“What was your father like?” Hester asked, then instantly regretted it. It was a stupid question. What does any woman say her dead father was like? Everything she wanted him to be, reality blurred by loss, loyalty, the sense of decency that says you speak no ill of the dead. “I mean, why might he have come to Leather Lane at night?” she amended.

Livia looked slightly embarrassed and defensive. “I don’t know. It must have been business of some kind.”

“What does your mother say?”

“We don’t discuss it,” Livia responded, as if it were the most usual thing to say. “Mama is an invalid. We try to keep anything troublesome or distressing from her. Jarvis . . . my brother . . . says he must have been going to meet someone, possibly to do with navvies, or something like that. My father owned a railway company. They have a new track which is almost completed. It will go all the way from the dockside here in London up to Derby. And we have a factory near Liverpool as well, for making railway wagons. Perhaps he was seeing someone about laborers, or steel, or that kind of thing?”

Hester could not meet her eyes and answer. That was not the sort of business people conducted in Leather Lane at night, but what use was there in pointing that out to Baltimore’s daughter? “These women wouldn’t know about that,” she said instead. “They scrape the best living they can by selling their bodies, and they pay a heavy price for it. . . .” She saw the incomprehension again. “You think they should be in factory labor? Sweatshops? Do you know what that pays?”

Livia hesitated. “No . . .”

“Or the hours?”

“No . . . but . . .”

“It’s honest, right?” There was an edge of scorn in her voice she had not intended, and she saw the sting of it in Livia’s face. “They can’t afford to be honest at one and sixpence a day for fourteen or fifteen hours’ work,” she said more gently, but still with the underlying anger—not for Livia but for the facts. She saw Livia’s eyes widen and her throat constrict. “Especially if they’ve got children to keep, or debts to pay,” she added. “They can make a pound or two every night on the streets, even after giving their pimp his cut.”

“But . . .” Livia started again, looking toward the curled-up outline of Fanny in the nearest bed.

“The risks? Injuries, disease, the unpleasantness of it?” Hester asked. “Go into a sweatshop sometime, see if you think it’s any better. They’re cramped, ill-lit, dirty, overcrowded. There’s just as much disease there. A different kind, maybe, but I’m not sure it’s any better. Dead is dead, whatever the cause.”

“Can’t you help me at all?” Livia said softly, shock and something like humility in her face. “At least ask them?”