“Reinhardt admitted it to her—to Maria. I brought the doctor to her, you see; forced him to tell her what he had told me. I thought—if she knew what Mayrhofer had done, infecting her, dooming their child, that perhaps she would leave him.”

She did not. Hearing out the doctor in numb silence, she had sat for a long time, considering, and then asked both Trevelyan and the doctor to go; she would be alone.

She had stayed alone for a week. Her husband was away, and she saw no one save the servants who brought her meals—all sent away, untouched.

“She thought of self-murder, she told me,” Trevelyan said, staring out toward the endless sea. “Better, she thought, to end it cleanly than to die slowly, in such fashion. Have you ever seen someone dying of the syphilis, Grey?”

“Yes,” Grey said, the bad taste creeping back into his mouth. “In Bedlam.”

One in particular, a man whose disease had deprived him both of nose and balance, so that he reeled drunkenly across the floor, crashing helplessly into the other inmates, foot stuck in a night bucket, tears and snot streaming over his rutted face. He could but hope that the syphilis had taken the man’s reason, as well, so that he was in ignorance of his situation.

He looked then at Trevelyan, envisioning for the first time that clever, narrow face, ruined and drooling. It would happen, he realized with a small shock. The only question was how long it might be before the symptoms became clear.

“If it were me, I might think of suicide, too,” he said.

Trevelyan met his eyes, then smiled ruefully.

“Would you? We are different, then,” he said, with no tone of judgment in the observation. “That course never occurred to me, until Maria showed me her pistol, and told me what she had been thinking.”

“You thought only of how the fact might be used to separate the lady from her husband?” Grey said, hearing the edge in his own voice.

“No,” Trevelyan replied, seeming unoffended. “Though that had been my goal since I met her; I did not propose to give it up. I tried to see her, after she had sent me away, but she would not receive me.”

Instead, Trevelyan had set himself to discover what remedy might be available.

“Jack Byrd knew of the difficulty; it was he who informed me that Finbar Scanlon seemed an able man in such matters. He had gone back to the apothecary’s shop, to inquire after Mrs. O’Connell’s welfare, and had become well acquainted with Scanlon, you see.”