“I don’t live in that ward.” Revere shook his head. “I heard of them, of course. Everyone in the neighborhood did. There was a scare, but it seemed to come to nothing after all but tavern-shouting and vows to protect wives and daughters.” He made a little space on the table that occupied most of that room to set a teacup before her, then sank into his barrel-chair. On the table between them Abigail saw pamphlets, engraving plates and tools, sketches of the Dartmouth at anchor on Griffin’s Wharf. On a shelf above them a half-finished set of dentures grinned, discolored ivory in silver wire. Abigail felt a pang of gratitude that even the bearing of five children had left her with her teeth intact.

“You think it was the same man?”

“I don’t know,” said Abigail. She told him of her words with Coldstone, of the help Malvern had given her, and the accounts of Zulieka Fishwire’s neighbors. “Sometimes it looks to me like the act of a lunatic, and at others, like a cold-blooded crime masquing as one.”

“Why the delay?” he asked. “Zulie Fishwire was killed—what? A year ago last September? If it is the same man, why did he stop? And why did he start again?”

“I thought he might have left Boston and come back. If he were a sailor on a deepwater vessel, for instance, or a whaler. Lieutenant Coldstone is writing to the authorities in Philadelphia and New York. John says he thinks the note we found in Mrs. Pentyre’s pocket, arranging the meeting, is a forgery, but whether that means the killer is in the Sons, or Mrs. Pentyre had simply given him the code for another reason, or whether he just had access to her correspondence, I don’t know.”

Quickly, she sketched out to him all that Lisette Droux had told her about the young gentleman, beau comme Adonais, and what the inhabitants of Love Lane had had to say about Abednego Sellars. “I suppose it would lie beyond the bounds of coincidence for him to be Mrs. Pentyre’s mysterious lover—”