“They will indeed,” I said. “Why don’t you work out how much is needed?”

Tess gaped at me, as this was the first instance I’d implied she could come up with a recipe on her own. She closed her mouth then, resolution in her eyes, and began to assess the amount of mushrooms versus dill.

Mr. Davis turned a page of the evening paper. Every night he read it through carefully before pressing it and taking it upstairs for the master when he came home.

“Is this the wall that fell on you, Mrs. Holloway?” He rested both arms on the newspaper, white shirt protected by sleeve guards.

I bent over his shoulder to see a large story spread across an entire page, complete with a sketch of the broken wall, dust, and unfortunate men staggering from the rubble. The picture contained a guard and wildly gesturing constables. Behind the wall was a hint of the buildings, labeled by the journalist as The Coldbath Fields House of Correction.

“Says it was the work of Fenians,” Mr. Davis said, then began to read. “‘Our correspondent reports that two incendiary devices were placed, one on the north wall between prison grounds and the street, and one on the west side, in Phoenix Street. Nate O’Reilly, a Fenian leader, was spirited away in the confusion, which, the police believe, was the intent of the explosion.’”

“Fenians?” I asked breathlessly.

I recalled Daniel in the midst of the chaos—the cold-eyed man asking him a question, and Daniel reluctantly shaking his head.

16

I continued to read over Mr. Davis’s shoulder, but the story did not give much more information. The event was so recent I was certain the breathless journalist had scribbled what he could, the artist had dashed off a picture, and both had been shoved into the evening newspaper.

No one had been killed by the blasts, I saw, but a score of men had been severely injured. Except for the man O’Reilly, no other prisoners had escaped.

“Them Fenians are a world of trouble,” Tess said as she chopped dill. “Blowing things up, shooting at the queen, hurting anyone who happens to be in the way. To the devil with the lot of them, I say.”

“I agree,” Mr. Davis said. “They want Ireland to be independent, and it makes ’em desperate. But there’s better ways to do it than chucking incendiaries at innocent people.”

Mrs. Redfern, who’d paused to take in the tale, joined the debate about what best to do with the Fenians. The three of them came up with rather bloodthirsty solutions.