“The Company’s on the verge of bankruptcy, from paying for its own troops to take over land in India,” said John, as he handed Abigail down into the sloop of a farmer named Logan, who had agreed to carry them to the island. “The King’s lowered the customs duty on the tea, so that he can put the smugglers—like Mr. Hancock—out of business . . . it’ll barely be three pence a pound. Once it arrives here, there is no way it will not be sold—and then the King and Parliament will have their precedent, that it is legal for the King to tax goods that come to us, without our consent to the tax.”

“And who cares about their constitutional right to consent to be taxed,” murmured Abigail, “if it means cheap tea?” She gripped the rail as the cold wind caught the Katrina’s sails, fixed her eye on the pine and granite tuft of Bird Island, the nearest of the small eyots that dotted the harbor’s deep channel. The clammy cold seemed to seep into her joints, and the pitching of the sea turned her stomach.

“Are you all right?” John pulled his own scarf higher and tighter about his throat. “I will be quite safe, you know.” As Abigail had feared, she slept little. When John had come to bed after midnight she had been lying with open eyes, fearing what she would see when she closed them.

“I know you can slay any number of British troopers with your bare hands,” she replied gravely. “Yet you may need someone to untie the boat, while you battle your way to the wharf.”

John slapped his forehead. “I had forgot, we might have to fight our way out.” His eyes danced as they met hers. But there was a sober worry in them, that answered the fear in hers, and neither needed to speak of what they both knew. On Castle Island, there was no chance that Sam could summon up a convenient armed mob to outnumber the available British troops. The only thing that might prevent Lieutenant Coldstone from arresting John the moment he set foot on Castle Island would be the fact that if he wished to do so secretly, he would have to detain Abigail as well.

Exhausted as she had been by the time she’d lain down last night, Abigail had remained awake by the light of her single candle, picturing over and over in her mind every room of Rebecca’s house, both before and after Sam and the others had gone over it. What did they forget? What could Coldstone have found that convinced him of John’s guilt? No list, no fragment of paper . . . Had she, Abigail, dropped her handkerchief, for someone to deduce John’s presence from? Yet why (her overtired mind had picked endlessly at this detail) would John have been carrying his wife’s handkerchief?

If they had found the brown-backed “Household Expenses” book, they would have gone to Sam, or Revere.

The same could be said if their only ground for suspicion was that Richard Pentyre—that wealthy and fashionable friend of the Crown—was one of the consignees to whom a monopoly of the East India Company tea had been granted. John had always held himself aloof from the darker doings of the Sons of Liberty. Even his pamphlets argued in terms of reason and the Constitutional Rights of Englishmen, not Sam’s flamboyant demagoguery.

Now, in the gray daylight, with the walls of Castle William bobbing ahead of them, Abigail shivered at the thought, What did they find in Mrs. Pentyre’s room?

In addition to the four hundred men of the Sixty-Fourth Foot, and the some sixty female “camp followers” supported on regimental half rations, Castle William—the brick fortress on the island to which the British troops had retired after the Massacre three and a half years ago—housed an assortment of servants, sutlers, animals, munitions, and supplies. These in turn engendered the need for offices and service buildings, so that what had originally been a castle indeed on the round-topped green island now had more the appearance of a grubby village, complete with cattle, chickens, children underfoot, and laundry hanging between the rough wooden dwellings of the men. The office of the Provost Marshal was in the fort itself, but as Abigail had feared, she and John were kept waiting for nearly three hours, on a bench in the chilly brick-paved corridor that circled the parade ground. Through a wide archway they watched the men come and go: clerks, grooms, batmen carrying officers’ bedding to air. A couple of soldiers edged by them with a crate of wine bottles. Another, brisk and military despite a rather unsoldierly smock, bore a brace of ducks toward the kitchen.

Did Perdita Pentyre have her own rooms here at the fortress? Was that a perquisite of the Colonel’s mistress? Abigail wondered who she could decently ask.

And her momentary, reflexive cheer at the answer to her question turned instantly to the haunted pain of dread.

While she’d washed in the icy predawn cold, gone to the stables to milk Semiramis and Cleopatra, she’d strained her ears, listening for footfalls in the yard, for Young Sam or Young Paul: Mrs. Malvern’s at my Pa’s, safe . . .

