And how wickedly clever of the men in the Exalted Brethren of Rack and Ruin to employ resurrectionists to sell their victims to hospitals or anatomy schools. Lost among the abandoned suicides and the criminals and the unclaimed poor.

“Should we catch them in the act?” I asked. “We can arrest them by law.”

“And then what?” Evan said. “We cannot take them to Bow Street. We have just seen one of the undersecretaries of the Alien Department attend the very club where the murder took place. I do not think our report would go very far, do you? Besides, I cannot walk into Bow Street—I might as well string myself up now—and nor can you, in your current guise.”

All true. Yet it did not sit well to allow Gib and Reed to profit from Miss Hollis’s death.

Sometimes, however, inaction was the most intelligent course, even if it did feel morally wrong. We walked back to the corner of the lane and leaned against the wall: just two laborers loitering in Bart’s quadrangle, or perhaps waiting for the open surgery to start.

I dug my hands into my jacket pockets, my left fingers closing around the knitted bulk of Miss Hollis’s purse—I had forgotten I had shoved it in there. I pulled it out, nudging Evan for his attention. There was something so pitifully innocent about its homemade shape; a gift, perhaps, from a loving mother, or maybe knitted by her own hands to go with a new gown. Now it was stained with her blood and in my hands, a stranger who had followed her body to a dissection room.

Evan eyed it somberly. “All her worldly possessions?”

I worked two fingers into the opening and spread the tightly bunched drawstring apart. Inside, a handkerchief embroidered with flowers, a sixpence, and a folded letter. I returned the handkerchief and sixpence to the bag and unfolded the letter. The direction on the front of the packet was to Miss Catherine Hollis, Chapel Street, Cheapside.

“Her home?” Evan asked, looking over my shoulder.

“Probably.” The sealing wafer had dropped off long ago, its gum discoloring the paper in a neat oval. I spread the page.