The floor was sanded, after the old country habit, and the ceiling low. The building itself was even more rickety than Rebecca Malvern’s dwelling, so that the dashing footsteps of several little Gridleys (there were at least four of them that Abigail could see, and Mrs. Gridley didn’t herself look old enough to be out without her own mother) almost vibrated the house. Nails and hooks had been driven into the walls of the small front room: “She had strings back and forth between ’em, with her herbs dryin’,” provided Mrs. Kern. When Abigail looked up at the little cluster of hooks in the low ceiling, the washerwoman added, “She’d hang skins up there. Snakeskins, enough to make a Christian’s flesh creep. Mornin’s, she’d go out to the Commons and catch ’em by the Mill-Pond, or pay the boys hereabouts. Lizards, too. She’d have ’em up there to keep the cats from ’em.”

“Had she many?”

“Three,” said George Ballagh. “My lad Pirate was one of ’em—” He looked out the open door of the little house, and pointed to a thin, rather delicate-looking black cat sitting on an upper windowsill of a tenement opposite, washing itself with the stump of a missing forepaw. “He a’n’t crossed this threshold since that day, an’ I can’t say as I blame him.”

“Because he still smells the blood, do you think?” Abigail knew plenty of people who’d disagree with the enlightened Mr. Gridley and attribute such reaction in an animal to ghosts.

The little ex-soldier’s face hardened with hate. “Blood my arse. The man who did it killed the other two, and I found my poor lad hid behind the cupboard with his paw all but sliced off, and cuts on his back where the man’d gone after him as he ran about. There was blood on the step”—he nodded toward the scuffed oak threshold, the shallow brick step outside—“where they three would sit after dark, waitin’ for the Fishwire to let ’em in for their dinners, an’ the two of ’em gutted like fish here in this room, an’ the poor old Fishwire herself in the doorway there, that goes to the back-kitchen. I was one of them as helped clear the dead from Fort William Henry, after the Abenaki had massacred the settlers there.” He shook his head. “This was near as bad.”

“That Father Scully,” put in Mrs. Gridley insistently, “he blessed both this room and the kitchen, and the doorway between ’em. There’s nought of evil, that remains here of the deed.”