Nothing. Orion Hazlitt will be listening, too, she thought. Waiting as she had waited, in that dark little house as he got his mother up, dressed her for the day, made coffee to go with the bread she’d sent . . . How well I cook, forsooth! Mrs. Hazlitt could barely boil an egg. Rebecca had often shaken her head and laughed at Orion’s tales of his mother’s accounts of her skills as a housewife. The Lord smote her, and with her her handmaid that was privy to all her ways . . .

Abigail frowned as that soft voice snagged in her mind. The handmaid that is heir to her mistress . . .

She watched the servants come and go. The more smartly dressed looked haughtily down their noses at the mere camp cooks and herdsmen, as was the way, Abigail had seen, of upper servants almost everywhere. What had Perdita Pentyre’s handmaid been heir to? To what ways, what secrets, had she been privy?

Her mind turned from the dead woman’s hypothetical servant to the known reality of that plump, giggling, sloe-eyed girl who followed Tamar Malvern into the coach in King Street. She would be after Rebecca’s time. Abigail recalled, over the five years of their acquaintance, how often her friend had spoken or written of Catherine Moore, her own maid.

“This is ridiculous,” muttered John, face reddening as those who’d arrived after them—town merchants and contractors in victuals, an elegantly clothed Tory judge, and a widow of the town notorious for the gambling-parties held at her house—were admitted to the office almost as soon as they presented their cards to the subaltern who answered their knocks. When that young gentleman finally emerged from the Colonel’s office and said, “Mr. Adams?” Abigail rose as well. “I beg your pardon, m’am.” The young man stepped, if not into her path, at least enough closer to her to make his point. “The Colonel has said, Mr. Adams by himself.”

“Nonsense!” stormed John. “My wife has been kept sitting here, in a cold and drafty hallway, since nine o’clock! I do not propose to leave her alone in the midst of an armed camp, exposed to the comment of every servant and laundress who happens by! You tell your Colonel—”

“I’m quite comfortable, thank you, Mr. Adams.” Abigail laid a quick touch on his elbow. “I have brought a book with me.”

“I will not have you treated—”

Though she was shivering with the cold, she shook her head again, meeting his eyes. “It is of no consequence. We have been delayed long enough already.”

John looked about to say something else, but at that moment Lieutenant Coldstone appeared in the archway from outside, a leather sabertache beneath his arm and his Irish sergeant at his heels. “My apologies for the inconvenience, Mrs. Adams, Mr. Adams. Unfortunately there is no other place to wait. Sergeant Muldoon, would you be so good as to bring Mrs. Adams a cup of tea? Or coffee, if you would prefer, Madame.”

“Coffee,” said Abigail drily, and the Lieutenant bowed, as if the whole of the colony were not aflame on the subject of tea.

“Coffee, then. Mr. Adams?” He held open the door, and closed it behind them.

Three hours. Abigail opened the book she had brought, then let it rest on her lap. The gauzy quality of the noon overcast brought other clouded days to her, in the little kitchen on Brattle Street: one of those wet mornings when she’d patiently attempted to teach Rebecca how to make Indian pudding that did not end as inedible clots. “He sent her away,” Rebecca had said, holding up the note that had just come to the house. “Without a character, Scipio says. Only for having served me.” “Does she have family?” Abigail had asked, and Rebecca had said, “A brother. She fled the place; she wanted something other than to be a farm drudge—”

At that point Johnny, who had just turned three, had staggered purposefully toward the fireplace and the discussion had ended, and Abigail never had learned where Catherine’s brother lived. From time to time over the ensuing years, Rebecca had spoken of receiving letters from her former servant: a farm somewhere, in the harsh backcountry that still crowded close to the cities of the seaside. Charles Malvern had not scrupled to—

Raised voices came dimly through the office door, faded almost at once. Abigail blinked, frowned. How long do they need, for John to sign a bond?

She waited for a moment when the corridor was empty—servants were coming and going with greater frequency now, bearing dress uniforms to be brushed, trays of tea things or port bottles—then stepped to the door. Putting her ear close to the crack, she heard Coldstone’s chill, measured voice asking something, and John’s, loud with his anger, reply, “. . . liver bay, about ten years old, white stocking on the off hind . . .” Balthazar, in fact: John’s horse. Had John dispatched his clerk, young Thaxter, to return the post-horse he’d borrowed to get back to Boston on? He must have—she hadn’t seen the young man at dinner yesterday afternoon, though he often stayed to eat with the family. She shook her head at herself. I must have been more tired than I knew . . .

“Purley himself, for one,” John was saying. They must have asked him, who saw him at Purley’s Inn. “Mrs. Purley, for another. A couple of the Uxford boys, and Elias Norton from Danvers . . .”

