Leicester Square, London, 1870:

After the orphanage, Jack was shunted from school-room to conservatoire to concert-hall, never staying in any of them longer than a few months. In seven years, the closest thing he'd had to a home was the suite of rooms at the top of the Alhambra – the huge, gaudy theatre that took up an entire side of Leicester Square.

Lots of wandering, dispossessed people thought of the Alhambra as their home. Lots of freaks had had their first taste of acceptance when they'd been applauded on that stage. On Sunday, there would be a performance by an eight-foot woman called Miranda, the Amazon Queen. But tonight, the only act on the bill – and, for the past five months, the only thing London had been able to talk about – was 'Spring-heeled Jack', less a virtuoso pianist and more a virtuoso personality.

It was his manners as much as his technique that made him famous. The way he would wink at girls in the front row in the middle of a concerto. The way he sometimes kicked away the piano-stool and played the tricky parts standing up.

They wouldn't have him at the Royal Opera House, because he had no respect, but he went down well enough at the Crystal Palace or the Alhambra. He was beloved by any audience composed of working or middle-class people, who liked the idea of a Street Arab growing up to play Schubert and Bach like one of the elite.

He had been a charity case, and now he was daring to run those cockney digits up and down a grand piano. And beautifully too – he didn't just play the classics, he made them jump for him, the way women would jump up and down outside his dressing-room door, trying to get his attention.

He was successful because he had charisma and a good story. The story was true, but it was Baby Jane, in collusion with a greasy theatre manager called Godwin, who packaged it, put a gloss on it, made it the story on everybody's lips. 

She had lots of contacts in the theatrical world – Henry, and his father before him, had been great patrons of the arts – and her high social standing made her ideally placed for setting trends. She even embellished the supernatural side of 'Spring-heeled Jack', by putting it about that he drank the blood of the willing young women who came back to his dressing-room at night – although whether this was to enhance his reputation or discourage the young women, Jack never found out.

He wasn't sure, sometimes, whether she was his friend or his enemy. They had become lovers when Jack was sixteen and she was thirty-three. She hadn't seemed to see any impropriety in that. In fact, Jack was fairly sure she had only waited until he was sixteen because he'd been in shared dormitories up till then. 

He didn't care. He found her fascinating, in a disturbing way, and he still owed her for her share in his mother's death. It was best to keep her close. For the same reason, he kept her letter to his mother folded up in the dinner jacket he wore for all his performances. He liked to think about how many times Jane had torn this coat off him and thrown it to the floor, without realizing her doom was sealed up inside it.

Tonight, he was in his apartments above the auditorium, at the very top of the Alhambra. These rooms had all the gilt and red velvet of the theatre downstairs, but the gold paint was thin, and the velvet couches were balding.

Jane, who knew how to suit the occasion, was wearing a dinner dress of exactly the same deep crimson. It would have been very impressive if her hair had been a proper red, but instead it was a gingery, peppery, strawberry-blonde, that clashed as horribly as all those tastes would clash if you mixed them together in a trifle.

She was reclining on the sofa next to an ice-bucket of champagne. There was always champagne within lolling, languorous reach of those fingers, although he never saw her position it there, or position herself near it. It was one of the effortless elegancies of the rich that really irked him.

She always drove him to the piano when she was in a talkative mood. He picked out chords to try and counterbalance her discord. And tonight, he was tired enough to turn to the deepest, darkest recesses of his heart. He played a tune he'd been working on since the days of the orphanage. It was never finished, and it consisted of several dislocated parts that he'd never dared to put together, for fear of being disappointed in the result. 

It was the darkness made song – or, anyway, it was a song that hinted at the darkness made song. It was his sheepish, frustrated, never-ending attempt to translate into music that curtain of dark hair.

News of the girl who had saved him in St Michaels' Church was hard to find. Her abduction had presumably been in the papers, but by the time Jack had emerged from the orphanage, the news had already been three years old. He didn't even have a name to aid his searches, and his description – dark-haired, beautiful, not-quite-Caucasian, in a way that was difficult to put your finger on – could have applied to millions of girls in the city.

He thought of her most when he was under the greenish gas-lights of the concert halls – or when some theatre manager who was all spectacle and no sense planted candelabras on top of the piano, bathing him with distracting, flickering light that made him want to claw out his own eyeballs. He thought of the darkness then, to stay sane – that curtain of black hair falling over his eyes and making everything all right.

"The fizz is from Henry," Jane was saying, while he picked hopelessly at the chords of his song. "He sent a whole case to the theatre. Even the stage-hands are drinking champagne tonight."

"He couldn't have sent something stronger?" Jack muttered, without looking up from the keys.

"Apparently, it's the third anniversary of your first performance here. I told him neither you nor the staff at the Alhambra would care, but he was determined to make some kind of gesture. I think he's hoping it'll come to the ears of that actress of his. He's watching her again at the Lyceum tonight – it must be the fourth or fifth time. I swear, he could give prompts to the actors if they forgot their lines."

