“Saw your prick, over the piss-pots at the Beefsteak,” he replied bluntly. It seemed absurd now that he should have suffered a moment’s shame or hesitation in the matter. And yet—would it have made a difference, if he had spoken out at once?

Trevelyan gave a small grunt of surprise.

“Did you? I do not even recall seeing you there. But I suppose I was distracted.”

He was clearly distracted now; his step had slowed, and a seaman carrying a small cask was obliged to swerve in order to avoid collision. Grey took Trevelyan by the sleeve and led him into the lee of the forward mast, where a huge water barrel stood, a tin cup attached to it by a narrow chain.

Grey gulped water from the cup, even in his depression taking some pleasure from the feel of it, cool in his mouth. It was the first thing he had been able to taste properly in days.

“That must have been . . .” Trevelyan squinted, calculating. “Early June—the sixth?”

“About that. Does it matter?”

Trevelyan shrugged and took the dipper.

“Not really. It’s only that that was when I first noticed the sore myself.”

“Rather a shock, I suppose,” Grey said.

“Rather,” Trevelyan replied dryly. He drank, then dropped the tin cup back into the barrel.

“Perhaps it would have been better to say nothing,” the Cornishman went on, as though to himself. “But . . . no. That wouldn’t have done.” He waved a hand, dismissing whatever his thought had been.

“I could scarcely believe it. Went about in a daze for the rest of the day, and spent the night wondering what to do—but I knew it was Mayrhofer; it had to be.”

Looking up, he caught sight of Grey’s face, and a wry smile broke out upon his own.

“No, not directly. Through Maria. I had shared no woman’s bed since I began with her, and that was more than a year before. But clearly she had been infected by her whore-mongering bastard of a husband; she was innocent.”

Not only innocent, but clearly ignorant as well. Not wishing to confront her with his discovery at once, Trevelyan had gone in search of her doctor instead.

“I said that she had lost a child, just before I met her? I got the doctor who attended her to talk; he confirmed that the child had been malformed, owing to the mother’s syphilitic condition—but naturally he had kept quiet about that.”

Trevelyan’s fingers drummed restlessly on the lid of the barrel.

“The child was born malformed, but alive—it died in the cradle, a day after birth. Mayrhofer smothered it, wishing neither to be burdened by it nor to have his wife learn the cause of its misfortune.”

Grey felt his stomach contract.

“How do you know this?”

Trevelyan rubbed a hand over his face, as though tired.