“The same Elias Norton, who has been accused of smuggling? I understand, too, that Mr. Purley’s sympathies are strongly with the so-called patriots—”

“The sympathies of half the men in New England are with the patriots, man! Will you discount a man’s testimony on the grounds of his politics?”

“M’am?”

She turned, sharply, to see young Sergeant Muldoon behind her with a tray of coffee things, and a sort of folding camp table hung over one immense shoulder. Her cheek-bones heated with embarrassment at being caught eavesdropping, but she asked, “Is there another door out of that office?” and reached out to take the tray from his hands.

“That there is, m’am,” he said, gratefully handing it over and unfolding the camp table. “Into the Colonel’s bedroom, it leads, and out into the parade. The cook says, there’s precious little cream this time of year, but I got you some, I have, and a bit of cake.”

Abigail made herself smile, spread her skirts, and settled on the bench again, there being no way that she could think of to check whether a company of armed men waited in the Colonel’s bedroom to drag John away in chains. “Thank you, Sergeant,” she said. “Lieutenant Coldstone didn’t happen to mention whether anything was found in Mrs. Pentyre’s chaise, to hint at whoever might have driven it from the house where Mrs. Pentyre’s body was found, to . . . was it Lee’s shipyard?”

“That it was, m’am!” The young man regarded her with admiration. “Think of you askin’ after that, same as the Lieutenant did, when he looked it over so careful. A chaise is a chaise for my money, and himself that angry that it’d been tipped off the end of the dock there where the water’s deep, not to speak of it spucketin’ rain like Noah’s Flood. Looked it over like somebody’d hid a treasure map under the seats, he did. And looked over every inch of the horse they found, like he meant to buy it. He’s a caution, he is, m’am, beggin’ your pardon, m’am.”

“Pardon freely granted.” Abigail smiled, and poured herself out some coffee from the small earthenware pot. “And did he find aught?”

“Not on the horse nor the chaise, m’am, given they was out in the rain all the night. But just lookin’ at the poor lady’s shoes, an’ at the hems of her petticoats, if you’ll excuse me mentionin’ such a thing, m’am, and her poor face, he says she wasn’t tidied up and laid on the bed by him what killed her, but by others, hours later, for what purpose God only knows.” He gave her a bow, and then—not to omit any sign of respect—saluted her as well, before excusing himself and hurrying off.

A caution indeed, Abigail reflected, reopening Pamela and taking a nibble of the regimental cook’s excellent cake. Wet hems and wet shoes meant she’d arrived in the rain, and the settling of the blood that Dr. Warren had spoken of told its own tale of how long she’d lain on her face before she was put on her back on the bed. Just because he knows someone tampered with the house doesn’t mean he knows who.

Was that why he suspected John? Because Rebecca would have admitted him to her house without question?

Try as she might to absorb herself into her favorite book—not, as Rebecca had described it, “the world’s longest shilly-shally,” but (Abigail had repeatedly pointed out to her) a serious look at how men and the world regarded a woman’s right to choose her own destiny—Abigail found her mind returning again and again to the riddle that lay before her, like a labyrinth plunged in darkness and reeking with the smell of blood.

“Damn Sam and his myrmidons,” said John softly, as they passed between the red-coated guards at the Castle’s gate and picked their way through the straggle of tents, boxes, and sheep pens toward the wharf. “Too many times they’ve run up against witnesses who’ll swear that one or another of the Sons of Liberty was elsewhere than where they know he was, or smugglers who’ll slip a man across the harbor at dead of night when the gates are closed.”

“That’s what they assume you did?”

He nodded. “Left my horse in one of the smuggler barns on Hog Island and crossed in a rowboat, did the deed, then slipped back—”

“But why? Why do they believe this of you, of all people, and why would you have done such a thing? It was an atrocity, John. Do they honestly think you would be capable of performing those acts—”

“They don’t know that.” John’s voice was grim. “Thanks to Sam, all they saw was her body—slashed, yes, but laid neatly out on a bed, and the blood all mopped away. And we cannot tell them otherwise. You’re frozen,” he added, chaffing her gloved hand as they descended the muddy path to the little wharf where Linus Logan waited for them in the Katrina. “You should not have—”

“They gave me very nice coffee,” replied Abigail. “And had I not come, in all this time waiting I’d have gone mad at home, and murdered the children in my rage, and then wouldn’t we both have felt silly when you came back safe after all.”