And the final thought: Abigail was not ashamed of Stephen for having interceded on behalf of his sisters. And if Abigail did not condemn him…

“I killed him,” Stephen said. “Put a tot of rat poison in his gin. It took a while, but he eventually succumbed and everybody attributed his passing to bad drink.”

“You killed him.” A question lurked in that statement. Perhaps a Why? or an Are you sure?

“Jack was planning to sell Althea and Constance to a brothel, and the buyer was coming around with money at the end of the week. I knew with Jack dead you’d be summoned off whatever clerk’s stool or fishing boat you were working on, because nobody wanted three more useless children depending on the parish. The neighbors kept us until you showed up.”

Some emotion ought to suffuse this recitation, but all Stephen could muster was relief to be dealing in the truth.

“You put rat poison in his gin. I am…” Quinn stared at the foot Stephen had propped on the hassock. “I am…I am sorry.”

Whatever Stephen might have expected his brother to say—I am disappointed, surprised, not surprised—I am sorry hadn’t been on the list.

“I made the decision, Quinn. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I am sorry you did not feel you could tell me this. Sorry I never thought to ask. Sorry that at the age of eight, you were put in the position where such a desperate measure was the logical course. You did the right thing.”

The night was apparently to be full of surprises. “I took my father’s life. How can that have been the right thing to do?” Stephen had never quite asked that question, but it had haunted the remains of his childhood and the entirety of his adolescence. Perhaps it haunted him still.

“Jack bragged about breaking your leg,” Quinn said, “about making a proper beggar boy of you and teaching you proper respect for your sire. Do you recall the game he’d play, tossing a crust of bread on the floor and making the three of you fight each other for it?”

“You never played.”

“And then you refused to play, though you were barely breeched. Constance and Althea learned to break the crust in half, and Jack took to eating the food in front of us instead. His own hungry children stood before him, ragged and shivering, and he’d eat half a loaf of bread bite by bite and laugh at us and tell us we should be out looking for work. Jane has likened him to a mad dog, one that menaces all other creatures and is deserving of a bullet to the brain.”

“Jane said that?”

Quinn stared into the fire, doubtless seeing memories of his own childhood. “Jack was an order of evil for which not even the Bible has a description. I had planned to kill him myself, but as the most likely suspect, I hadn’t devised a way to evade blame. I wasn’t about to leave you three without an older brother to fend for you. How ironic, that I should end up in Newgate for murder anyway.”