“There is that,” Abigail agreed. “But answer me this, John. If a woman has been betraying her husband quite profitably with the Colonel of a regiment—who can provide the husband with contracts and protection for his property if he happens to be about to take a whacking great consignment of tea from the East India Company—and that woman then becomes entangled with a young Adonis to whom Colonel Obliging may take exception, whose whereabouts would it be more reasonable to inquire after when she’s found dead? The twice-betrayed husband who may be about to lose both contracts and protection due to his wife’s romantic self-will, or a total stranger who has done nothing worse than object to the import of tea?”

“A hit, Portia.” John’s hand closed over her wet and soapy one. “A palpable hit. Yet I remind you that your Lieutenant Coldstone is not a stupid man, and what you have told me, he already knows. And yet whatever else he knows—or thinks he knows—causes him to believe that I, and not the deceived husband, wielded the knife.”

“I wonder if there’s a way to ask the Lieutenant to be in the room with me when I speak to Pentyre?” said Abigail. “I’m sure there is. For I’m very curious what Pentyre’s reaction will be when I mention that someone of my acquaintance saw him—or someone very like him—walking down Hull Street at eleven thirty Wednesday night, only a half mile from where his wife was found dead. I don’t expect he’ll cry out or anything, but as Hamlet says, If he but blench . . .”

“Not a bad idea,” agreed John. “And I’ve done the same myself in courtrooms. Yet I urge you to remember, Portia, what happens to Hamlet at the end of Act Five.”

Once the dishes were washed up John wrapped himself in cloak and scarves and vanished into the slow drizzle of the rain. Colonel Leslie had proclaimed a curfew on the town but no one was keeping it: John calculated that some four thousand countrymen had come into Boston so far. As she stitched at the mountain of household mending—and tried to keep her attention on her children’s reading—Abigail reflected that the tea crisis and subsequent presence of the mob in Boston may have been the only reason John hadn’t been arrested for the Pentyre murder already, if Coldstone were that certain of whatever it was that he refused to tell her.