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Chapters (37)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. Twenty-six
  30. Twenty-seven
  31. Twenty-eight
  32. Twenty-nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-one
  35. Thirty-two
  36. Thirty-three
  37. Thirty-four

“Pardon, m’am—pardon, m’am,” mumbled the stumbler’s friend, catching the stumbler by the elbow. “M’friend’s not well, not at all well . . .” The third member of the party hooted with laughter.

“There, Percy, you’ve gone and offended a respectable matron! Your wife will have words to say to you!” He caught his two friends by the shoulders, and the three of them staggered away down the hill toward Lynn Street, leaving Abigail gazing after them, not certain if she should be troubled or merely bemused.

The young man who’d spoken to her—drunk as a lord and elegant in a coat of blue satin beneath his caped gray greatcoat—looked a great deal like Jeffrey Malvern.

Seventeen

Seventeen

018

Scarlett’s Wharf, where the body of the prostitute Jenny Barry had been found, lay barely four hundred yards from Love Lane. “There won’t be anythin’ to see now, m’am,” warned Surry, as they descended the hill, past taverns and tenements, past public houses where men from the country gathered, quietly talking, and when they fell silent, the tolling of the church bells filled in like the heavy scent of lightning in the air.

“I know.”

Had her hair been red? Blonde? Coldstone hadn’t said.

Had she been young? So many of the girls who came and went through the doors of the Queen of Argyll tavern near the head of the wharf seemed, to Abigail’s eyes, barely children. Others had the bitter faces of crones, though probably no older than her youngest sister Betsy, who was barely twenty-three. Despite her decent upbringing and wary loathing of drunkenness, Abigail felt her heart contract with pity at the sight of them. You could not open yourself to six or eight or ten men a day, she thought, without the assistance of alcohol—of something to keep your mind from what you did and what you’d become. Her thoughts went back to Mrs. Kern and her daughters, hanging gentlemen’s shirts on the stretched lines, their hands red with lye. The youngest one—whom Mrs. Kern had sent without a second thought to fetch Mr. Ballagh from the tavern—had looked barely six.

More men loitered on the wharves, waiting their time to take a shift at guarding the Dartmouth’s cargo to prevent it being unloaded. She crossed Ship Street, pattens clanking on the bricks, to the short wooden platform that stretched out over the salt-smelling waters, and behind her caught the words “liberties of Englishmen . . .” “. . . Parliament . . .” “. . . make us slaves, sure as if we was Negroes ourselves!”