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lungful of smoke, he shook his head.
    “You’re sure? Confession and the soul. You know what they say.”
    Cooper shot Gabriel a sudden, vicious look. “I didn’t kill Jane Wheaton or her baby. I did my best to save them.”
    Gabriel didn’t throw the details he’d already heard in Cooper’s face. In Wentworth, the correct response when a convict told his story was to listen. Even if it was all bollocks, even if anyone who’d scanned a newspaper in the last ten years knew the real story, the only proper reaction was to listen. The judge, the jury, society at large – all three entities had already weighed in on what was true and what was false. The last thing a man inside needed was another inmate calling him a liar.
    “You do know I’m listening?” Gabriel prompted at last.
    “The thing is, I wanted to go to Findley,” Cooper said suddenly, as if Gabriel might argue the point. “I was over the moon to join a physician as distinguished as Dr. Pfiser. I had other offers but never considered them.” Cooper put the cigarette to his lips. “God knows where I’d be if I had. Not here, that’s for damn sure.”
    Striking a match, Gabriel lit a Pall Mall and waited.
    “It started fine. I liked Dr. Pfiser. He was so – encouraging. Never tried to take the mickey, never corrected me in front of patients. Even when he disagreed, he only said, ‘That approach doesn’t work for me,’ or ‘I’ve had no luck with that treatment.’ Never what I expected – ‘Don’t argue, I’m a well-known physician and you’re a nobody who only saw the inside of Oxford because of a scholarship.’”
    Gabriel, who’d finished school at thirteen to learn his trade, carpentry, was more curious about university and the scholarship process than Cooper’s relationship to Dr. Pfiser. But now was hardly the time to say as much.
    “Dr. Pfiser let me work independently more often than I expected, especially at night or on weekends.” Cooper looked sidelong at Gabriel. “I should have been suspicious. But when you come out of training, after being second-guessed and watched like a hawk at every turn, it’s a great feeling, being the bloody physician. Not Cooper the student but Dr. Cooper, thank you very much.” He gave a bitter laugh. “So, yes. During the trial, the Crown mentioned my hubris. My overweening pride. And I guess there was some truth to that point.”
    Gabriel thought of Dr. Bekins, who’d botched his little brother Robbie’s fractured leg, setting the bone so crookedly the boy healed with one limb two inches shorter than the other. Dr. Bekins was a learned man; no one in the old neighborhood disputed that. He was wise about breeding women and colicky babes. But when he’d been at the laudanum, he made mistakes, and patients like Robbie MacKenna had to live with the results.
    “Nights and weekends, you say? A family man,” Gabriel said. “Or a drunk.”
    “A drunk.” Cooper stared straight ahead into the darkness. “If he’d let me handle Jane Wheaton’s labor alone it would have been all right, I think. But he didn’t dare. Dr. Pfiser was a personal friend of Lord Wheaton. So when Dr. Pfiser turned up with a red nose and a booming laugh, I …” Cooper took another deep drag off his cigarette. “I didn’t speak up. Didn’t steer Dr. Pfiser away from Jane’s bed and say I smelt the whiskey on his breath. Didn’t warn Jane or Lord Wheaton. I knew my place and kept my mouth shut. That was my real crime. Perhaps that’s why God put me in here. If there is a God.”
    “Oh, there’s a God, rest assured of that.”
    Cooper looked at him with such naked surprise, Gabriel felt warmth rise in his cheeks. Since taking his pleasure in the showers – he wouldn’t call it rape, it was just the way of things at Wentworth, what dominant men did to weaker ones – Gabriel had assured himself it was only another sin of the flesh. Now, sitting beside the other man, submitting to that stare, a suspicion crept