Yet the next morning, instead of setting briskly forth to the market the moment Nabby and Johnny led the cows out of the yard toward what little pasturage the Common offered these days, Abigail brought out her writing desk, and began reading through the twoscore letters that Rebecca had sent to her, in the eighteen months between the family’s removal to the Adams farm in Braintree in April of ’71, and their return to Boston nineteen months later, in November of ’72, scanning for names. In hundreds of desultory conversations, Abigail recalled her speaking occasionally of friends, cousins, her brother’s comrades from Baltimore, to any one of whom she would have opened her door on a rainy night. Names Abigail recalled only vaguely, and sought now, in the letters, grimly fighting the temptation to linger on the memories they stirred.

Her anger came back to her, reading of how Charles Malvern had harried her from first one set of chambers and then another; the sadness and pity, at that letter when Rebecca spoke of Orion Hazlitt’s growing love for her; grief at the account of little Nathan Malvern’s death. And like a mirror in her friend’s words, the recollection of her own days on the farm, with John’s two brothers and their wives and children, John’s indomitable little mother and her easygoing second husband . . . No lying jealousies about stepparents there.

It was well and truly eight o’clock before she set out for the market. Coincidentally, just about the time the Tillet cook Queenie—in Abigail’s mind one of the laziest women in New England—generally made her appearance there.

“Wait your turn, you pushy slattern!” the stout little woman shrilled at a young housemaid who was trying to get past her to a golden heap of pears. “The nerve of some people!” she added, loudly, as Abigail came up beside her. “Think they own the market—not that these nasty things have any more juice to them than ninepins, or flavor either. And a penny the slut wants for two of them! Why would anyone want two of the things, or one either—don’t you pay her prices, Mrs. Adams, I refuse to stand by and let a good woman be cheated.” She dragged Abigail away. “What Mrs. T will say sweetening the fruit, with sugar at three shillings for a loaf, and blaming me that there’s nothing fit for the family to eat—”

“How horrible for you,” sympathized Abigail warmly, “after the shocking day you had Thursday! I had meant to come yesterday, to see how you did—and I confess I’m astonished you were not felled by it all!—but that vain, arrogant officer dared to come and order John to go out to the camp, only because he was Mrs. Malvern’s lawyer—”

“Oh, my dear, you don’t know,” gasped Queenie. “You can’t know how things have been since then! That horrible Lieutenant Coldstone, and those dreadful soldiers, asking me if I’d heard anything in the middle of the night—What would I have heard, sleeping as I do in the west attic and the whole house locked up, and at midnight, too?—and Mrs. Tillet coming home in the midst of it all, and such a row there was, with all the luggage brought in, I swear my head was pounding fit to split! You know the headaches I get—”

“Oh, dear, yes!” agreed Abigail, having been treated to minute descriptions of every single headache whenever she came to call on Rebecca over the course of the past year. If Nehemiah Tillet had a habit of dropping in on his tenant to advise her on how best to arrange the wood in her fireplace, and Mrs. Tillet was constantly in and out of Rebecca’s little house to bring shirts for Rebecca to sew and errands for her husband that could not be put off, Queenie was just as intrusive, crossing the yard a dozen times in the course of preparing dinner, with items of gossip, complaints about her health and the ill treatment she was obliged to endure, or simply queries: Who was that who was just here? Is he a gentleman friend of yours? Don’t think I didn’t see Mrs. Wallace coming to call on you—is it true she’s a spendthrift who has nearly bankrupted her husband . . . ?

But when Abigail interrupted the catalog of further symptoms to ask, was there anyone Rebecca had spoken of, to whom she might have fled, the cook only bristled, and snapped, “Belike she’s run off with her man—after all her talk of how she’s pure as driven snow—”

“Her man?” asked Abigail, startled. “Not Mr. Hazlitt—”

“As if her sort stops at one.” Queenie sniffed. “The one she let in through her parlor window from the alley.”

