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as if he couldn’t get enough. “Next morning, in comes Dr. Pfiser. He’s stone-cold sober, more serious than I’ve ever seen him. Hands shaking with the DTs. You know about those?”
    “Delirium tremors,” Gabriel said, biting back a smile. “I am Irish, if you didn’t guess.”
    Cooper almost smiled back. Then wariness returned to his eyes. “Well. Dr. Pfiser called me into his office. Took out vellum writing paper and a fountain pen. Showed me how terribly his hands shook. He couldn’t have written clearly if it meant the firing squad. ‘I need you to take down my words,’ he told me.” Cooper closed his eyes. “And I did. God help me, I did. Word for word. How Dr. Pfiser felt sure he could manage any birthing complication. How he craved Lord Wheaton’s patronage. How he shunned all assistance and caused a mother and child’s death.”
    Gabriel caught his breath. He saw it again, the showers, Cooper beneath him and crying out to God for mercy. What had Gabriel told himself? That a bad doctor deserved what he got?
    “Dr. Pfiser stitched you up.”
    “Yes. I’m not sure he meant to, not at first,” Cooper said. “Maybe he did. But at some point, Dr. Pfiser realized the confession had been written just as he dictated it, in the first person. A constable came round to arrest me next morning. Said he had a confession in my own hand, a witness – Lord Wheaton – and my own mentor Dr. Pfiser ready to give evidence against me. At first I thought the truth would out. Isn’t that what we’re taught, growing up? The truth will out?”
    “Shakespeare didn’t know everything,” Gabriel muttered. Cooper’s story sounded authentic. Worse, it felt authentic, in the hidden chambers of Gabriel’s heart. Educated at Oxford by benefit of scholarship and lacking family connections, Joseph Cooper had found himself at the mercy of a well-respected man and paid the price. Two hundred years ago he would have been strung up on some convenient tree branch for his trespasses. Nowadays he was buggered by the British justice system and sent to Wentworth to marry the man with the most cigarettes.
    Which is me , Gabriel thought, ever aware of his tobacco stash, the currency of his world. Poor trusting bastard who never committed a crime at all. And I reamed his ass like he fucked an entire girls’ academy.
    A memory returned to Gabriel, something he’d never confided to anyone. An Easter Sunday when he was six years old and his grandmother had surprised him with a fuzzy yellow duckling. Gabriel had been enchanted. He’d adored the duckling’s softness, its orange beak, its intelligent black eyes. For half the day he’d fed it, carried it, talked softly to it. Then the MacKennas had gathered for the afternoon meal. Afterward, six-year-old Gabriel had forgotten his duckling. Caught up in some impromptu game with the other boys – jumping over the back step while slamming the door – he hadn’t expected the duckling to dart into the kitchen at the wrong moment. Gabriel, the most vigorous player, had slammed the door on the duckling’s neck.
    He’d cried and cried until his Da, impatient with weeping girls and infuriated by weeping boys, had threatened to peel the skin off his ass. Choking back his tears, Gabriel had prayed for God to heal the duckling. Gabriel had never meant to hurt it; he would have gladly maimed himself in penance. It didn’t matter. The duckling had died and Gabriel’s Da had made him bury it, saying, “Boy, you’re too great a fool to be entrusted with any living thing.”
    “Oh, Christ,” Gabriel muttered, seeing Cooper curled up and weeping on the shower floor.
    “Go ahead.” Cooper sounded defiant.
    “What?”
    “Call me a liar. Isn’t that what you said? Every inmate claims innocence?”
    Gabriel finished his Pall Mall, dropping the dog-end and grinding it beneath his heel. “When I came here, I said I’d never turn prison queer. I bit off Carl Werth’s dick and that was the last