“What happened?” asked Abigail, though Rachel Revere had last night given her the armature of the story: that sometime during the night of the twelfth of September, 1772, Zulieka Fishwire had been slashed to death in her house on Love Lane—a house now rented to a tailor named Gridley and his family. (“And a very pleasant gentleman he is, when he’s himself,” affirmed Mrs. Kern loyally.)

Paul Revere’s wife had, like Lieutenant Coldstone, described Mrs. Fishwire as a hairdresser, “But that was just so the church elders wouldn’t come pokin’ their long noses into her affairs,” provided Mrs. Kern. “Between black eyes from the Bull”—she nodded in the direction of the public house—“and round bellies from the girls down at the wharves, if you’ll excuse my mentioning what’s in front of everyone’s noses hereabouts, and children hereabouts comin’ down with fever and what-have-you every summer, not to speak of breakin’ their arms like my Timmy did climbin’ on the back of the butcher’s cart like a young id jit . . . Well, Mrs. F. barely had time to fix her own hair, poor lady.”

“It’s why nobody thought a thing of it, that strangers were in and out of her house all the day and of an evening,” confirmed Georgie Ballagh, a bent little man who’d lost a leg and a hand fighting the French at Louisburg, over a decade ago. “Mysel’, I don’t hold with a woman gettin’ shut of a child she’s carryin’, but what’s the odds, if the poor mite’ll be born to a mother who’s workin’ the streets for her livin’? Sailors’d come in with their doxies, or by theirselves to be rid of the pox—beggin’ your pardon for mentionin’ it, m’am—at all hours of the day and night.”

He frowned, and ruffled at his thin, colorless hair with the iron hook that had replaced his left hand; Abigail told herself firmly that she must not speculate how many scars he had on his scalp from this habit. “We think a sight more of it now, I’ll tell ye. There’s not a man or a woman on this yard, that don’t prick up their ears when they see a stranger come ’round. But all that’s after closin’ the barn door when the horse is already gone.”