“I don’t know any ladies,” he said calmly.

“Is that so?” he heard Jenkyn ask, affecting mild surprise. “I was under the impression that lately you’ve been keeping company with quite an interesting lady. Dr. Garrett Gibson.”

Now Ethan’s stomach no longer felt like it was swooping. It felt like it had crashed through a window and was plummeting in a shower of broken glass. Any time Jenkyn was sufficiently aware of a fellow human being to mention his or her name, their life span became statistically shorter.

Somewhere within the iced-over machinery of his brain, he registered that Jenkyn was speaking again. “Never stub the end of a good cigar, Ransom, it doesn’t deserve a violent death. Let it burn out with dignity. You haven’t answered my question.”

Ethan looking down at the collapsed foot of his cigar, which he hadn’t even been aware of crushing into the ashtray. As the flood of ruined smoke bit inside his nostrils, he asked tonelessly, “What question?”

“Obviously I would like you to tell me about your relationship with Dr. Gibson.”

Ethan’s face felt stiff, as if it had been covered in plaster and left to dry. He needed to produce a smile, something that looked genuine, and he searched frantically through the chaos of his thoughts until the phrase “scrotal chafing” came to mind. That was enough to help him crack a grin. Relaxing back in his chair, he lifted his gaze to Jenkyn’s, and saw a hint of surprise at his self-possession. Good.

“There’s no relationship,” Ethan said easily. “Who told you there was?”

The older man ignored the question. “You’ve been following Dr. Gibson to the Clerkenwell area. You accompanied her to a special evening market and visited her home afterward. What would you call that?”

“I was trifling with her.” It required the full force of Ethan’s will to remain calm as he realized he’d been shadowed, almost certainly by another agent. Probably Gamble, the disloyal prick.

“Dr. Gibson is not the kind of woman one trifles with,” Jenkyn said. “She’s unique. The only female in the entire British medical profession—what does it take to achieve that? Superior powers of mind, a cool disposition, and courage equal to any man’s. If that weren’t enough, she’s reportedly quite pleasing to the eye. A beauty, even. Regarded as a saint in some circles, a she-demon in others. You must be fascinated by her.”

“She’s a curiosity, is all.”

“Oh come,” Jenkyn said with amused chiding, “she’s a good deal more than that. Even Dr. Gibson’s sharpest detractors won’t deny that she’s extraordinary.”

Ethan shook his head. “She has a high way with her. Hard as flint.”

“I’m not displeased by your interest in her, my boy. Quite the opposite.”

“You’ve always said women are a distraction.”

“So they are. However, I’ve never asked you to live like a monk. A man’s natural passions are meant to be exercised in moderation. Prolonged celibacy makes the constitution irritable.”

“I’m not irritable,” Ethan snapped. “And I’m no more interested in Dr. Gibson than I am in staring at a bucket of dirt.”

Jenkyn appeared to suppress a smile. “Thou doth protest too much.” Seeing Ethan’s lack of comprehension, he asked, “Haven’t you read the copy of Hamlet I gave to you?”

“I didn’t finish it,” Ethan muttered.

The older man was obviously displeased. “Why not?”

“Hamlet spends all his time talking. He never does anything. It’s a revenge play with no revenge.”

“How do you know, if you haven’t finished it?”

Ethan shrugged. “I don’t care how it ends.”

“The play is about a man who’s forced to face the reality of human depravity. He lives in a fallen world, in which ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is whatever he decides. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ I assumed you would have had enough imagination to put yourself in Hamlet’s place.”

“If I were in his place,” Ethan said sullenly, “I’d do more than stand around making speeches.”

Jenkyn regarded him with a touch of fond paternal exasperation. Something in that interested, caring look pierced down to the place in Ethan’s heart that had always yearned for a father. And it hurt.

“The play is a mirror held up to a man’s soul,” Jenkyn said. “Read the rest of it, and tell me about the reflection you see.”

The last thing Ethan wanted to see was the reflection of his own soul. God help him, it might look far too similar to the man sitting across from him.

But there was his mother’s influence. More and more often of late, Ethan had found himself thinking about her shame at the sins her circumstances had obliged her to commit, and her hopes that he would grow up to be a good man. She’d turned to religion near the end of her life, and had worried constantly about salvation, not only her own, but also her son’s. She had died of cholera not long after Ethan had joined K division.

One of Ethan’s last memories of his mother was how she’d wept with pride upon first seeing him in the blue uniform. She’d thought it would be the saving of him.

Oh, how she would have hated Sir Jasper Jenkyn.

“As for Dr. Gibson,” Jenkyn continued, “my compliments on your taste. A woman with a brain will keep you interested out of bed as well as in it.”

If Jenkyn thought Ethan cared for Garrett, he would use her as a pawn to manipulate him. She might be threatened or harmed. She might simply disappear one day, as if into thin air, never to be seen again unless Ethan did whatever unspeakable thing Jenkyn wanted of him.

