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came the coup de grâce , when Mrs.
Poole leaned closer and whispered that her maid had told her that
another maid had told her that Lady Naismith was sacking her
overworked secretary, an upstairs maid, and one of the scullery
girls. She leaned closer still to add, “Rumor says that Sir Edwin
Naismith is taking too great an interest in those women to suit the
old witch.” She sat back in triumph, her dose of gossip
finished.
    “ Wait? What?” he had asked, stunned
by the news. “Lady Naismith is letting go of her secretary …
and the others?”
    “ On Christmas Eve,” Mrs. Poole said,
almost as if she savored bad news. “I call that heartless, but what
can anyone do about it?”
    The thought that Mary Ann Poole, lady with a
heart of oak herself, must put herself in soul-sucking employment
just to survive made Thomas wonder about his nation. It was beyond
him that widows and orphans must continue to suffer long after the
last signature on the treaty, the congratulatory victory balls, and
the departure of kings and rulers for their own countries. And now
Mary Ann Poole was soon to be unemployed. No wonder every pence
mattered. He thought of her in the stationers’ shop and saw her
purchases for what they were: a little light illuminating a growing
world of darkness.
    “ These are trying times, are they
not?” Mrs. Poole said to him, she who had likely suffered little or
not at all.
    He agreed that they were, which allowed him to
turn the conversation to the poor, and then St. Luke’s charity
school. That Thomas moved easily from one topic to the other gave
him confidence that he was getting better at
skullduggery.
    “ More tea?” Mrs. Poole asked before
launching into additional gossip about how little the vicar knew on
any subject. “But the poor must take what they can, eh?”
    Even the talented ones who exhibit early
signs of mathematical genius , he thought, wondering how many
promising minds and ideas had been snuffed out by poverty. His
might have been numbered among those, had he not taken a chance on
the deck of the Agamemnon. Young girls had even less chance,
and it chafed him.
    By the time he left, Thomas’s head throbbed. He
wanted to snatch Mary Ann and Beth Poole away from Haven and the
hand that had been dealt them, just grab them up, hold them close
and promise them something much better, even though he had no idea
what it was or how he could achieve it. He gave his head a rueful
shake—which didn’t help the pounding within—and wondered if perhaps
boredom was easier than action, and less hard on the
heart.
    Instead, he directed his post rider to a vague
address that included Carmoody Street and a row of four houses
close to a shoe factory. Smoke curled up from three of the
one-story row houses, telling him that the fourth one must belong
to a working woman and her daughter at school.
    That bit of detection gave him three doors to
knock on. The first was opened by a woman with a nursing baby at
her breast who slammed the door in his face. The second attempt
introduced him to Sharlto Laidlaw, landlord, and an old Ancient of
Days.
    This meant more tea, a further trial to his
already overloaded plumbing, and more information about the widow
and her daughter next door.
    Thomas invented some fiction about looking for
his distant relative, a Lieutenant Poole survived by a widow and
infant child. When Thomas mentioned that he planned to return in a
few hours and invite his second cousin’s widow and child to dinner,
Mr. Laidlaw brightened.
    “ That will be a rare treat,” he
said. “You will be the first visitor they have ever
had.”
    With no more encouragement than an inquiring
look—my, but he was getting good at effortless detection—Thomas
learned that Mrs. Poole’s father had been a clerk in a woolens
warehouse in Northumberland, where woolens were surely
needed.
    “ She married the youngest son of a
vicar, who had a paltry living on the estate of a marquess who
spent his days running