“Don’t be so damned unhelpful,” Ridley said, then scowled through the window at a city being pounded by rain. Grace Street was almost empty. There was just one carriage clattering toward Capitol Square and two Negroes sheltering in the doorway of the Methodist Church. “Does Mrs. Richardson have anyone who can get rid of babies?” Ridley turned to ask. Mrs. Richardson presided over the brothel in which his half-brother had such a significant investment.

Delaney gave a delicate shrug that might have signified almost anything.

“Mind you,” Ridley went on, “Sally wants to keep the bastard, and she says if I won’t help her then she’ll tell Washington Faulconer about me. And she says she’ll tell her father. You know what he’ll do to me?”

“I don’t suppose he’ll choose to have a prayer meeting with you,” Delaney chuckled. “Why don’t you take the inconvenient bitch down to the Tredegar works and leave her on a spoil heap?” The Tredegar Iron Works by the James River was Richmond’s filthiest, darkest and grimmest place, and not many enquiries were made about the tragedies that occurred around its satanic edges. Men died in fights, whores were knifed in its alleys, and dead or dying babies were abandoned in its filthy canals. It was a corner of hell in downtown Richmond.

“I’m not a murderer,” Ridley said sullenly, though in truth he had considered some such extraordinary and saving act of violence, but he was much too frightened of Sally Truslow who, he suspected, was hiding a gun somewhere among her property. She had come to him three nights before, arriving at Belvedere Delaney’s rooms in the early evening. Delaney had been in Williamsburg, swearing a will, so Ridley had been alone in the apartment when Sally had rung the front bell. He had heard a commotion at the front door and gone downstairs to find George, his brother’s house slave, confronting a bedraggled, wet and angry Sally. She had pushed past George who, with his customary and dignified politeness, had been trying to keep her from entering the house. “Tell this nigger to keep his hands off me,” she screamed at Ridley.

“It’s all right, George. She’s my cousin,” Ridley had said, then had arranged for Sally’s bedraggled horse to be stabled and for Sally herself to be shown upstairs to his brother’s parlor. “What the hell are you doing here?” he had asked her in horror.