Jack cast one last wistful look down at the keys, and then reached for the champagne she had placed on top of the piano for him. It was no good. It would have been no good anyway, probably, but there was something about Jane that made the darkness even harder to catch hold of.

"Does that mean he's going to marry her?" he said, taking a tentative sip of champagne. "And would you let him if he tried?"

"Oh, of course I'd let him." She had an incurable habit of gesturing with her glass whenever she spoke – waving it for emphasis until you became quite anxious for its contents. "I'm not completely heartless, although I do find it hard to follow when he says he's not good enough for her." 

Her voice got higher, and she clasped her free hand to her chest, as she always did when she was protesting her innocence. "I just think it would be a good idea if someone pointed out to him that a man with a house in Hampstead and an estate in Derbyshire seldom has to worry about whether he's good enough for a fishmonger's daughter. But there you are. If he likes her, he likes her. And I told him she'd be glad to have him. I told him to send her two dozen roses and a diamond necklace, but he just said something about how he shuddered to think how many other rich men had done the same thing – gazing at her from their private boxes, trying to persuade her to part with her honour for a handful of gaudy stones. I said, if that was the case, then she and her honour had almost certainly parted company already, and she'd be only too glad of a chance to settle down."

Jack laughed softly, but she remonstrated with her champagne glass again, almost spilling some in her outrage. "What do you think he said to that?"

"I think he walked out."

"Not without telling me I ought to be ashamed of myself." She swirled the champagne more gently now, listening to its hushed, gossipy fizz. "Have you seen his actress? In – oh, what's her new one – she's Rosalind, isn't she? In As You Like It?"

"I've seen it."

"What did you think?"

"She was fucking exquisite," said Jack. He chose both those words – fucking and exquisite – to irritate her, but she pretended it was just the foul language that had put her out of temper.

"You'll always be a Street Arab, won't you?" she said, clenching her jaw.

"In my heart."

"Well, thank heavens you're not still a Street Arab in your pocket."

Jack took another sip of champagne, noticing for the first time that it was very good, and sparing a warm thought for Henry, who had unknowingly armed him with enough alcohol to endure his sister for the evening.

He liked Henry. Henry talked about Jack's mother with his eyes permanently fixed on the floor, so Jack didn't have to feign indifference, or pretend he wasn't ravenous for every word.

What he didn't like about Henry was the distance that existed between them. He'd been aware of it even as an eleven-year-old, when he'd first met the Tilneys in that piano-stuffed pantry. Although, back then, it had been funny – his red, serious face, radiant with ideas it didn't know how to articulate.

And, yes, it could still be funny – it was funny tonight, to think that he still believed that ravishing actress of his was a virgin, and didn't want to be bought with diamonds. But Henry always thought the best of people, and Jack had seen enough of his family to know that he must have learned that from Elizabeth Barrett.

For a while, he had argued that it was easy to see the best in people when you'd grown up in a fine house, received the best education, and never had to struggle to put bread on the table. But a few months' acquaintance with Henry made you realize that it was actually harder for him than it was for anybody else, because everyone was trying to rob him, all the time. They'd heard of his fortune, and his kindness to charitable foundations, and they wrote to him with their hard-luck stories – real hard-luck stories, in most cases, but the cash he forked over was almost always spent on drink. Once or twice, Jane had been able to prove this to him, but he still went on – stubbornly, painfully, with none of the joy you'd get from the genuinely oblivious – believing in the nobility of the human spirit. 

He believed in it the way Jack believed in the girl with the curtain of dark hair: he didn't know where it was, or whether he would ever see it again, but one glimpse had been enough to ensure he would dedicate the rest of his life to it.

Jack could read his mother's letters and set fire to charitable foundations in Ealing till he was blue in the face, but Henry was her real son. Henry had inherited something from her. Jack was just a younger and more-frequently-sober version of William Cade.

Jane poured herself another champagne. "It was your mother who made him so ridiculous," she said, as though she had read Jack's mind. 

His fingers curled slightly, but he gave no other indication of his mood.

"When she wasn't making us practise our scales or play interminable dirges, she read chivalric romances to us – stories of knights errant, performing impossible tasks for a brief, chaste glimpse of their ladies. I never met someone so in love with the idea of self-sacrifice. It didn't surprise me in the least when I heard she'd married that reprehensible man just to keep her baby."

"I'm half that reprehensible man, you know."

Jane chucked him fondly under the chin. "You're entirely a reprehensible man, darling – just a reprehensible man of a different stripe." She went back to her champagne, and he caught the following sentence as a careless afterthought, half-buried in fizz: "Let's just say that, when your mother martyred herself for love, I don't think you were quite what she had in mind."

