Vallimir raised a brow at her, and she shrugged. “It is not like me to show too much faith in people’s good nature. These days we have fewer disruptions.”

“Charity on an industrial scale,” murmured Vallimir. “You were never one for half-measures.”

“No. I mean to set up a similar operation across the river and need to leave the management of this one in capable hands.”

“Mine?”

“Unless they are fully occupied carving toys? I have no doubt I could make use of your wife’s talents as well. My parents’ house is currently filled with orphaned children. The work has no end…” She trailed off into awkward silence.

Vallimir was studying her with a healthy degree of suspicion. “I read that pamphlet, you know.”

The pamphlets that circulated under the old regime had been bad enough. Some of the ones that circulated now went far beyond slander into the realm of sordid fantasy.

“I hardly dare to ask which one,” said Savine, already feeling pinched by the cold.

Vallimir took out a paper, creased and faded. The Darling of the Slums. And there was that etching of a radiantly smiling Savine dan Brock dispensing coins to the starving while orphans clutched at her skirts. The sight of it made Savine feel faintly nauseous.

“What did you think?”

“I could not avoid the conclusion that you were a damned liar.”

Savine gave a brittle smile. “I would not dream of denying it.”

“So I am forced to ask… what is the angle?” Understandable, of course, given he had known her before Stoffenbeck. Before Valbeck. Hard to believe it was only a year and a half ago. Savine dan Glokta seemed a faint acquaintance, dimly remembered, and not with much affection. “Is there some profit hidden in all this?”

Savine thought of Zuri shaking her head over the numbers in the book. “Not of the financial kind, certainly.”

“Goodwill, then? Popularity?”

“We could all use a little goodwill in these troubled times, but I daresay I could polish my image for a fraction of what I am spending here.”

“So why…” Vallimir waved towards a woman waddling from the warehouse gates with a bag of coal, the bulge of pregnancy showing even through her mass of clothes, three children of decreasing height waddling after her like ducklings after their mother, the one at the back with a loaf in his pink hand and two glistening streaks of snot down his face. “All this?”

Why indeed? Savine took a deep breath, the cold of it almost painful, and gazed into the flames in the brazier. “It is, as you have no doubt guessed, entirely selfish. The truth is… the past seems to be a scab I cannot stop picking. I often think about Valbeck. About the uprising, and what I did there… and what I did before. About the children we used in our mill. The children… I made you use.” The fire, the queue, the snowy street, it had all become a sparkling blur, her eyes focused beyond. “I think about the battlefield at Stoffenbeck, too. The graves there. You would hardly believe… the size of the graves. The truth is… I wonder if the Great Change has really made things worse, or if it simply made them worse for me. Are there more beggars now, or do I simply see them for the first time? Was I any better than Judge, when I held the power? Was I worse? The truth is… I jerk awake, in the night, sure the Burners have come for me at last, and I know… that I deserve it.”