And there wasn't any hope, but there was still compulsion. On the rare occasions when he had time to go to bed, he would lie on top of the covers, propped up on his elbow, recreating her in fervent detail, until he could swear that she was lying beside him, her black eyes open, absorbing the pain.

How different she was, this fantasy Ellini, to the one who had appeared in his dreams three months ago. And yet it was the stand-offish one he wanted. The fantasy-girl was docile and kind and came whenever he needed her, but he still longed for the angry, acid-tongued woman who had visited him that once and made him feel, for a fleeting second, like she wasn't dead.

So he set a trap to catch her. Not catch her as a hunter would – not detain her against her will – but just tempt her out of hiding, so that he could look at her again. He only wanted to look at her. He just wanted to feel, one more time, the conviction that she wasn't gone.

When he slept, he found himself going back to the dream-room in which he'd encountered her, staring at the door through which she'd come in. It was locked. He could alter the details of the bedroom – patch up the missing plaster in the walls, smooth over the jagged floorboards – but he couldn't unlock the door. Evidently, she could come to him, but he couldn't go to her.

This was a crushing blow to start with, because he didn't much feel like being patient, but since there was nothing else to do, he made the best of it. He did everything he could to make the room – the one thing he did have control over – somewhere she'd want to come.

And since India was the place where they'd been happiest, he made it an Indian room. This kept him occupied for several nights, pushing the walls out to make the space bigger, lengthening the windows until they were the long, latticed kind that opened onto a balcony, hanging a dreamy canopy of mosquito nets above the bed. 

In the end, he had a bedroom that wouldn't have looked out of place in the Arabian Nights. Perhaps the very room in which Scheherazade had whispered her stories to the Sultan. 

It was lit by those Indian lamps known as diyas – clay bowls filled with ghee, in which a single candle-wick floated. They were arrayed on the floor and on the tables, casting their light up to the painted ceiling.

He filled the dream room with anything and everything that might tempt her. The walls that weren't painted night-sky-blue were lined with bookshelves: green leather spines with gold lettering, like the books that had so enchanted her in the Bibliotheque Mazarine. He filled the air with the sound of cicadas and mosquitoes and minas until he could feel the homesickness pouring from his chest like blood.

And then he'd had the real stroke of brilliance. He needed a puzzle, like the clay doll – something intriguing and absorbing that would draw her out. A mess that she could pull together using her plentiful reserves of sympathy and imagination. Her previous act of sympathetic reassembling had been so strong that it had even assembled the inhabitants of the Faculty into a family.

That, in the end, was why he knew she would come back. Dead or not – angry or not – she was too tender-hearted to leave things in pieces.

And this was the strange part: he didn't plan the puzzle. He didn't build it up in stages, or experiment with different styles, as he had with the rest of the room. It just arrived fully-formed in his head – or, rather, fully unformed, because it was a jigsaw puzzle in hundreds of separate pieces, and he had no idea what kind of a scene they'd form when they were all fitted together.

He couldn't even decide whether it was a day-scene or a night-scene, except that there were lots of dark colours: charcoal and burgundy and orangey-brown, and here – just on this one piece, although maybe it was skirting the edges of some of the others – a perfect black.

He sat down at the table on which the pieces had arrived and set to work, determinedly not looking at the doorway opposite, and thinking 'patience, patience, patience' in a long, unbroken string that often made it quite hard for him to concentrate on the jigsaw puzzle.

And then there would be moments – whole hours, for all he knew – when he would become absorbed in the jigsaw, and then remember the door with a guilty start, as though he'd been neglecting it.

It was during one of these moments when a gloved hand reached over his shoulder, picked up one of the jigsaw pieces, and slotted it into place amongst its fellows, without a word of explanation or apology.

Jack's heart thudded in his chest. It kicked at his ribs like something mad and hungry come suddenly to life. But he didn't look up. Patiencepatiencepatiencepatience.

"And that one goes in the corner there," said a voice – oh god, her voice – motioning with the glove towards the piece he still had clutched in his hand.

