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hated seeing so little of her, only moments here and there, and too seldom alone.
    Monk waited until Hester had eaten her cake and drunk half of her tea before he filled her cup again, and then told her about his conversation with Scuff.
    ‘Are you sure?’ she said with a furrow of anxiety between her brows. ‘He’s not doing it to please me?’
    ‘There’s probably a bit of that in it,’ he conceded. ‘He wants us to be proud of him.’ He smiled. ‘And he was terrified I would be upset he didn’t want to join the River Police.’
    ‘And are you?’ she asked, meeting his eyes frankly.
    ‘No, not at all. I don’t want to be in command of him. I would have to lean backwards not to be thought to favour him. I think it would be very difficult. And I would be terrified in case he were hurt . . . or worse.’
    She relaxed a little. ‘Medicine is very hard. It’s difficult and you pay for your mistakes terribly. You . . .’ She stopped. ‘I’m sorry. You know all that.’
    ‘You should be proud of him,’ he said, reaching across the table to touch her hand. ‘I’m pretty sure he wants to give something back to the people he left behind when he came to live with us. And he wants to be like you,’ he added softly. ‘Don’t . . . don’t put him off.’
    Hester was exhausted and grieving, full of the heavy burden of failures and so proud of Scuff and afraid of the pain of such failures ahead for him that the tears spilled down her cheeks.
    ‘I won’t,’ she promised.
    He stood up and came around the table to kneel beside her and hold her in his arms.
    After a short rest, when Scuff was on his way to school and Monk had gone down to the river to catch the ferry across to Wapping, Hester went straight to the ferry herself, also to the north bank and then on the omnibus to Portpool Lane. She walked along in the shadow of the brewery to the large, rambling old warren of houses that had once been a thriving brothel. It was now a clinic for many of the same women whose place of business it had been. Added to them were any others without a home and whose illness or injury had rendered them in need.
    Hester had no skill in raising money to sustain the clinic, but she had the organisational abilities and the nursing skill and experience that made it seldom necessary to call in a doctor willing and able to lend his greater knowledge without payment.
    She went in through the main door. She had no time for more than a brief acknowledgement of the elderly woman who sat at the desk to admit or deny those who came seeking help, a hot meal, or simply somewhere to lie at peace, knowing they would not be molested or thrown out. It was a completely discretionary decision and Hester seldom interfered with it. She had learned over the years to tell a conniver or a malingerer from a genuine case, but she was still far behind Hetty in the skill. Hetty had been a prostitute herself too long for anyone to fool her. She knew every lie and excuse there was and had tried most of them.
    Today Hester only wished her good morning, and went straight on into the warren of passages and rooms to find Claudine Burroughs. She would almost certainly be either in the kitchen storeroom or the medicine room at this time of the day. Claudine was a well-to-do woman, unhappily married and without children. She had offered her services in the clinic several years ago now. To begin with she had seen it as a worthy charity, and something of a defiance of the highly conventional part of society to which she belonged. Slowly she had come to care for the people, even the highly dubious and disreputable Squeaky Robinson, who had originally owned and run the brothel, until Oliver Rathbone had tricked him out of it. Squeaky had rebelled, outraged that he, the master trickster, had wound up outsmarted by a gentleman, even if he was a lawyer as well. His choice had been a long term in prison, or to remain with a home in the clinic and work for his keep by