“She said that he laughed,” Trevelyan said, his tone remote, as though reporting some business disaster; a mine cave-in, perhaps, or a sunken ship. “He told her then that he had killed the child; told her that she should be grateful to him, that he had saved her from living day after day with the shame of its deformity.”

At this, the woman who had lived patiently for years with the knowledge of infidelity and promiscuity felt the bonds of her vows break asunder, and Maria Mayrhofer had stepped across that thin line of prohibition that separates justice from vengeance. Mad with rage and sorrow, she had flung back in his teeth all the insults she had suffered through the years of their marriage, threatening to expose all his tawdry affairs, to reveal his syphilitic condition to society, to denounce him openly as a murderer.

The threats had sobered Mayrhofer slightly. Staggering from his wife’s presence, he had left her raging and weeping. She had the pistol that had been her constant companion through her week of brooding, ready to hand. She had hunted often in the hills near her Austrian home, was accustomed to guns; it was the work of a moment to load and prime the weapon.

“I do not know for sure what she intended,” Trevelyan said, his eyes fixed on a flight of gulls that wheeled over the ocean, diving for fish. “She told me that she didn’t know, herself. Perhaps she meant to kill herself—or both of them.”

As it was, the door to her boudoir had opened a few minutes later, and her husband lurched back in, clad in the green velvet dress which she wore to her assignations with Trevelyan. Flushed with drink and temper, he taunted her, saying that she dared not expose him—or he would see that both she and her precious lover paid a worse price. What would become of Joseph Trevelyan, he demanded, lurching against the doorframe, once it was known that he was not only an adulterer but also a sodomite?

“And so she shot him,” Trevelyan concluded, with a slight shrug. “Straight through the heart. Can you blame her?”

“How do you suppose he learned of your assignations at Lavender House?” Grey asked, ignoring the question. He wondered with a certain misgiving what Richard Caswell might have told about his own presence there, years before. Trevelyan had not mentioned it, and surely he would have, if . . .

Trevelyan shook his head, sighed, and closed his eyes against the glare of the sun off the water.

“I don’t know. As I said, Reinhardt Mayrhofer was an intriguer. He had his sources of information—and he knew Magda, who came from the village near his estate. I paid her well, but perhaps he paid her better. You can never trust a whore, after all,” he added, with a slight tinge of bitterness.