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context is one of the best ways to break the ice. I know how hard it can be, Miss Bairstow.”
    “You lost someone?”
    “My father…in India, when I was small.”
    Julia stole a glance at Lady Law from the corner of her eye. “A coincidence then. Georgina and I were also born in India on a tea plantation. Our parents emigrated here when I was nine, but it was a shock when they found out how little a rupee bought in England. To make matters worse, one of Father’s speculative investments flopped and we fell from being moneyed landowners to working-class civvies in a matter of months. The old story, I suppose: the grass is greener ‘til it ain’t.”
    “…E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me, still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee…” sang the choir, already on to the next song in their practice session.
    “Nicely put, Julia. May I call you Julia?”
    “Of course…” Julia waited for a reciprocal offer.
    “England is the land of opportunity,” continued Lady Law, her soft voice settling into an affected, storyteller’s rhythm, “but only for a tiny, tiny minority. My father tried his hand at various small business enterprises here—a whole raft of them—throughout his twenties and thirties, without success, before he accepted a job as cartographer on a privately funded Himalayan expedition. Good money, good enough for my mother to sail to India and live with her uncle, a retired sergeant major. That’s where I was born. I spent less than a year with my father, all told, between his expeditions, before he was killed in the Zulu massacre at Isandlwana. That was the summer of my fourteenth birthday.”
    “When did you move to England?” asked Julia, feeling closer to this superior woman than she had ever thought possible.
    “When I was seventeen. My mother forbade it—insisted a single girl of no standing was doomed to a life of poverty in London. And she was right. By all trends and wisdom I ought not to be a lady with a title. Women marry into nobility or accumulate a fortune in business or, more often, inherit their place in that world. So how is it, you ask, that an unattached girl toting thirty pounds and no references managed to conquer Britannia herself?”
    “I have not read your book, I am sorry to say.”
    A sweet, feminine titter. “I will summarise it for you, Julia. It simply essays that justice, like any of Nature’s forces, is about balance. The same decade that poisoned London with Jack the Ripper also saw me arrive, from equal obscurity, with the means to apprehend him. If there is one way to describe my gift, it is as the antidote to an ever-worsening criminality. Muggings have become more vicious, killings more rife. I have at my disposal an intuition I cannot explain and it has stricken fear into the hearts of all potential criminals. I do not claim any supernatural gift. On the contrary, I consider this talent to be nature at its clearest. Every evil done can be undone. Wherever a natural poison is found in the world, nature also stocks a remedy nearby. I am here for a reason, of that I have no doubt. God gave me this talent for deduction and I will use it to assist the law as long as I am able.”
    A series of thuds and then a smattering of laughter in the balcony cut short a chorus of “Those In Peril On the Sea.” One of the choirboys had fallen off his box.
    Julia hurried to fill the pause, eager to hear more. “I must admit—your reputation does not do you justice, ma’am. The gossip about you and your investigations is sounding more and more like jealousy. It is an admirable philosophy you aspire to.”
    “Thank you, Julia.”
    “So it really is all bosh?”
    Lady Law twitched her cheek. “The gossip?”
    “Hmm.”
    “Great bosh. Among the more unsavoury mail I receive are letters hypothesizing my methods. Everyone from pious parishioners, grieving persons whose cases I had to turn down, disgruntled scientists and literary figures—they all