“In the past eighteen months, two other women have been killed in the same fashion as Mrs. Pentyre.” Lieutenant Coldstone stretched his hands to the small blaze in the parlor hearth, newly kindled and struggling, but his coffee-dark gaze remained on Abigail’s face.

Abigail stared at him, feeling as if she had been struck. Two—? And then, sickened that she had not thought earlier to ask, Why did I think she was the only one?

She took a deep breath, yet could think of nothing to say.

“One was a whore, the other a hairdresser—common women—”

“And does a woman’s poverty or morals make her more deserving of that horror?” She fought the urge to pick up a stick of firewood from the box beside the hearth and smash it over that immaculately powdered wig.

“No, of course not,” he replied calmly. “But it does make it curious that the third victim was a wealthy woman, a married woman, and a woman who under normal circumstances could not be easily got at by a stranger who did not have an introduction to her.”

Abigail opened her mouth again to snap a response, then thought about his words, and closed it. Her mind darted at once to Charles Malvern’s house, and how it was never entirely still: always the distant tread of a servant, the sense of other people at call. When Rebecca had taken up her first set of rooms in that cheap lodging house on the North End, after six months of living with the Adamses on Brattle Street, she had said, It feels so queer, to come in from the market, and know I’ll be there alone.

She said, slowly, “And Mrs. Malvern was poor, and she lived alone . . . as I presume the other two did. And though her landlord had servants and prentice-boys, they were not in the same house with her. She fits the pattern, not Mrs. Pentyre.”

“Precisely. And, Mrs. Pentyre deliberately took considerable trouble—ordering her husband’s man to harness a chaise for her, and driving herself through the rain on a pitch-black night—to put herself into a locality of danger. Why?”

Abigail shook her head. The forged note, in the code of the Sons of Liberty, seemed to her mind to be crying out from the drawer in the sideboard where she had put it, like a kitten in a cupboard. “I can’t imagine. Who were the other two?”