There was a noise outside the women’s clinic in Coldbath Square. Hester was on night duty. She turned from the stove as the street door opened, the wood still in her hand. Three women stood in the entrance, half supporting each other. Their cheap clothes were torn and splattered with blood, their faces streaked with it, skin yellow in the light from the gas lamp on the wall. One of them, her fair hair coming loose from an untidy knot, held her left hand as if she feared the wrist were broken.

The middle woman was taller, her dark hair loose, and she was gasping, finding it difficult to get her breath. There was blood on the torn front of her satin dress and smeared across her high cheekbones.

The third woman was older, well into her thirties, and there were bruises purpling on her arms, her neck, and her jaw.

“Hey, missus!” she said, urging the others inside, into the warmth of the long room with its scrubbed board floor and whitewashed walls. “Mrs. Monk, yer gotter give us an ’and again. Kitty ’ere’s in a right mess. An’ me, an’ all. An’ I think as Lizzie’s broke ’er wrist.”

Hester put down the wood and came forward, glancing only once behind her to make sure that Margaret was already getting hot water, cloths, bandages, and the herbs to steep, which would make cleaning the wounds easier and less painful. It was the purpose of this place to care for women of the streets who were injured or ill, but who could not pay a doctor and would be turned away from more respectable charities. It had been the idea of her friend Callandra Daviot, and Callandra had provided the initial funds before events in her personal life had taken her out of London. It was through her also that Hester had met Margaret Ballinger, desperate to escape a respectable but uninteresting proposal of marriage. Her undertaking work like this had alarmed the gentleman in question so much he had at the last moment balked at making the offer, to Margaret’s relief and her mother’s chagrin.

Now Hester guided the first woman to one of the chairs in the center of the floor beside the table. “Come in, Nell,” she urged. “Sit down.” She shook her head. “Did Willie beat you again? Surely you could find a better man?” She looked at the bruises on Nell’s arms, plainly made by a gripping hand.