It is not as if Caleb cared for him, or was even grateful for the help Angus gave him. It made me so angry . . . and then that distressed him. He said he could not help it. Caleb was his brother, his twin, and he was bound by a tie which he could not break. When I realized how it hurt him, I ceased to speak of it.”

She looked down again, ignoring her tea, her eyes brimming with tears.

“If you had known Angus, you would understand. There was a goodness in him, an honor unlike anyone else I have known. The only other man as gentle, and with anything like the same inward love of what is good, is Mr. Niven. I think that is why they were friends, and why I feel I can turn to him now.

Angus would have understood that.”

There was nothing further to pursue, except facts, and Hester was not even sure what use they would be. Nevertheless she asked Genevieve precisely in which street she had grown up, where and when she had first met Caleb, how she had met Angus, and all she could remember of that early relationship.

“I barely knew Caleb!” she said bitterly. “I swear to you that is the truth. He was a violent man, even for Limehouse. He frightened me. I think he frightened everyone. He was so like Angus in build and feature, and yet so unlike him in nature that no one could mistake one for the other. The way he walked, the way he stood, his voice, everything was wild and . . .

I don't know how to describe it.” She frowned, struggling with recollection. “As if he were always angry, as if there were something inside him so full of rage it was held in only by the frailest thread, and any provocation at all and it would explode and be free to hurt and destroy whatever stood in its path.” Hester did not interrupt her, but quietly sipped her tea and watched Genevieve's face.

“I suppose he must have had a gentler side,” Genevieve went on, her voice lower. “That poor creature Selina seemed to have cared for him.” She bit her lip. “I don't know why I speak of her like that. I started in the same place, just three streets away. I could easily have been there now, if I had never met Angus, and he had not had the patience and the love to teach me how to better myself, to speak well enough to pass as respectable, if not as a lady.”