The young man turned swiftly, and Abigail walked with him out through the passway to the street. “She’ll forget all this by the time I’m home, you know,” he said quietly, seeing the trouble on Abigail’s face. “I hate it: I hate having to do it. And she—she doesn’t understand. She’s never understood—” He shook his head, as if trying to shake away sacking wrapped around his eyes and brain. “Have you heard anything? Anything at all?”

Abigail debated for a moment about telling him that at least two other women had been murdered in the same fashion as Perdita Pentyre, then put the thought aside. “I know Rebecca hasn’t fled to stay with her maid,” she said. “Her husband—”

He had been wavering, caught between his fear for his mother, and the tug of the tolling bells. Now he grew still. “You’ve seen him?”

“He has been most helpful, Orion.”

“If I had—” he began impulsively, then stopped himself, and stood for a moment, looking past her, his face wooden with anger and distress. “He’s shown before he’ll do anything to possess her, up to and including putting her under lock and key! Do you think you can trust him?” he asked at last.

“I think so,” she said slowly.

“Do you ever wish—?” He hesitated, then let his breath out in a rush. When she put her hand on his arm, Abigail was disconcerted to feel him trembling. “Let me know,” he said, “if you learn anything. If you find anything. I know it’s—” He shook his head again, and rubbed his eyes. “Her husband will always be her husband.” He sounded like a man reminding himself. “And Mother will always be my mother. I know that. Yet I can be her friend.”

Wish what? Abigail watched him stride away down the slope of Wine Lane toward Faneuil Hall. Wish that instead of sitting at home comforting his mother when the rain began Thursday night, he had been still at Rebecca Malvern’s, when Perdita Pentyre’s killer came knocking at the shutter? Asking in a voice she knew, to let him in?

Wish that he had stood at God’s elbow, there at the beginning of Time, and asked that the woman he loved not be given in marriage to a bone-dry merchant with two half-grown children? That he could spend his days with a mother whose grip upon him was an embrace and not a stranglehold?

And in her mind she heard her father’s gentle voice: But we were there, my Nab, at the beginning of Time with God. And we saw, and assented to, every single act and event of the lives He drew up for us, seeing in them His wisdom, before we entered into the human condition of blindness day-to-day.

The sound of the church bells followed her home.