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authentic curiosity kindling.
    “It is this.” I took in the young, spotless skin, the artless cascade of her hair. Her nose was long and very thin, turned down at the tip, a single element of elegance in an otherwise freckled, rustic face.
    “Why do you let him make a nothing of you?”
    She brought her gaze back to me, but there was perplexity there. “Sir?”
    “A
nothing
,” I whispered at her. “He pushed you or he wheedled you into giving yourself up to him in Edinburgh, and he treated you like a rag doll he kept in a closet above the flat, to play with at his leisure. And when he’d played with you and got you with child, he threw you back into the closet where he found you, with ten pounds for your trouble.”
    Someone yelled in the street, and she waited before answering me, as though the voice might belong to someone coming to her aid. But then she spoke. Her own voice was gravelly with swallowed tears, but she defended him—and, I suppose, the child. “He’s taken notice of the lad, sir. He’s said the boy’s to be called Boswell. He’s said he ain’t ashamed if ’tis known.”
    “Of
course
it is to be called Boswell. Do you not see? Everything must bear his name, like a knock-off pamphlet. This is hack publication, not fatherhood.”
    “He’s set us up a nurse for him. The boy’s to be schooled when he’s of an age.”
    “It means
nothing
, you silly
hamely
Scots fool. Nothing in kindness, nothing in law. The boy will inherit nothing, and James will do little for him but encourage his dissatisfactions. But that is beside the point. My question pertains to you. Why do you allow James
yourself
, here, now, after what has passed? Why do you seek him out, when he has cast you off and left you to litter on your own down some cold little Edinburgh wynd?”
    It was a question she couldn’t answer, for modesty, or shame, or self-loathing.
    “Is it that he’s had you, and you think yourself without value to anyone else? God grant it is not that you
love
him, Peggy Doig, or that you believe that you’ve taken over some small portion of James’s heart. Because there is only room for one in that desiccated heart of his, and he is himself already lodged there.”
    I held the golden pistol-butt to her cheek again. She twisted away from it. “Why, Peggy Doig? Enlighten me. Why do you suffer him? Why do you defend his smutty hands on you? What could there possibly be to draw you back to him? It can’t be money, because he offered money only when you’d agreed to take the child and leave him in peace.”
    She said nothing, moved not a muscle.
    “God’s plague on you, girl! Answer me! Why?” I spat the question at her, bringing my face down much closer to hers. But she closed her eyes tightly again, rolled to her side.
    We stayed that way for a few seconds. I could see in her breathing that she’d mastered the tears. She was still shocked, but now looking to live through this strangeness. Beneath the new London linen and the tears, she was a hardened little Canongate
deemie
, and, when all was said and done, she trusted my country and the cut of my coat. Edinburgh gentlemen don’t murder girls in garrets. They may beat them, they may starve them, or both, over and over again, but the girls live to tell the tale.
    And then she answered. “I’m sorry—I can’t say, sir. I don’t
know
why, sir, truly I don’t. I don’t know, I don’t.”
    “You know why. You sent him a letter telling him how to find you, and when the way would be clear, you waited here for him like a little pussy in the sun. Don’t tell me you don’t know why, Peggy Doig. Don’t insult me that way. I won’t have it.”
    “You think me a hizzie, but it ain’t so.” Her voice was pleading, as much with herself as with me. “I don’t know why, but still he’s father to my boy, sir. It’s wrong what we done today, I know’t. But he’s my lad’s only hope in the world.”
    “Then in fact the lad is hopeless. You