“The place was shut tight as a drum when we got there; Sam broke a window in the printing shed, to get us in,” he said. “He wasn’t about to wait, you understand, for Hazlitt to pick up some rumor in the morning and disappear with Mrs. Malvern’s cipher-book and list of names, always supposing he had them. Hazlitt wasn’t there. Neither was the book. Sam searched the place.”

Of course Sam searched.

“What was there,” went on Revere steadily, “was Mrs. Hazlitt. Dead, like the others.” He was silent a moment, his eyebrows standing out very dark in the dim glow of her lamp, as if his face was still chalky from what he had seen. “Just like the others.”

Abigail put a hand over her mouth, trying to push from her mind the sight of a fresh bite in the wax yellow flesh of Mrs. Pentyre’s shoulder. The serpent, the harlot, the witch, the nightmare . . .

What nightmares had tormented Orion Hazlitt’s sleep, on the trundle at his mother’s bedside while she murmured in opiated slumber?

What nightmare had he sought to flee, in the sanity of friendship with a woman he couldn’t have?

“The Sons are out looking for him,” Revere continued after a few moments. “Sam has asked me to tell you, that this isn’t to go any farther. We’ll look after our own.”

“I will at least send a letter to Miss Fluckner,” responded Abigail, “alerting her slave-girl—whom—” Her throat closed on Orion Hazlitt’s name, as her mind flung up at her a hundred conversations, a hundred memories, of that handsome and quiet young man. “Who was surely marked for the next victim. I will swear Miss Fluckner to secrecy—she is a fierce partisan to our cause—and Sam surely cannot object to that. And if he does,” she added mildly, “assure him that I will spend the next six months weeping with chagrin at his displeasure.”

Despite his look of having quietly thrown up his supper not long before, Revere managed a wry grin. “Depend upon me to do so, m’am.”

Twenty-nine

Twenty-nine

My dear Miss Fluckner,

Thank you for the help you have given us, beyond what I can express.

The man who wrote the poems to Philomela is a printer named Orion Hazlitt. He is being sought by authorities now, for yet another crime. My suspicion is that he will flee the district, yet the possibility remains that he may attempt to cross over to the Island. Please be alert, and both you and Mistress Philomela take care about going anywhere alone. Yet I beg you, for reasons which you must take on trust, do not speak of this, or show this letter, to anyone, unless you should return to the mainland, or see him on the Island.

I will advise you, when I hear that he has been apprehended. I do not feel that it will be long.