“She’s been lying on her face.” The young doctor’s fingers brushed the yellowish shoulders, the stiffening curve of the neck, avoiding the gaping red slit that knife or razor had opened from ear to ear. “The blood will sink down through the flesh once the heartbeat ceases, like water oozing out of a sponge. All this”—he gestured toward the slashed legs, the cuts on the cheeks and breasts—“looks as if it were done after she was dead.”

Abigail reached to draw up one of the chairs, then went over gingerly to it, and sat down on it where it stood. Must not disturb anything . . .

“Do you recognize her?” Sam reappeared in the parlor doorway.

Behind him, Revere said quietly, “I doubt her own husband would.”

Only Revere, thought Abigail, seems to have taken note of the broad gold wedding band on the woman’s bloodless hand. She said, “Her pockets should tell us something,” and Dr. Warren—who was in truth very young—looked shocked at the suggestion.

As she came over to his side, her skirts firmly gathered up to avoid the blood, Abigail heard Revere ask Sam quietly, “Anything?”

“Not yet.”

She looked up sharply at the pair of them, Revere dark and burly in the short rough jacket of a laborer, Sam looking like what he was—a slightly down-at-the-heels middle-aged gentleman, until you saw his eyes. It was his eyes—the way he glanced around the kitchen as if seeking something, concerned with something beyond the horror of this woman’s death—that angered her. She said, a little tartly, “I take it Rebecca didn’t simply write poems and broadsides to make fun of the British. Was she a Son—or a Daughter—of Liberty?” The edge on her voice came not only from Sam’s abstraction in the face of death: She, Abigail, would have been a Daughter of Liberty herself, had such an organization existed—and had she not been either carrying a child or nursing one for most of the preceding nine years (thank you, John). It was typical of Sam that he hadn’t even thought to form such a group while organizing the men.

Sam cleared his throat, a little deprecatingly, and it was Revere who answered her question. “Mrs. Malvern handled the communication between our organization and the other Committees of Correspondence in other colonies.”

“That explains, I suppose,” said Abigail drily, “how Rebecca got her information about what passed in the British camp. As to this poor soul—”

Carefully, she worked her hand through the placket in the gray silk overskirt, the embroidered underskirt, and found the pockets—silk, too, by the feel of them—tied around her waist. One contained three keys, a handkerchief, an ivory set of housekeeping tablets with a pencil attached; the other, a single piece of paper folded in quarters.