I poured out more tea and we took sips of the overly bitter but at least hot liquid. “Then he was sent to prison?”

“Yeah.” Bessie held her cup in both hands. “Bet you think I’m going to say he were innocent, and wrongly banged up, but no. Jack did it. Was a fair cop, as they say.”

“What exactly did he do?” I added a touch of sugar to my cup, but I doubted it’d cut the musty taste of the cheap tea. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Stole a hammer and some other tools. Daft sod. Well, he wanted to be a carpenter, didn’t he? But you have to have tools, or no one will hire you. A man left his box just sitting there, and Jack helped himself. He wasn’t a very good criminal, was he, because he got caught five minutes later. But tools is expensive, so Jack got two years in the Steel.”

A grim place. A rhyme I’d learned as a child told of the devil getting ideas to improve cells in hell from Coldbath Fields. “His sentence is up in six months, I heard the guard say.”

“Yeah. But I think the guv’nor should let him go, for what he did today.” She glared, her belligerence returning. “Helping the hurt men and all, guards and prisoners alike. Jack could have run away, but he didn’t, did he?”

Her baleful look told me she thought I’d disagree, but I had much sympathy for Jack.

“I too hope that this incident lessens his sentence.” My statement surprised but mollified her, and Bessie resumed her tea. “Now, why were you there, Bessie? You were terribly out of sorts today. Did you know the explosion would happen?”

Now she looked amazed. “Me? How could I know? Don’t you be putting the finger on me, Mrs. Holloway. I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to break down a wall, and neither would Jack. He’s a builder, yeah, but he nails up cornices or hinges doors, that sort of thing. He wouldn’t know nothing about blowing things up.”

“Then why were you so worried today?”

Bessie sighed. She noisily slurped tea, but when she met my gaze again, the fight had gone out of her.

“I were trying to take a message to him. Nothing that would get him into trouble, just me telling him I was well and we’d be together soon. I do that once in a while, and he sends me a message back. Only, I hadn’t heard from him in some weeks, and I started to be afraid.”

“That he was ill?”