“I was so happy. Champlain had promised to have a very important discussion with me as soon as he returned from his latest trip to the Continent—a discussion of highly personal matters, he said. Champlain called himself Mr. Richard Champion when I knew him, the man of business for a great lord whom discretion forbade him to name. I was too overjoyed to question anything he did or said. Everything I’d ever wished for—a devoted husband, a family, a home of my own—I was to have it all, at last. I was about five months along when he returned from Paris. He wrote to me, but I wasn’t to write to him, so I told him in person. I expected him to share my joy and have the banns cried.”

“I take it back. I will kill him even if he’s already dead. I knew Champlain, I know his widow. He could have plundered any number of willing citadels. He should not have trifled with you.”

“Oh, he loved me. Said so himself, wrote the words many times. I only learned he had a wife after I’d conceived. He loved his wife too, and would never give her cause to regret their marriage. But what did it matter that he was married when he would cheerfully set me up in my own establishment and make sure the child wanted for nothing?”

“I hope you hit him, Abigail. I hope you kicked him right in his courtesy title.”

So fierce, for a man who couldn’t kick anybody. “I almost burned his letters. Mon petit agneau chéri and Mein liebstes Häschen…As if I could be anybody’s dearest little lamb or favorite bunny rabbit. I should have burned them. I lost the baby a month later. A stillborn boy.”

The words were simple, the emotions complicated. She had eventually been relieved not to face endless scandal, not to visit illegitimacy on her firstborn. But the relief had been tiny, belated, and guilty—also vastly outweighed by sorrow.

“You kept the letters to punish yourself, didn’t you?” Stephen stroked her shoulder, as if they had all the time and privacy in the world. “You kept them as a reproach, and you became an inquiry agent because you wanted to preserve other young women from having to pay for trusting the wrong man.”

Perhaps she had. Abigail had never considered her motivations, beyond keeping a roof over her head and maintaining her independence.

“Champlain died within two years,” she said, “and destroying the letters seemed overly dramatic. They are mostly travelogues of his gallivanting on the Continent. Fine beer here, excellent wine there, an impressive violinist at some comtesse’s chateau. That should have told me something.”