Very slowly and deliberately, Jack put the jigsaw piece down in the place she had indicated. He tried to say 'thank you' in a light, casual, absent-minded tone, but wasn't sure, in the end, whether he had managed the tone or the 'thank you'.

"What's the picture supposed to be?" asked the voice.

"I don't know yet," said Jack, picking up another piece for something to do with his hands.

"You didn't dream the box it came in?"

"No."

"You couldn't have a try at dreaming it now?"

"I've had five or six tries. It seems like I'm not supposed to know."

There was a motion in the corner of his eye, and a rustle of fabric. She had sat down in the chair opposite him. He didn't hear what she said next, because he was so busy telling himself not to look up.

"I'm sorry?" he said, trying to draw the table-top in front of him into focus.

"It's extraordinary," she said. "I mean, I suppose it doesn't seem that fantastical, for a dream, but normally one dreams in whole structures and forgets about the details. You've gone the other way. Your mind created a picture, didn't tell you what it was, and broke it up into pieces that you can separate and rotate and fit together. Doesn't that strike you as an incredible feat of imaginative architecture?"

"Only if the pieces make up a complete picture in the end," said Jack.

He finally looked up. He had only meant it to be a quick glance, but his eyes got caught on her somehow, and he felt as though they'd be wrenched out of their sockets if he tried to look away. There was a lot to come to terms with – some of it painful, and some it just strange.

She wasn't dripping with blood like in his nightmares, or scantily-clad like in his fantasies. She was dressed quite sensibly – even fashionably – in a bustle dress of brown silk with a low, square neckline, and a black velvet choker at her throat.

And she seemed... what? More confident? More present? Certainly healthier. How could death make your cheeks glow like that?

Again, he had that sudden, half-conscious thought: It's not a dream. She's not dead. 

But the words were just sounds. He couldn't believe them. Because, if you believed something like that, and were proved wrong, it would be worse than all the preceding hurts put together.

And now he'd been staring at her for so long that he would probably have to say something about it.

"You look well, mouse," he said, dragging his eyes back to the jigsaw puzzle. "Happier, maybe."

"Couldn't very well be less 'appy, could I?"

He smiled. "Cocknified too. Are there cockneys in heaven?"

"I wouldn't know."

Jack started to search through the drawers under the table, absent-mindedly at first, and then with an increasing sense of urgency. Still, he kept smiling, because he really was happy – terrified and frustrated, but happy.

"I enjoy these uninformative interrogations," he told her. "Here, try this one: where have you been for the past three months?"

She leaned forward and planted her elbows on the table. "Where haven't I been?"

Jack chuckled, trying to keep his eyes level with hers, and not think about what was happening to that low, square neck-line as she leaned down. Where the fuck was the – ah, OK...

He pulled a belt out of the drawer, and saw a fleeting look of alarm cross her face.

"What's that for?"

He smiled patiently. "Not for you."

He wrapped the thick leather strap round both his wrists and pulled it taut with his teeth. "Gargotha taught me to do this," he mumbled, with the strap in his mouth. "Well, actually, what happened was that he did it with four hands and made me think about how it could be managed with two. It's a skill of his, making people think, but I don't think you'd like how he does it."

"I'm sure that's not necessary," she said, watching his struggles with a wary smile.

"Are you? That's nice."

"For starters, this is your dream, so I'm not sure any physical restraints would be effective. You could just dream the clasp unfastened, or dream the belt out of existence-"

"Never tell me that," said Jack.

She laughed – the first time he had heard her laugh since her death – and got up, walking to his side of the table and holding out her hands. "Come here," she said, taking his wrists and tightening the strap herself.

She pulled it much too tight, of course – she still had a lot of latent hostility towards him – but all he could think about was that her hands were on him. He couldn't feel her skin through the gloves, but the pressure – even the pain – made his heart hammer with excitement. He was surprised she couldn't see it thumping against the walls of his chest, making his shirt quake.

He wondered why she was only latently hostile – why she wasn't shouting and taunting like last time – why she was here at all, if not to torment him. But the answer turned up in his head fully-formed, just like the jigsaw.

