For as Anne Scott had already glimpsed, the truly frightening thing about this man, was that he defied all the self-destructive traits of the storybook villain. And though he had given himself over to evil, he was still capable of a kind of wisdom. Though he lived on one side of the boundary, he never ceased learning from the other. He understood killing and healing alike. Forcing all else from his mind, he looked back across the pages of his life, trying to find some common thread, some shred of lost meaning that would make him understand. His childhood memories remained the most vivid of his life, and though long suppressed, it took little effort to bring them back in sharp detail. He shuddered as he sat again on the edge of the bed, anticipating the grim scenes which had hardened him and made him cold, but never lessened in their stark brutality. He had grown, a wild weed, among the wharves of London. His mother was a sometime prostitute, his father a man he had never seen. The only thing she would ever say of him was that he had been a sailor, and had left her destitute when she was but a girl. He wanted to hate the man for it, but he knew his mother too well to trust her version of the past, or to feel much pity on her account. She fed him, sometimes, and gave him a corner of the floor in which to sleep. In return for this he was expected to steal, to warn her of the police, and to keep silent when she brought home from the public houses the dirty, hardened wretches who filled her cup and purse alike. One evening she had returned with a particularly evil looking Portuguese, a cut-throat pirate by the look of him, living like others of his kind under the King's protection, so long as they terrorized Spanish treasure ships and not his own. The man's dark eyes through their narrow slits spoke of a malevolence that even his mother must have felt. But she said nothing, gave him the wine he demanded though he already stank of it, and led him up to her room, oblivious. Through the poor ceiling he could hear the clothes tearing, the blows and sharp curses of the man. But these meant little to him. The rougher sort were like that, and if his mother minded, it never kept her from bringing the same lot back again. So long as they paid in gold and silver, it was all the same to her. But then he heard an unfamiliar sound, and it brought him up short. His mother had screamed in earnest. He could hear her pleading, while the man before her had become deathly silent. Trembling with sudden fear and concern, he reached under the floor-boards to the place where he kept the stolen pistol. Then ran with it up the doubling stairway. Again the woman screamed, the sound cut short by a dull gasp of pain. He lifted the latch and burst into the room. . .too late.