“Did you see him? Was this at midnight? It could have been—”

The protuberant brown eyes shifted suddenly, and Queenie said, “No, of course not! That is, it wasn’t at midnight—What would I have been doing in the alley at midnight? It wasn’t Wednesday night at all. I mean to say, I’ve seen her do so at other times, many other times, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it, too!” she added defensively. “What I mean to say is, this Mrs. Pentyre, if she was carrying on with the Colonel of the British Regiment, and had someone else she wanted to meet, a woman like the Malvern is just the one who’d have let her use her house. And I’m sorry to say it,” she went on doggedly, as Abigail opened her mouth to protest, “being as I know you were taken in by her cozening ways, but taken in you were, Mrs. Adams.”

“No!” Abigail stopped still in the midst of the market crowd. “How dare—That is,” she collected herself, seeing Queenie’s face redden dangerously, “how could I have been so deceived? Are you sure of this man you saw?”

“Other nights,” said the cook. “Dozens of other—”

“Mrs. Queensboro!”

So engrossed had Abigail been in Queenie’s rather confused tale, that she had completely neglected to keep an eye out for Hester Tillet. The draper’s wife swept up to them now like a Navy Man of War in her dark gown and tall, starched cap, her voice like a bucket of coals falling down a flight of stairs. “I don’t come to market to have you stand prattling of our affairs to all the world—your servant, Mrs. Adams.” She accompanied her bobbed curtsey with a poisonous glare.

“M’am, I would never—”

“Don’t you tell me what you would do and what you wouldn’t,” snapped Mrs. Tillet. “I won’t have it. Come away at once.”

Though Queenie was a good decade older than her employer she bowed her head at once and retreated.

“ ’Twas my fault, m’am,” said Abigail quickly, hoping to win herself enough of Queenie’s goodwill to elicit further confidences later. “I but asked after Mrs. Malvern—”

“Then shame on you for gossiping with servants,” retorted Mrs. Tillet. “The lazy trollop has come to her just and fitting end, and I make no doubt they will find her body, too, in time, at the bottom of the harbor, with her throat cut like her friend’s.” She closed her hand around Queenie’s arm—a mighty handful of flesh, but the linendraper’s wife had a grip to accommodate nearly anything—and thrust her away ahead of her into the crowd toward the oyster seller’s stall.

Though her own market basket was still nearly empty, thanks to her companion’s determination not to let her purchase from any farmer to whom she herself had taken a personal dislike, Abigail—with a backwards glance to make sure the towering Tillet bonnet was still moving among the stalls—hastened her steps around the corner of the market hall and out of sight. A small bridge crossed the opening of the town dock, leading to the tangle of lanes that eventually gave onto Ann Street, then Fish Street, along the brisk and crowded waterfront of the North End. It was a walk of only minutes to the alley that led to Tillet’s Yard, shadowed still with the wet light of the chilly morning.

The gate was still closed—and still barred, though Tillet and the younger of his two prentice-boys were obliged to help a carter unload several quires of paper, a roll of buckram, and a box of what appeared to be shoes in the street beside the shop’s front door, to the great inconvenience of traffic. But Abigail didn’t need to enter the yard to refresh her memory. Rebecca’s parlor window—shuttered again now—looked out onto the alley, and there was no way that it could be seen from either the main Tillet house, or from the yard.

Had Queenie seen a man entering Rebecca’s window, either Wednesday night or on some other occasion? Despite the vindictiveness in her voice, the cook’s words had had a ring of truth, before she’d begun to go back on her story and obfuscate . . . What, indeed, would she have been doing in the alley, on a night of threatening rain? On a night, moreover, when her master and mistress were away? Selling a pound or two of the Tillet cornmeal, or a loaf of sugar, to put the money in her own pocket?

Abigail couldn’t imagine the self-pitying little woman possessed a clandestine lover of her own. Either way, reason enough to come up with any kind of slander to undermine Rebecca’s credibility, had Rebecca, for instance, seen her from that parlor window when she opened it to pull the shutters to. Still—

The only window of the L-shaped Tillet house that overlooked the alley was the small gable window of the south attic, a room which Abigail knew had for years been given over to storage, after the overhasty marriage (in her opinion) of the youngest daughter of the house. According to Rebecca, the cramped and stuffy little chamber had been shuttered and out of use for years.

But as she looked up now, she saw—a little to her surprise—that the window’s shutters stood open. And just for a moment—though admittedly the angle of her vision was a narrow one, looking up from the straitened confine of the alley—Abigail thought she saw pale movement behind the dingy glass.

