“A woman crying for help, on a pitch-black night, in the pouring rain?” By his disbelieving frown, Abigail deduced that Dr. Warren hadn’t heard Lucretia Hazlitt on the subject of Babylonian harlots who deserted honest husbands in order to seduce her innocent son. “For that matter, why wouldn’t Mrs. Malvern have simply run to the nearest watchman—?”

“Perhaps because it was pitch-black and pouring rain,” replied Sam, “and the nearest watchman was huddled next to the common-room fire at the Sheep and Lamb—”

“At midnight?” protested Warren—who obviously thought that all taverns along the Boston waterfront obeyed the city ordinances about closing times.

Sam and Revere gave him glances that pitied his naïveté. They crossed the Mill Creek on its little bridge, the waters low now on the slack tide, though when the tide was running it could make a respectable enough torrent to turn the water mill that reared up to their right. Abigail couldn’t keep herself from glancing down at the gray stream and tried to put from her mind what this street would be like on such a night as last night had been, with every house shuttered tight and the rain hammering down, no starlight, no moonlight, only the rush of the tidal flow in the stream to guide a woman groping in the darkness.

“ other, I’m quite sure that Deacon Curtin has heard every one of the arguments for Mankind’s Salvation by good works,” Orion Hazlitt was saying as Sam and Abigail entered his tiny shop.

His mother neatly sidestepped the gentle hand that he put out, and planted herself before the customer, whose face was growing alarmingly red. “Forgetting those things that are behind, the Apostle says, and reaching forth unto those things that are before, I press toward the mark.” Still dazzlingly beautiful, for all the silvering of the raven hair beneath her house-cap, Lucretia Hazlitt shook a finger at the elderly man whom Abigail recognized as one of the Deacons of New South Church. “Now, if the truth revealed unto the Apostle had been, I sit still, knowing that God hath already saved me without the slightest stir on my part toward salvation, would he not have said, I sit still, knowing—”

“Please.” Hazlitt took his mother’s hand, began to lead her toward the shop’s rear door, which led, Abigail knew, into an even tinier “keeping room.” These little kitchen-cum-parlors backed most Boston shops whose upper floors housed the shopkeepers’ families. His strained smile did nothing to change the outraged deacon’s glare, but he tried anyway. “My mother doesn’t always know what she is saying.”

“So I should hope,” retorted the man drily.

“I know without some hypocrite roarer to tell me, my son, that Faith without Works is dead—”