," he said at last. "Go back a bit. You think you can beat her?"

"Do you even want me to?" said Ellini. "I mean, she's your wife – wouldn't you be just as angry with me if I'd had a plan for hurting her?"

Robin turned and shook his head incredulously. "That's it, is it? She's my wife? The normal rules of husband and wife apply?"

"I don't know anything to the contrary," she protested.

"Don't pretend you haven't been speculating!"

"All right then, tell me! Did she do something to you? Do you hate her?"

"Hate doesn't even-" Robin broke off and then shut his eyes, as though forcing himself to be calm. She even saw him reach in between the buttons of his shirt and run his finger over one of the notches.

"Very well," he sighed, motioning towards the vaulting horse. "Have a seat. This is one of those imaginative exercises, Ellie. Like when I told you to put yourself in the place of the knife-throwing girl at the circus."

Ellini perched on the vaulting horse, between the handles, and swung her legs nervously. She didn't like imagining things anymore. And he started off ridiculously enough:

"Imagine what it's like to be locked up."

She couldn't help laughing, but Robin gave her a dignified frown and said, "I'm not finished yet. Imagine what it's like to be locked up inside your head, so you're not in control anymore. And your gaoler is in love with you – so insanely, dotingly in love that it terrifies you. Imagine she treats you like an adorable baby, and makes you act like an adorable baby. Imagine that, out of sheer self-defence, you start to like it." 

"And you try to pretend you're still yourself. You try to keep pace with your old life. You find refuge, and a scrap of independence, with two young people who look up to you like a father. But they turn on you. They fall in love with each other and run away together, leaving you bleeding to death on the lawns outside the Bibliotheque Mazarine. And then your gaoler stands over you and says, 'Poor baby – you see what happens when you care for anyone but me?' And you beg her to make you a prisoner again. For a while, she does, but you're not as much fun when you don't fight to be free. So in the end, she leaves you too. What have you got left after that? What's freedom supposed to mean to you when you didn't choose it?"

Ellini just stared at him. She found this short, selective biography of Robin Crake quite touching. You could almost feel sorry for him, if you didn't know about the gaps he was leaping over. If you didn't know, for example, that the young people who'd 'turned on him' had only wanted to be free. They'd been tricked and kept apart and starved of each other's company for four years just because he couldn't stand to see them loving each other as much as they loved him.

And the fact that he was still so deluded, even after seeing the error of his ways – even after all that posthumous remorse had surged through him and made him cut himself two hundred odd times – made her feel almost maternal towards him. Some kind of revolution was going on in his sensibilities, but it wasn't complete, because he was still a child, still frozen exactly where he'd been when life had started to go wrong for him. God, nothing was as sad as a man who had a conscience but didn't know how to do anything about it!

Poor little monster, she thought, and almost reached out her hand to him. But she changed her mind in mid-air, just as he always did, and drew her arm in.

Robin didn't seem to notice. He was still angry with her, perhaps – or angry with the story. "Now you know why I hate Myrrha and why I hate Jack," he said.

"Then why don't you hate me?"

For a moment, he looked at her with hostile disbelief. "You really don't-?" 

Then he broke off, laughed, and shut his eyes again – a strange succession of emotions that she couldn't, for the moment, understand.

"Well, I tried," he said at last. "I tried to hate you. Think of it as pragmatism, if you like. I always back the winner, Ellie. You'll never find me on the losing side. And, like I said, there's something different about you. It's not new, it's just–" he waved his hand "–facing a different direction. All that steely ruthlessness you usually turn on yourself...just imagine what it could do if it was somebody else's problem."