She missed their conversations – those evenings when they had sat together in the Faculty lounge and played dice, or listened to gramophone records, or picked apart some Ancient Greek story while she put together her doll. They had been such necessary escapes for him that he had never considered how necessary they might be for her. Even without love, or sex, or understanding, there had been such fulfilment in those irrelevant conversations.

But they hadn't been irrelevant, that was the funny thing. Everything else he had thought of as mattering – the Faculty, his relationship with Alice Darwin – had been drug-addled distractions. He had only been his real self when he'd been chatting aimlessly with Ellini.

Did she feel the same way? As though talking to him was escaping and getting right to the heart of the matter at the same time? Obviously, she hated him – obviously, the sight of him brought back bad memories – but just here, where there were no difficult questions, no declarations of love, and very little eye-contact, perhaps she felt safe. As though she could be herself again.

The idea was one that split his chest with regret, but also delirious happiness. If it was right, it would entail a lot of sacrifices on his part. He wouldn't be able to look at her very much, or tell her how much he missed her – that would be too real, too relevant. It would frighten her. But he would be able to see her. She wouldn't be gone.

"Happy now?" she said, buckling the belt. "My other objection was going to be that you're really not the type to need this kind of restraint. You're a bastard, but not that kind. It was my fault last time. I made you desperate."

Jack just looked at her, resisting every urge to speak. He wanted to tell her that he was still desperate, that there wasn't a single type of bastardry he hadn't tried, or wouldn't try, to keep her with him.

That was the problem with being the hunter. It was painful enough to make you want to cry out when the little creatures assumed there was nothing to fear.

But you shot them anyway, because you were hungry.

"Is this one of the places we stayed in in India?" she asked, going back to her seat and letting her eyes wander about the room.

"It's a few of them," said Jack, with no small amount of pride. "I took the best bits of all the places we called home. The curtained bed from the Chattar Manzil, the lectern from our forest-tent, the dresser..."

She peered out of the latticed windows. "Does it still have the same view? The University Church?"

Jack grinned and stood up, unfastening the long windows with some difficulty, since his hands were still strapped together. "That's the best part." 

He pushed his way out onto the balcony, where the texture and warmth of the Indian air caressed his skin. They would caress hers too. Perhaps she would even smile.

The balcony, and the view beyond it, was what he'd worked hardest on. It couldn't be Lucknow, however happy he had been in Lucknow, because the whole place was poisoned now, in both their memories. He couldn't think of the Turkish Gate without shuddering – he couldn't even eat Turkish delight without shuddering. The associations of the associations were tainted.

So he had chosen a view of the Jal Mahal – the water palace in the middle of the Man Sagar lake in Jaipur. It was built of pale sandstone, with domed turrets in each of the four corners – those domes that stand above their open towers on thin pillars, and end up looking like a hot air balloon above its basket.

Of course, it was dark now, so you could only see the palace by its lighted windows, the lanterns in its archways and on its parapets, all of which made a beautiful, bright, moving smudge on the water.

Jack looked back, anxious for a reaction from her, and realized that she was still standing by the windows, her mouth forming a perfect little 'o'.

"It's the Jal Mahal," she said faintly.

"You liked that, didn't you?"

She turned to look at him, her astonishment melting into suspicion. "Is that what all this is? Bait to lure me in?"

"Oh, I didn't know what to use as bait," said Jack, leaning back against the balcony. "I never have. I just tried everything."

She frowned at him for a moment, and then switched her focus back to the palace behind him. "You're infuriatingly immune to despair, aren't you?"

Again, he stared at her and said nothing. Again, it was a question he would have very much liked to answer, but he didn't dare. That was the price of seeing her again. He had to pretend they were just casual, indifferent acquaintances. If he tried to tell her how he felt – what life was like now – she would run.

He could see her edging back into the bedroom, without turning round. It was the Jal Mahal perhaps, or the sensory bombardment of the Indian air – the scent of jasmine, the chirruping of cicadas. It was too real. She was starting to feel things. That was not why she'd come here.

"I'd better-"

"Will you come back?" said Jack, trying to keep his voice light and casual. "To help me with the jigsaw puzzle?"

