“Myself, I think it was only a matter of time, before she met the end she did,” he said at last. “She was one of your bawdy whores, who reveled in being a disgrace. A big well-made Irish girl, with hair like a bunch of carrots. If she had money she’d spend it, on gimcrack ornaments and rum. I doubt she drew a sober breath since before she was a woman, and she could not have been twenty-five when she died. Everyone on the North End knew her, if not to speak to then by sight: There wasn’t a man who crossed the Mill Creek by day or night she did not approach. There’s a story—” He grinned suddenly at the recollection. “ ’Tis said one day Governor Hutchinson’s coach was stopped by some pigs in the lane, and she climbed in and sat on his knee, and offered him a drink from her bottle. She followed me once the whole length of Ship Street, shouting to the world how I was afraid of a real woman, as she called herself . . .”

“And were you?” asked Abigail, amused.

“Petrified. Still,” he said more quietly, “her death was an obscenity. I don’t know why I didn’t think of her, the moment I saw Mrs. Pentyre.”

“Possibly because hers was a death that falls more often to poor whores, than to rich ones?”

“Possibly.” He sounded sad.

“Lieutenant Coldstone says she was killed somewhere else, and brought to the wharf—”

“Lord, yes. In the summer the whole world’s out on the waterfront ’til all hours.” Revere’s fingers, long and deft, toyed with the carved-horn spoon. “Jem Greenough—he was constable of the ward that summer—said he thought it must have been done at the Queen of Argyll, across the way, which was where she generally took her men-friends. The landlord there is a cold-blooded rascal, and keeps open ’til dawn in the teeth of church and Army and all. He has rooms on his yard that nobody sees who goes in and out; all the girls use them. If he found her in one of them, as we found poor Mrs. Pentyre, he’d have done as we did.”

Abigail sniffed. “At least Sam didn’t put Mrs. Pentyre’s body out in the road. Or was that only because Mrs. Pentyre wasn’t found until daylight?”

“Where Sam is concerned, and the liberties of Englishmen,” returned the silversmith quietly, “I would put nothing past him.”

“You said Abednego Sellars was constable over in the Ninth Ward, in ’72 when Mrs. Barry was killed,” said Abigail after a time of thought. “Davy Sellars was taken in ’68 or ’67, so Sellars would have been frequenting the taverns in the North End pretty heavily by then—”