The maid reappeared as we stepped onto the first floor, and led us to a small front bedroom. The drover deposited his burden on the bed there and returned to me in the hall.

"'E's not long for this world, poor sod," he said. "Now, then, guv, I'm off to 'Ampstead."

He didn't exactly hold out his hand, but I took a crown from my pocket and dropped it into his calloused palm. I could ill spare it, but he had gone out of his way when he had no reason to.

The drover touched his forelock and departed, finished with the business.

I returned to the small, neat bedroom. The old man, barely alive, lay face up on the bed. The maid, her hands visibly shaking, was peeling his ruined waistcoat from him.

The ball had torn a heavy gash through his middle. Bone, white and obscene, poked through the hole, and his chest rose and fell with his shallow, rasping breaths. But I knew enough about gunshot wounds to know that this one was clean. The bullet had passed clear through him.

"He needs a surgeon," I said.

The maid answered without looking up. "We can't afford the likes of that."

I removed my coat. "Get a basin of water and plenty of cloths. Are you willing to help?"

"Help what, sir?"

"Patch him up if nothing else. That's all a surgeon could do. He may live if the wound doesn't sicken."

She stared at me. "Are you a doctor?"

I shook my head. "I've bandaged plenty of wounds. Including my own."

The maid was brave. She brought the basin and a pile of towels and stayed for the whole messy business. Alice, she said her name was, and she'd been doing for the master and mistress-Mr. and Mrs. Thornton-for twenty years. She steadied the basin and handed me towels and held Mr. Thornton to the bed when I came to the tricky business of cleaning the wound.

In the heat of Spain and Portugal, during the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, which had ended only the year before, surgeons had used water to clean wounds when they could no longer obtain healing concoctions. They continued to use water when they discovered that wounds cleansed with it tended to heal more swiftly than those smeared with ointment. I put that theory to the test now, sensing that these people could not afford ointment from an apothecary in any case.