“He killed her cats,” Abigail said after a moment. “Two of them. Slashed them to pieces, as he did her.” But when she looked back at the Lieutenant’s face, there was no more expression there than he would wear if he were playing cards.

“It seems, then,” he said, “that Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Fishwire were more similar to one another than we had known—that there were those who would consider the latter as reprehensible, in her way, as a woman of the town would have been. And the gap widens between them and Mrs. Pentyre.”

“One could say that,” returned Abigail levelly, “if one did not regard Mrs. Pentyre as a whore herself.” His back stiffened. Does he truly believe that when a fine lady takes lovers it is different in the eyes of God from the act of some poor woman who is only doing it to buy herself bread? “As some—whom I shall not name—regard Mrs. Malvern.”

He thought about that for some time before saying, “You are quite right, m’am.”

“And no politics in sight.”

Something changed in his eyes, and she knew as if she read it on a piece of paper, that in his mind was whatever it was that made him—and Colonel Leslie—so certain John had a hand in the killing. Whatever it was that he would not tell her.

As she would not—could not—speak Abednego Sellars’s name to him.

A pretty black maid, slender as a dark lily, got down from the coachman’s box to collect the odds and ends left in the coach: a book, a scarf, vinaigrette, an overfed lapdog who whined and licked her hands. As if she heard Coldstone’s speculations the maid turned quickly, trying to get a look at the loitering watcher. But the young idler slipped away out of sight. Too many soldiers about? Abigail wondered. Or had he simply been told to report to some master-thief, that the family had indeed departed for Castle Island, and the house could be robbed at leisure?

“You said to me the other day that killers such as this one—of whom I presume you have heard more in London—invariably continue with their killings,” she said. “Why would he have waited fourteen months, between the second murder and the third? You’re certain there have been none between?”

“After Mrs. Fishwire’s murder,” said Coldstone quietly, “I have been watching.”

“Fourteen months is the length of a sea voyage, and a stay in some other land.”

“I had thought that. I will send to the city magistrates of New York and Philadelphia, to ask if there have been similar crimes.”