Turning his back on Bates, Joseph slipped his arms into his coat. Although the man had become like a father, replacing the one Joseph had lost, he couldn’t reconcile himself to Bates’s life.

They’d known each other since Joseph had attended Harrow School, where Dr. Bates had served as the parochial surgeon. Bates had been there when Joseph received the news his family had taken ill with cholera during an epidemic that had ravaged London. And Bates had been there when Joseph learned his mother, father, and brother had all succumbed.

After Joseph finished his studies at Oxford, Bates had been the one to support him when he’d sought to attend the Royal College of Physicians. None of the members of the peerage had understood how the titled Lord Colville, Baron of Wiltshire, could cast aside his duty to Parliament and to the other privileges of his station to pursue a commoner’s work of becoming a physician.

His fellow gentry hadn’t concerned themselves over the fact that a title and his family’s estate were never meant to be his as second-born son. They hadn’t cared that he’d sensed God’s call to do something more with his life than smoke cigars and drink brandy at The London Tavern and eat turtle cutlets in the Surrey Oak dining room. They certainly hadn’t understood his decision to become a doctor and then later to become a ship’s surgeon for a yearlong voyage to India. He’d caused more gossip when, shortly after his return, he left again as the ship’s surgeon on a tea clipper to Shanghai.

Joseph couldn’t explain the choices he’d made, couldn’t explain what was driving him. All he knew was that he’d needed to go. And all he knew now was that he’d have to leave again. Soon.

Since the Kate Carnie had docked last month, the unsettled urge had been pacing back and forth inside him, like one of the caged tigers he’d seen in India, always restless, always anxious to prowl, as if that could somehow dispel the darkness hovering deep in his soul.

Silence settled about the office, heightening the sharp patter of raindrops against the boarded window. The May evening had grown in length, but the shadows of night had crept in with the return of rain. The lantern at the center of the desk failed to drive away the gloom.

Joseph rolled his shoulders in an attempt to release the tension that had built in his chest as he’d tended one poor soul after another all day. But the tension only tightened, like violin strings being tuned under a maestro’s adept fingers. He forced himself to pivot and face Bates. His friend deserved the truth from him.