“Perhaps it’s more wretched than you can see on the surface.” We veered down a narrow hall, carrying the now-full bucket between us, and stepped outside a side door. Maybe I should tell him—confide in him about what I’d found. But what could a small lad do about it? We dumped the load in a ditch out in the yard. “Didn’t you say that it felt off here, that something was amiss?”

He shrugged, dragging the empty bucket behind, then stowing it in an old butler’s pantry just off the kitchen. “The work is honest and they let me sleep by the stove. I don’t ask questions.”

“Really, there must be better positions for such a hardworking chap.”

He guided us up the stairs to the wards then, his expression firm. “Thank you kindly, miss, but I’ll be staying.”

I scrutinized that sunken little form. “What hold do they have over you, Lew Wiggins?” It was a trap, this place. It didn’t let a body go. He didn’t let a body go, that Thornhill. “How did you come to Hurstwell, of all places?”

He shrugged, his oversized shirt hanging crooked on his narrow frame. “Da is gone, Ma owns a bawdy house, and I was nothin’ but trouble at the foundling home. Had to go somewheres.” Yet his deeply shadowed face seemed as if it had materialized from the old stone walls and crevices of this place. As if he belonged here, whether or not he chose to.

Lew lifted the end of his wheelbarrow without a word.

“Your whistle. Is it a signal of some sort?”

He shrugged. “Just helps, I suppose. Me Da used to sing a lot. Made me feel better when I was afeared of the fights on our street, or the gunshots.”

I watched his slender muscles work, shifting that cart down the rows as we alternated emptying the chamber pots into it. “You must have loved him very much.”

He kept on, looking at the ground as he worked. “Fine man. Made the house feel full, even when the larders were empty. It were a bit rowdy at times with him there, but I wish he’d come back. Always knew I was safe with him.”

“He’s alive then?”

“He’s aboard an East Indiaman. Midshipman.” Lew straightened before the last word. “Only two years of service instead of three to get there. He was that clever.”

“Seems a shame to lose him.”

“He isn’t lost,” he hurried to correct. “He wouldn’t have left me at that foundling place, neither, but he didn’t know. Mum spent all the money he sent on absinthe and tonics, and the rent was due. It weren’t so bad, though. Got regular meals and a roof at the foundling home.”

“Could you not send word to him?”