Mrs. Tillet’s unmistakable voice boomed from the street, shouting to her husband. Abigail moved off further up the alley, to cut through a neighbor’s drying yard and garden, and so out onto Cross Street unobserved.

There was no message from anyone, by the time she came belatedly home.

Rebecca Malvern at eighteen, coming for the first time into the Brattle Street Meeting-House as a bride. She recalled how the dark, self-consciously sober fabric of her dress had been cut and trimmed with a stylish flare that no Boston woman would ever display. In her own family pew, Abigail had overheard the whispers from the pews on all sides: Maryland . . . dowry . . . Papist . . . Poor little Tamar Malvern told me only yesterday she said, “I’ll teach you to pray to the Virgin and the Pope.” Tamar, mincing with downcast eyes behind her new stepmother, had looked smug; Malvern icy; Rebecca wretched, but head still high.

October of 1768. Abigail herself, she recalled, had been great with the child who had become Susanna—her precious, fragile girl. That was the week the redcoat troops had first come ashore in Boston, setting up their tents on the Commons, and jostling everywhere in the streets. A group of them had passed the meetinghouse after the service, and while Malvern had paused to ask John some question about the vestry—on which they were both serving that year—Rebecca had commented to Abigail, Are we expecting French invasion, or does the King just think that eight hundred of his armed servants in the town will cause us to sleep better of nights?

Some in the congregation didn’t hesitate to ascribe her objection to the King’s troops to a secret Papist’s natural sympathy for the Irish, or perhaps the French. But despite the difference in their ages, in Rebecca, Abigail had found a kindred soul. Before long she was inviting the girl to take potluck tea in the kitchen while she herself did the household mending, rather than sit formally in the parlor, and Rebecca had watched in wide-eyed consternation as Abigail performed whatever household tasks needed doing: churning butter or scraping out candlesticks or kneading bread, things that had been done by slaves in the home of Rebecca’s father. Later, when Rebecca was living with them—sharing the bed with Nabby and Johnny in the other small upstairs chamber—they’d laughed together about her dismay. “I wish I’d paid closer attention!” Rebecca had moaned during her first lesson with the butter churn. Abigail had replied in her primmest schoolmistress voice: “At least you’ve seen one before and aren’t frightened.” Rebecca had flicked droplets of the skimmed milk at her from her fingertips, like a schoolgirl, and they’d both laughed.

How good it had felt to laugh, Abigail remembered, after all those weeks of grieving Susanna’s death.

A carriage was drawn up before Malvern’s front door, as it had been on Thursday afternoon. From across the street, Abigail watched the merchant climb inside, stiff and self-conscious-looking in a satin coat and hair powder. Cloaked shapes that had to be his two surviving children followed him, tall Jeffrey and slender Tamar, trailed by the more robust shape of the giggling maid. Scipio, in his evening livery, bowed them away from the house’s single, shallow step, then turned back inside. As he did so, another servant on the ground floor leaned from a window, and closed the shutters against the night.

“I’ll be all right now, Shim,” said Abigail softly, but the boy insisted on escorting her across the street and down the carriageway to the yard. Scipio must have come straight from the front step to the kitchen’s door to meet her, his candle glinting on the brass of his livery buttons.

The fire had already been banked in the kitchen, but the room still pulsed with warmth, exquisite after the night’s brutal cold. The glow of the oil-lamp on its chain dimly outlined cauldrons and skimmers, trammels and oil-jars in the shadows, and the brick floor still smelt of the after-dinner wash up. The butler had kept coffee from dinner for her in the pot on the hob, and served her in one of the family cups: blue English porcelain rather than servants’ pottery.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come up with the direction of Miss Catherine’s brother any sooner than this, m’am,” Scipio explained, when Abigail had gestured him to sit. Since it was the house he lived in, she felt strange and awkward inviting him to do so, slave or not, even as she stopped herself from inviting him to share with her the coffee he’d made. What is the proper behavior between slave and free in this situation? she asked herself irritably, and concluded that there wasn’t any. A truly proper servant wouldn’t have admitted a stranger to his master’s house in the first place, nor discussed the family’s affairs with an outsider. “She wrote to me, and to Ulee in the stables, once or twice over the last year. But we had to look through the letters to find mention of the nearest town to her brother’s farm. It’s Townsend, but where that might be I don’t know. Wenham is another place she speaks of, but she writes as if it’s some ways off from her, it sounds like.”

