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“—and now our hearts remain with you—”

She wanted to scream. She inched closer to the boy’s prostrate form, scooting over the wooden floor on her knees. His eyes were shut fast, his small lips parted and pale. He didn’t respond to her shaking his shoulder.

“Miss?”

“—sweet girls adieu!”

“Miss?”

Sophie twisted her body around, a violent contortion, and opened her mouth to snap at Mr. Chenoweth. Damn propriety! They needed a doctor. This poor child needed more aid than she could provide. But what she saw over the coachman’s shoulder stopped her: a black, barreling force; a flash of red.

“What in—” Mr. Balfour stopped in front of her. He looked miles long from here, an expanse of leg and heaving chest. And higher, his mouth hardened. He had seen Barnard.

“We need a doctor,” she said, retuning her attention to the child. “He needs help.”

Mr. Balfour was crouched beside her in the next moment, and the one after that saw them both standing, Barnard slung in his arms. People stared as they made for the door—Sophie could feel it. But she didn’t look. She didn’t care.

“What do you think has happened to him?” she asked once they had gotten through the worst of the crowd and rejoined the sidewalk. “He doesn’t feel fevered. I can’t wake him to ask what ails him.”

The sight of the boy’s small, dark head flopping against Mr. Balfour’s chest invited a sob, but she clamped it down.

“He’s drunk.”

Her mouth gaped. “What? No. Impossible.”

Mr. Balfour’s expression did not move a muscle, but stayed in that tight, determined gaze. She was having to jog to match his long walking strides. “But he’s a child!”

Dark eyes found her. “Yes. A child that lives exclusively in the company of grown, drinking men.”

She refused to believe it. That these grown men, some of them fathers, all of them old enough to be, would let a boy endanger himself so. “But I thought …” Her pace quickened. She put a hand to Barnard’s forehead. Clammy. “Vice Admiral Crofton made it sound as though he was being taken care of.”

“I didn’t say Crofton’s intentions were bad. I just said the boy reeks of Blue Ruin.”

The hospital gates opened, and the keeper only yawned as he took in the disheveled lot of them. His mouth was a deep abyss, his eyes lazy. “Back already, I say.”

“Is there a physician here tonight?” Sophie was wasting no time. Even if Mr. Balfour was right, and overindulgence was the boy’s ailment, he needed medical attention. Enough of the stuff was poison to anyone’s body, and Barnard’s …

He looked impossibly frail in Rafe’s arms, his buckle shoes smaller than the hands that held him, his bony knees prominent beneath dirt-spattered breeches.

“I ’spect so, ma’am.” The gatekeeper eyed her; up and down. He had put a pipe in his mouth and his lips crumpled around it, clamping fruitlessly. “S’thing the matter?” The words were garbled. Up and down.

Mr. Balfour stepped in front of her, blocking the man’s view of her. “Barnard here needs some attention. It seems he’s gotten into some drink.”

A dry, heaving laugh, which descended into a cough, came from around the blockade of Mr. Balfour’s back, and the scent of tobacco colored the air. Sophie crept to his side. The boy’s hand was loosely fisted, his arm bent at an awkward angle against his chest. She picked it up and pressed her fingertips to the inside of his small wrist. She, Sophie, with her short fingers, could have fit the entire circumference of his forearm in her grasp.

“His pulse,” she said, looking at Rafe, “it’s awfully slow.”

As he stared down at her, the very portrait of severity, and yet of care, too, she had to accept the truth—she smelled it. Beneath the warm piquancy of Rafe’s scent and the choking sweetness of the gatekeeper’s smoking pipe was gin. A bald, punchy, poisonous scent when attached to a child. Barnard moaned and his head fell to the side.

“Where can I take him?”

She had never heard Rafe’s voice this stern. The gatekeeper mumbled some instruction, and as Mr. Balfour set off with Barnard in his arms, something clinked to the ground. Sophie was right beside them, prepared to run if that’s what it took to keep stride, but the boy started mumbling incoherently. The sound trebled down into a single, repeated word, Stop, and his right arm thrashed.

“What’s the trouble?” Sophie was in front of him instantly, cupping his small face in her hands, thumbing his flushed cheeks. “Barnard, do you hear me?”

His eyes opened to slits. Save their gimlet centers, they were bloodshot, devoid of that childlike exuberance and shyness she had known on their first meeting. “M-M-”

He couldn’t seem to get the word out. Everything in Sophie’s chest constricted to half size. Please, God, don’t say ‘Mother.’ That would be too much for her resolve.