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over, then replied, “No. There are no marks from a rope of any kind.” He walked around the table to have a look at the boy’s hands, which were still frozen at head height. “No cuts here. The removal of his appendage was neat and tidy, and accomplished with a leisure of time. Surely he must have been dead, or at least insensate.”
    The relief at that news surprised Suzanne. It seemed she was becoming too involved in this and taking it too personally. She shook herself out a bit and took another deep breath. “He wasn’t drowned.”
    “Plainly. I don’t even need to look inside his chest to know that.”
    She noted, “He had no linens beneath the dress.”
    White shrugged. “Not terribly rare. A goodly number of corpses come to me half clad. Sometimes the drawers are stolen by the discoverer of the body, sometimes by the murderer, sometimes they were never there to begin with. Particularly women come without them, for when they’re murdered they’re nearly always violated first. Or later, and not necessarily by the killer.”
    Suzanne blanched, but pressed on. “And you can tell the difference between violation before or after?” She told herself she shouldn’t be surprised. She’d heard often enough about men poking holes in pumpkins and melons; she knew a dead body was not safe around many a man who thought nobody would find out.
    “Usually. Hard to say, but there’s a different sort of damage as happens when a body is still alive and can . . . well, bleed.”
    Suzanne nodded. A hollowness in her belly and a lightness in her head made her wish for someplace to sit, but there was none. She continued in spite of it. “Can you tell whether this boy was violated in that way?”
    Both White and Pepper stared blankly and blinked at her for a moment. Pepper said, “You can’t possibly be serious.”
    “The boy was selling himself. He may very well have been raped by the man who killed him. Someone who simply didn’t wish to pay him for his services.”
    “If he was selling himself as you say, then rape would be impossible. A tart cannot be raped, and that applies to a male harlot. Especially it should apply to a male selling himself as a girl.”
    Suzanne couldn’t miss the unmistakable implication that wanting to be female was a disgusting thing. Rage warmed her cheeks, and she struggled to hold her temper. “Can we look regardless?”
    “You wish to violate him again?”
    “I wish to learn the truth. Whatever we find may turn out to be significant within the context of whatever else we may find. I must know everything knowable. If you please, turn him over and have a look.”
    “I’ve been the coroner here in Southwark for a very long time—”
    “Please look.”
    White emitted a snort of impatience, then proceeded with the examination. It took little effort to turn the small corpse on its front, which raised the boy’s behind off the table in its slightly bent and stiff configuration. He pressed aside the buttocks to peer between them, which took some effort with the muscles so stiff. He grunted at what he saw.
    “I see nothing. No suggestion of any recent activity here.”
    “How recent do you mean?”
    He shrugged. “Honestly, I wouldn’t know. This isn’t the sort of examination that is the usual for me. However, I see no residue, and no bleeding. I suppose he may have been used that way in the past, but I feel certain not last night.”
    Suzanne knew it was entirely possible—perhaps even likely—the boy had only ever used his mouth to service clients, and that told her something about why he had not been open to Daniel about his true sex. “Thank you, Marcus. Now we know something about the killer we wouldn’t have known had you not looked.”
    “What do we know now?”
    “Why, that the killer was not necessarily a sodomite, of course.”
    *   *   *
    B Y the time Suzanne returned to the theatre, she’d missed all of the rehearsal of
Julius Caesar
. In the dressing