“Wenham is some ways off from any spot on the civilized earth,” muttered Abigail. “Always supposing Mrs. Malvern could get across the river or through the town gate.”

“I understand—” Scipio cleared his throat delicately. “I understand that Miss Rebecca had friends who might have skiffs or whaleboats that could get her across the harbor, even on a falling tide and a rainy night—”

“If she had such,” replied Abigail, with equal tact—since no one in Boston, not even the slaves, admitted to knowing anyone either engaged in smuggling or involved with the Sons of Liberty, “and of course I don’t for a moment imagine she would know such people—I think they would undertake inquiries amongst themselves, and quickly learn if that had in fact been the case. It does not seem to have been.”

“Ah.” Scipio nodded. “I didn’t think you would be asking after Miss Catherine, if it had. Mr. Adams—”

“—has some fairly low acquaintances. Did Lieutenant Coldstone ask about Mrs. Malvern’s possible friends?”

The slave shook his head. “Not of me, he didn’t. And I think if he had asked Mr. Jeffrey or Miss Tamar, I would have heard. Myself, I don’t even know for a fact if she had such friends, though I know that being friends with Mr. Adams, and Mr. Revere, and reading the newspapers and arguing with Mr. Malvern as she did, I shouldn’t be surprised to hear of it. As to what Mr. Jeffrey or Miss Tamar might have told him—or their father—I can’t answer for that.”

Abigail was silent for a time, gazing into the dense shadows of the kitchen. Even under the relatively strong glow of the oil-lamp overhead, the long sideboards, the sturdy bin-table and homely water-jars were barely distinguishable in the gloom. After a time she asked, “Do they hate her so much still?”

The butler sighed. “Not hate, I don’t think, so much, Mrs. Adams,” he said. “They were her enemies before they even met her. I think Miss Tamar talked herself into hating her—and talked Mr. Jeffrey into it—because it’s easier to do evil to someone you hate, than to admit to yourself you’re only telling lies and making trouble because you don’t want another little brother or sister to come along and cut into your inheritance. That’s what it came down to.”

“Rebecca—Mrs. Malvern—told me once that Tamar would search her room while she was away, and stole her letters. She said she always suspected it was Tamar who learned, and told Mr. Malvern, about her arranging to pay her brother’s gambling debts with part of the household money, and backing her father’s bills with Mr. Malvern’s name. Mrs. Malvern said she knew she shouldn’t have done it, but—”

“People do foolish things for those they love.” Scipio poured her a little more coffee. “It’s true Miss Tamar doesn’t like the idea of having her father’s estate cut up into five or six rather than just in two, but it’s for Mr. Jeffrey that she started working to turn her father against Miss Rebecca. For Mr. Jeffrey and little Master Nathan—she did her possible, to turn that poor little boy against Miss Rebecca, for his own good, as she said. He’ll thank me for it, she said, ’specially after Miss Rebecca left. But when he was ill there at the end,” added the butler softly, “it was Miss Rebecca he would call for.”

And it was for Nathan, Abigail knew well, that Rebecca had chosen to remain in Boston, the summer of ’72. Hoping against hope that she would have the opportunity to go to the child’s bedside.

“Does Miss Tamar still have Miss Rebecca’s letters?” asked Abigail. And, when Scipio looked uncertain, she went on, “I’m not fishing for servant-hall gossip, Scipio. Mrs. Pentyre was deliberately lured to Rebecca’s house—I know this,” she added, seeing the surprise in his face. “Believe me, it is true. She was lured there, and murdered, by someone who knew Rebecca: someone who knew that he could get Rebecca to let him into the house, one way or another. I think she saw him, and I think that’s why she fled. It may be someone she knew in Boston—someone I would know, or Mr. Adams, or even you . . . and it may be someone she knew before she married Mr. Malvern.”

“Who?” asked Scipio, baffled. “Most of her people—her brother and her father—are dead. The rest of her family cut ties with her, when she gave up her faith.”

“That’s why I need to see her letters,” said Abigail. “Because whoever he is, I suspect that he knows she saw him. And unless we find him—and find her—he may reach her first.”