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unexpected gift, and another to herself as well.
    She had a house, and now a servant to help her maintain it. Best of all, she was following her instincts, and they felt so correct.
    The day was starting out much better than she'd ever expected.

Four
    Dr. Felix Chandra Rhys sat at his desk in his Exeter clinic, carefully explaining the needs of his tiny patient to its mother. As he spoke, he dangled his pocket watch before the toddler, noting the boy's lethargic interest in the bauble. He doubted the woman understood half his explanation about nutrition, so he relied, finally, on a simpler set of directions. "Every morning I want you to go to the Loden Brewery and ask for Mike Farrell. Tell him you need a bit of the unfermented malt blend. Have Roddy suck down as much as he'll take for the next few days."
    "Beer?" the woman asked, shocked.
    "Not beer. Hops and barley and molasses. Just what Roddy needs for the next few days. Can you do that?"
    "I've a couple shillings that I was planning to—"
    He understood. "No need to pay me now. Just see that Roddy gets what he needs." He showed the woman to the door, hoping that she would follow his orders, but hardly certain. Still, he tried. If the child survived, so be it. If he died, well, Rhys shared his own mother's beliefs in reincarnation and hoped the child would have a better life the next turn of the wheel.
    Rhys had a successful practice in another part of Exeter much like the one he'd abandoned in London the year before, but once a week he spent a day in this dingy storefront just a few blocks from Winnie Beason's charity hospital, tending to the needs of Exeter's poorest citizens, just as he had in
    London's East End. Over the past year his main surprise was how many poor there were in this small city and how, in spite of the huge numbers who died far too young, their numbers seemed to grow so quickly.
    But he did not abandon the charity work he'd begun years before. His charity cases were, after all, in keeping with a promise he'd made a decade ago to his mother. He didn't care that she was long dead when he made it, since he knew her spirit was with him. Now every person he saved was a way of thanking her for ensuring his own survival through infancy. He could scarcely remember her, yet his aunt told him often enough that she had been a remarkably courageous woman.
    And he had a gift for dealing with the poor. Hardly surprising since his first few years had been spent among them in London's East End, a place that made this dank section of Exeter seem like Paradise.
    He'd hated it there—the poverty that made children into beggars and thieves, the drink that turned men into brutes and women into harlots. And the terrible way that vice spilled from those who inflicted it on themselves to the innocent whose only crime was to trust too well.
    Then there were the ones like this mother—well-meaning but destitute. He did not mind his vow so much when he worked to heal ones such as these and the innocents they bore.
    As he watched the woman leave with her child, he spied Essie Toth coming down the street. Her bonnet was a bit skewed, her hair windblown, but she had a wide smile on her round face. The factory must have work for her, though he shuddered to think of the sort of labor she would have to do. She wasn't trained for it, but she would learn. They all did.
    "They hired you, did they?" he called to her.
    She walked toward him, waiting until she was close to answer. "Better! I have a real position. Servant to a Mrs. Wilhemina Harker."
    "Even after what—"
    "She acted like she'd heard the rumors about Judge Proctor. Perhaps I should have tried some of the other families instead of thinking that no one would have me when he let me go"
    He shrugged. Treading in both worlds—and because of his race, accepted in neither—he knew how shallow the rich could be when it came to scandal.
    "So I've come for my things," she went on.
    He took a key from his coat pocket and opened