Jack had heard enough. He took the glass out of her hand and, smiling the hard, bright smile of the theatre, said, "Come to bed, Baby Jane."

***

She was more smug and shrill and shiny-faced than ever afterwards – so much so that Jack went back to the half-melted ice-bucket and fished out the remains of the champagne.

He awoke to a headache, and a world that was washed-out and grainy in the light of the sun. Theatres never really looked right without the gas-lights to smooth over their incongruities. From under the floorboards came the tittering and stamping of chorus girls as they gathered for their morning rehearsal.

Jane, who was already sliding on her stockings, complained about how inconsiderate it was.

"I don't know how you can live here. Don't they keep some quieter apartments for their more profitable performers? You're making them at least a hundred pounds a night – you'd think that could buy a few minutes' silence from a chorus girl."

Jack – who knew exactly what it could buy from a chorus girl – said nothing. He groped around under the bed for the champagne bottle, only to find it empty.

"And that reminds me – tell Godwin you won't be able to make the Edinburgh performances, will you? Something's come up, and I need you in London."

Jack groaned. He had been looking forward to the Northern Tour. It was a chance to breathe some air that wasn't London's for the first time in his life, and Jane had too many social engagements to follow him, so he would have been free of her for three solid months. He should have known it was too good to be true.

"What's come up?"

She shook the wrinkles out of her dress, and said briskly, "We have to get married."

"I'm sorry?"

"Don't make a fuss," she said, throwing the dress over her knee to smooth out its creases. "I made a slight mistake with the timing of one of our-" The rest of the sentence was swallowed up as she lifted the skirts over her head, and the only thing he caught when she emerged was: "-so there's going to be a child."

Jack said nothing. He could hear a faint, seductive whispering, almost on the edge of hearing – that voice that never quite left him, even in the thunder of the applause – the one which reminded him that this was the world that had chewed his mother up and spat her out, and any flirtation with it must of necessity end in violence.

"Don't worry, it won't change anything," said Jane, now arranging the bows and ribbons on her bodice. "I can give it to a wet-nurse as soon as it's born, but it will start to cause comment if we're not married."

"You've changed your mind about me," said Jack softly.

"No, I haven't," she said, looking up at him for the first time since they'd started this conversation. "I always knew we were perfectly matched. But you can understand my hesitation to marry you, darling. A Street-Arab-turned-concert-pianist was not exactly what my mother had in mind when she told me to choose my future husband with care! You and I don't suffer from Henry's romantic delusions, after all."

Oh, how it fed his demons to hear her say they were perfectly matched! It chilled and excited him – because, yes, it meant that he could never find shelter with the two tender, innocent women he was always thinking about, but it also meant he had no responsibility to be merciful. If he was just like Jane, then he could treat her just as Jane had treated his mother.

"No, I mean you've changed your mind about me since you first learned of my existence," he said, hunting through the discarded clothes of the night before. "Since you said – oh, what was it? – 'any child of that brute William will no doubt be exactly like him'."

The uncertainty was just for effect – he knew the letter off-by-heart – but he couldn't help his theatrical training. When he found his dinner-jacket next to the empty champagne bottle, and – at long last – pulled out the paper that had nestled next to his heart through all those performances, he read it out slowly and tonelessly, savouring every word.

It was another performance. It was the truth, but it was still a performance, because everything was with them. She seemed to know it, too, because she didn't interrupt. He had never known her to stay silent this long. She fumed and flushed, but she let him get to the end, where he laid a sardonic stress on the words 'Your friend always – Baby Jane'.

Eventually, she whispered, with her hands balled up into fists, "I was seventeen."

"What would you advise her to do now?"

Jane glared at him, and then tossed her had defiantly. "All right. And what's wrong with that? I have no doubt that he forced her – why shouldn't I advise her to get rid of his wretched spawn?"

She eyed him significantly when she said those last words, as though she'd never realized before how apt the description was. She couldn't have known that he was glad to be a wretched spawn – glad, for once in his life, to be William Cade's son – because how could Elizabeth Barrett's son have done what he was about to do to her?

"Because she told you she wanted to keep her baby," said Jack, in the same level voice in which he'd read the letter. "She said she'd do anything to keep her baby."

"Well, she had no right to want it! It was disgusting! Preaching to us about knights errant and then begging me to help her keep an illegitimate child! And you notice she didn't write to Henry – she was too proud to write to Henry!"

"She thought another woman would sympathize," said Jack. "I'll admit, it was naïve, but I still have some hopes that you'll learn to sympathize, Baby Jane, because I'm not marrying you. I suggest you find another Street Arab, or take your own advice and head down to Harley Street."

"You bastard."

"Oh no," said Jack, laughing. "Born in wedlock, thanks to you. Bill Cade's legitimate son. Can you imagine how proud that makes me?"

"I'll ruin you-"

"Oh, come on, Jane. How could you ruin that?"