“I’m looking for my uncle Pardloe. Sir Henry just told me that he left Charles Town more than a week ago.”

“He did,” Denys said promptly. “I crossed paths with him as I came down from Charlotte on the … oh, when was it … the thirteenth? Maybe the fourteenth …”

“Damn what day it was. You mean he was riding north, not south?”

“How clever you are, William,” Denys said in mock approval. “That’s exactly what I meant.”

“Stercus,” William said. His stomach knotted. “Was he alone?”

“Yes,” said Denys, looking at him sideways. “I thought that odd. I don’t know him to speak to, though, and hadn’t any reason to do so.”

William asked a few more questions, with no results, and so took his leave of Denys Randall, with luck, for good.

North. And what lay to the north that might lead the colonel of a large regiment to depart suddenly and without word to anyone, riding alone?

Ben. He’s going to see Ben. The vision of a black bottle rose in the back of his mind. Had Hal thought of poisoning himself, his son, or both of them?

“Too bloody Shakespearean,” William said aloud, turning his horse to the south. “Fucking Hamlet, or would it be Titus Andronicus?” He wondered whether his uncle ever read Shakespeare, for that matter—but it didn’t matter; wherever he’d gone, he hadn’t taken the bottle. At the moment, all he could do was go back to Savannah and hope to find his father there.

Three days later, he walked into Number 12 Oglethorpe Street and found Amaranthus in the parlor, poking the fire. She swung round at the sound of his step and dropped the poker with a clang. An instant later, she was hugging him, but not with the fervor of a lover. More the action of a stranded swimmer reaching for a floating log, he thought. Still, he kissed the top of her head and took her hands.

“Uncle Hal’s gone,” he said. “North.” Her eyes were already dark with fear. At this, the little blood remaining in her face drained away.

“He’s going to see Ben?”

“I can’t think what else he could be doing. Have you had any word from Papa? Has he come back?”

“No,” she said, and swallowed. She nodded at an open letter that lay on a small table under the window. “That came this morning, for Father Pardloe, but I opened it. It’s from a man named Richardson.”

William snatched the letter up and read it quickly. Then read it again, unable to make sense of it. And a third time, slowly.

“Who is that man?” Amaranthus had retreated a little, eyeing the letter as though it might suddenly spring to life and bite. William didn’t blame her.

“A bad man,” William said, his lips feeling stiff. “God knows who he really is, but he seems to be—I don’t know, exactly. ‘Major General Inspector of the Army’? I’ve never heard of such an office, but—”