“He believes it. It is not so?”

Trevelyan shrugged, suddenly indifferent.

“No matter now.” He rose, restless, and went to stand by the bed again. He could not keep from touching her, Grey saw; his fingers lifted a damp wisp of hair away from her cheek and smoothed it back behind her ear. She stirred in her sleep, eyelids fluttering, and Trevelyan took her hand, kneeling down to murmur to her, stroking her knuckles with his thumb.

Scanlon was watching, too, Grey saw. The apothecary had started brewing some potion over a spirit lamp; a bitter-smelling steam began to rise from the pot, fogging the windows. Glancing back toward the bed, he saw that England had fallen far behind by now; only a narrow hump of land was still visible through the windows, above the roiling sea.

“And you, Mr. Scanlon,” Grey said, rising, and moving carefully toward the apothecary, cup in hand. “How do you find yourself entangled in this affair?”

The Irishman gave him a wry look.

“Ah, and isn’t love a grand bitch, then?”

“I daresay. You would be referring to the present Mrs. Scanlon, I collect?”

“Francie, aye.” A warmth glowed in the Irishman’s eyes as he spoke his wife’s name. “We took up together, her and me, after her wretch of a husband left. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t marry, though she’d have liked it. But then the bastard comes back!”

The apothecary’s big clean hands curled up into fists at the thought.

“Waited until I was out, the shite. I come back from tending to an ague, and what do I find but my Francie on the floor, a-welter in her own blood and her precious face smashed in—” He stopped abruptly, trembling with recalled rage.

“There was a man bent over her; I thought he’d done it, and went for him. I’d have killed him, sure, had Francie not come round enough to wheeze out to me as it weren’t him but Tim O’Connell who’d beaten her.”

The man was Jack Byrd, who had followed O’Connell to the apothecary’s shop, and then, hearing the sounds of violence and a woman screaming, had rushed up the stairs, surprising Tim O’Connell and driving him away.

“Bless him, he was in time to save her life,” Scanlon said, crossing himself. “And I said to him, I did, that he was free of me and all I had, for what he’d done, though he’d take no reward for it.”

At this, Grey swung around to Trevelyan, who had risen from his own wife’s side and come to rejoin them.

“A very useful fellow, Jack Byrd,” Grey said. “It seems to run in the family.”

Trevelyan nodded.

“I gather so. That was Tom Byrd I heard in the corridor outside?”

Grey nodded in turn, but was impatient to return to the main story.

“Yes. Why on earth did O’Connell come back to his wife, do you know?”

Trevelyan and the apothecary exchanged glances, but it was Trevelyan who answered.