"I don't know... You might not even dream about it again..."

"I want to see what it is," said Jack, forcing his shoulders into a shrug. "So do you, I expect, only you don't like to pry. Middle class girls are so adorable."

She glared at him, and his heart leapt. She had stopped backing away.

"Maybe I'll come back, maybe I won't," she said coolly. "Don't count on it, either way."

***

That was the beginning of their night-time meetings. It was the reason Jack looked forward to going to sleep, made time for it in his busy schedule, felt butterflies in the pit of his stomach whenever he saw the sun go down. 

Danvers and Manda put the improvement in his mood down to the fact that he was sleeping again, and he supposed that couldn't have hurt. But it was the jigsaw, the sound of her voice, the snatched glances at her face when she wasn't paying attention, that were pulling him back together.

She didn't come to him every night, but the anticipation was so intoxicating that he rarely had time to feel disappointed. Even when she didn't turn up, he would sit down to the jigsaw puzzle, idly fitting pieces together and breaking them apart, feeling his heart thud whenever he heard a noise.

He told her he couldn't keep his progress on the jigsaw. He told her each night he would arrive to find the pieces fully disassembled, just as they had been when they'd first appeared. But this wasn't true. He took the pieces apart himself after she left, to keep her coming back again. He was like Penelope, weaving and unweaving that tapestry, desperately trying to buy herself some time.

As long as Ellini was curious about the finished picture, she had a reason to return. He hoped it wasn't the only reason, but when you were trying to escape, there was nothing so handy as an excuse.

On the second night, he suggested that she tell a story.

"You told stories when you were piecing the doll back together, and this is basically the same thing." He paused, and sneaked a look at her, over the top of his jigsaw piece. "Why did you do that, by the way? To pass the time? To tell the doll what it was supposed to be?"

"To tell me what I was supposed to be," said Ellini.

"And what are you supposed to be?"

"Well, back then, brave. But now it doesn't really matter."

"Let's pretend I've got to be brave," said Jack, without looking up from his contemplation of the jigsaw puzzle. "What stories would you tell me?"

"You?" she said, laughing. It wasn't her warmest laugh. "What could possibly frighten you? Not having enough battles to fight, or enough barmaids to sleep with?"

He stared at her for a second, and then tried to shrug and smile. "Well, just pretend – just pretend I have feelings."

"I'm not sure I have that good an imagination."

"Someone else, then," said Jack, his voice hardening. "What stories would you tell someone else who needed to be brave?"

Ellini relented, and gave the matter some thought, rotating one of the jigsaw pieces in her gloved hands. It was the piece with the perfect blackness. It was already Jack's favourite, although it didn't seem to fit anywhere.

"Have I told you about Agamemnon and Orestes?" she asked. "The curse of the Royal House of Mycenae?"

Jack shook his head. "Tell me now."

"You know, how Orestes killed his mother, and was-"

"No, no, no," he said, holding up a hand to stem the tide of exposition. "Don't tell me what happens, tell me the story."

"How can I tell you the story without telling you what happens?"

"Tell me what happens by telling me the story," he insisted. "I want scene-setting, back-story, digressions, misdirection – rhetoric, mouse. How could the Ancient Greeks bear to have their stories told without it?"

He saw an unwilling smile flicker across her face, and bowed his head over the jigsaw puzzle. It was all he could do keep himself from turning over the table, snatching her up in his arms and trying to eat her, she was so adorable.

"Well, the good thing about the Ancient Greeks is that there are always two or three different versions of every myth," she said. "And a lot of the myths intersect with other myths-"

"Perfect," said Jack, taking a deep, calming breath. "Begin."

It was wonderful to hear her stories again, especially in a room which looked so much like Scheherazade's. Of course, this was a very English version of the Arabian Nights – a man and a woman fully clothed, barely even making eye-contact, assembling a jigsaw puzzle. The contrast between that and the dreamy, post-coital intimacy of Scheherazade and the Sultan sometimes made him sigh. But, in general, he was able to remain cheerful. More than cheerful.