Like nearly everyone else in Boston, Abigail had seen Richard Pentyre from a distance. Like nearly everyone, she had for years thought him an Englishman, and the caricature of one, at that: slight, girlish, excessively tailored and intensely peruked. He bowed to Abigail with great polite-ness, and took a seat on the opposite side of the heavy table like a man who providentially finds the chairs so arranged, rather than one who has insisted on their placement to keep the greatest distance from his caller. He said, “Mrs. Adams,” in his wisp of a voice, but did not offer to touch her hand.

“Mr. Pentyre.” Lisette Droux’s voice came back to her: He laughed and joked his wife about her lovers, yet if any man crossed him in a business way, he make sure that that man became truly sorry that he had done so. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“The honor is mine.” His eyes were dark, intelligent, and wary: because he knew more than he was saying concerning his wife’s death? Or because he expected that at any moment she would whip a pistol out from beneath her skirts? “Lieutenant Coldstone said that you thought I could be of assistance in some way?”

“I know not if anyone can be,” said Abigail, hoping her voice and expression combined to express wearied resignation. “But I know not where else to turn. I am a friend to Mrs. Malvern—the woman in whose house—”

He raised a hand to stay further words, and turned his face aside. “Yes,” he said quickly, though his expression registered nothing. “I know who Mrs. Malvern was.”

“Pray forgive me for bringing up a subject that I know must grievously distress you.” Was? A thoughtless trick of speech? Or—Knowledge of something that others didn’t have? “Yet I—and, I might add, Mr. Malvern—are grasping at straws, in the matter of Mrs. Malvern’s disappearance.”

Annoyance flickered across his face at the mention of Malvern’s name. “Pray believe me, m’am,” he said, “though I sympathize with you in your concern for your friend, I had no idea that my wife had formed so distasteful a connection. While I’m sure Mrs. Malvern was a paragon of virtue and beauty, her husband’s habit of using members of his family—in particular his son and daughter—to obtain information about his trade rivals would have caused me to forbid the acquaintance, had I known of it.”

He was watching her again, with an intentness that she found hard to attribute merely to grief for a wife who had betrayed him. Trying to read her, she thought, as she—her eyes downcast in a counterfeit of confusion—was trying to read him.

“They had no acquaintance in common that you know of?”