“I said go and look after the horse!” She snapped the order, thus sending the hapless Decker scuttling back into the rain. Once he was safe out of earshot Sally closed the parlor door and turned back to Thaddeus Bird. “Is Ethan Ridley here?” she demanded.

Thaddeus Bird’s hand clawed nervously in his tangled beard. “No.”

“So where is he?” There was no politeness in her voice, just a bald demand and a hint that she might unleash a violent temper if her demands were frustrated.

Bird felt overwhelmed by the girl. She had a force of character not unlike her father’s, but where Truslow’s presence suggested a threat of violence coupled with a dour muscular competence, the daughter seemed to possess a more sinuous strength that could bend and twist and manipulate other folk to her wishes. “Ethan is in Richmond,” Bird finally answered.

“But where?” she insisted.

Bird was taken aback by the intensity of the question and appalled by its implications. He had no doubts what business this girl had with Ethan and he disapproved of it mightily, yet he felt powerless to resist her demands. “He stays in his brother’s rooms. His half-brother, that is, in Grace Street. Shall I write the address down? You can read, yes?”

“No, but others can if I ask them to.”

Bird, sensing that he did something wrong, or at least something horribly tactless, wrote his friend Belvedere Delaney’s address on a piece of paper and then tried to salve his conscience with a sternly asked question. “Might I ask what your business with Ethan is?”

“You can ask, but you’ll get no answer,” Sally said, sounding more like her father than she might have cared to know, then she plucked the scrap of paper from Bird’s hand and tucked it deep inside her rainsoaked clothes. She was wearing two threadbare homespun dresses dyed in butternut, two frayed aprons, a faded shawl, a moth-eaten black bonnet and an oilcloth sheet as an inadequate cape. She was also carrying a heavy canvas bag, suggesting to Bird that she stood in his parlor with all her worldly goods. Her only adornment was the silver ring on her left hand, a ring that struck Bird as old and rather fine. Sally, returning Bird’s appraisal with her scornful blue eyes, had clearly dismissed the schoolmaster as a nonentity. She turned to follow Decker out to the street, but then paused to look back. “Is there a Mister Starbuck here?”

“Nate? Yes. Well, not exactly here. He went with the Colonel. And your father.”

“Gone far?”

“Indeed.” Bird tried to indulge his curiosity as tactfully as possible. “You’ve met Mister Starbuck, then?”