“I prefer a woman who’s easy for the taking, and easy to discard,” Ethan said curtly. “Unlike Dr. Gibson.”

“Not at all,” came Jenkyn’s softly chilling reply. “As you and I are both aware, Ransom . . . anyone can be discarded.”

Leaving Whitehall on foot, Ethan headed north and cut across to the Victoria Embankment, a road and river walk along the Thames. The new roadway along the granite-faced embankment had been expected to ease the crush of daytime traffic along Charing Cross, Fleet Street, and the Strand, but it seemed to have made no appreciable difference. At night, however, the embankment was comparatively quiet. Occasional puffs of smoke or steam rising through the iron ventilation grids reminded pedestrians of the subterranean world beneath their feet: tunnels, telegraph wires, underground railways, and pipes for gas and water.

Wandering near a coal and forage wharf, Ethan reached a maze of alleys crowded with excavating equipment and temporary contractors’ workshops. He slipped behind a massive stone-channeling machine and waited.

In less than two minutes, a dark figure entered the alley.

As Ethan had expected, it was Gamble. The lean, wolfish face and sharp brow were distinctive even in the shadows. Like Ethan, he was tall but not so towering that he would stand out in a crowd. With his big arms and bulldog chest, he carried most of his power in his upper torso.

There were many things to admire about William Gamble, but very little to like. He was physically adept and aggressive, able to tolerate brutal punishment and keep coming back for more. His tenacity had driven him to train harder than any of Jenkyn’s men. He never complained or made excuses, never exaggerated or boasted. Those were all qualities Ethan respected.

But Gamble had been born into a coal-mining family in Newcastle, and the desperate poverty of his childhood had engendered a ferocity that had burned out any softer qualities. He had come to revere Jenkyn with an intensity that verged on zealotry. There was no sentiment in him, no trace of empathy, which Ethan had once judged as a strength but had turned out to be a weakness. Gamble tended to miss the fiddly little clues and signals that people unconsciously gave away in conversation. As a result, he didn’t always ask the right questions, and often misinterpreted the answers.

Keeping still, Ethan watched Gamble come farther into the space between the sheds. He waited until Gamble’s back was turned, and sprang from behind, fast as a striking cobra. Hooking the bend of his arm around the thick neck, Ethan jerked the man back against his chest. Ignoring Gamble’s violent writhing, he gripped his own left bicep and fitted his hand against the back of the man’s head to increase the pressure of the choke. The combination of pain and oxygen deprivation worked in a matter of seconds.

Gamble submitted, going still.

In a quietly vicious tone, Ethan asked near his ear, “How long have you been reporting on me to Jenkyn?”

“Weeks,” Gamble gasped, clutching at the arm around his throat. “You made it easy . . . sodding idiot . . .”

“An idiot who’s about to crush your larynx.” Ethan slowly tightened his arm against the trachea. “You’ve put an innocent woman at risk. If anything happens to her, I’ll beat the marrow out of you and hang you up like salted pork.”

Straining to breathe, Gamble didn’t reply.

For a moment, the urge to finish him off was nearly overpowering. It would be so easy to constrict his grip a few degrees more, and prolong the hold until the bastard was properly throttled.

Uttering a low curse, Ethan released him with an abrupt shove.

Wheezing, Gamble pivoted to face him. “If anything happens to her,” he retorted hoarsely, “it will be your fault. Did you think Jenkyn wouldn’t find out? Someone else would have told him if I hadn’t.”

“You’re daft as a rock if you think Jenkyn will like you better for turning into a snitch.” Seeing Gamble’s defensive posture, his muscles tensed to fend off an attack, Ethan said sardonically, “If I were going to kill you, I’d have done it already.”

“You should have.”

“I’m not the enemy,” Ethan said in exasperation. “Why in God’s name are you wasting time and effort fighting me?”

“Eliminate a rival without mercy,” Gamble quoted, “or one day he’ll try to replace you.”

Ethan snorted, unimpressed. “Parroting Jenkyn makes you sound like more of a lackwit than you already are.”

“As long as I’ve known Jenkyn, he’s never been wrong about anything. Before we left for India, he predicted that someday one of us would kill the other. I told him I would be the last man standing.”

Ethan smiled without humor. “He said the same thing to me. I told him to kiss my arse. Jenkyn’s a manipulative bastard. Why should you and I turn into a pair of dancing monkeys every time he winds up the barrel organ?”

“Because that’s the job.”

Ethan shook his head slowly. “No, Gamble,” he said, his voice pure acid. “Because we each want to be his favorite. He chose us because he knew we would do anything, no matter how vile, to win his approval. But I’ve had enough of it. ’Tis not a job, but a deal with the devil. I’m not a well-read man, but I have the impression those never turn out well.”