“He did, then,” he said. “Very like, very like.” Adam. William relaxed, too, and thanked the Elmsworths profusely, though they refused any gift of money.

As he prepared to take his leave, he had another thought.

“Ma’am—do you still have the note my cousin wrote to you?”

This request resulted in a quarter hour of fussing about the tiny house, picking up sticky jars of preserves and putting them down again, and concluding in Mr. Elmsworth’s belated recollection that he had used the note to light his candle.

“There wasn’t much to it, son,” Mrs. Elmsworth told him sympathetically, seeing his disappointment. “She only thanked us for keeping her, and said as how her brother would take her to her husband.”

IT WAS LATE in the day by now, and his horse was tired and in need of food, so despite his urge to ride off immediately, he reluctantly accepted the hospitality of the Elmsworths’ small barn for the night. They had invited him to share their supper as well, but having seen that their supper was to consist of a dab of cornmeal porridge with a few drops of molasses and a few slices of hard and curling bread, he assured them that he had a little food in his saddlebags and retired to the barn to see to Betsy’s needs before seeking the refuge of his own thoughts.

In fact, he had a bruised apple and a small chunk of hard cheese, this oozing grease and slightly moldy. He paid little attention to his sparse supper, though, his mind being occupied with what the devil to do next.

Adam. It had to be Adam. The problem was that he didn’t know where Adam was supposed to be. He’d not seen his cousin in more than a year, and such conversation as he’d had lately with Papa and Uncle Hal hadn’t touched on Adam at all, everyone being taken up with Benjamin’s death.

The last he had heard of Adam, his cousin was a captain of infantry, but (wisely, he thought) not in his father’s regiment. Hal’s sons had all concluded, early in their military careers, that their chances of remaining on good terms with their father depended on not serving under him, and they purchased their commissions accordingly.

“Well, start from the other end, then, ass,” he said impatiently. “The only way Adam would have found out where Dottie was, is from Denzell. We assume Denzell is with Washington, and Uncle Hal says that Washington is in winter quarters in New Jersey.”

All right, then. He belched slightly, tasting the sweet decay of the apple’s soft spots, and relaxed a little, hunching his greatcoat up round his ears and curling his toes inside his cold, damp boots. He didn’t need to know where Adam was or had been, if this reasoning was sound. But his guess was that Adam was with Clinton’s army in New York—if they still were in New York. If Clinton was intending to go take Charles Town, though, surely he wouldn’t be doing it so late in the year? Still, if the Hunters were not with Washington in New Jersey, Adam was his only source of information as to their whereabouts.