“Beyond the fields, yes. My impression was that the place was larger ten or fifteen years ago. Several houses looked completely deserted, and many of the inhabited ones had their upper stories shuttered up, even in the daytime when we rode out. But it was the end of daylight when we reached here, my husband’s clerk and I, and we were taken immediately to their House of Repentance for evening services. It was well and truly dark by the time the Hand of the Lord had had his say.”

“Then we’d best have a careful look round.” The sergeant took his musket in its wrappings of oilcloth from the back of his saddle, and after it, the pistol that John kept in his office desk under lock and key. “How close are the woods to the buildings?”

With half-closed eyes Abigail summoned back the wet twilight, the impression of trees crowding in on those decaying gray buildings. “A hundred feet?” It was hard to put aside her horrified anger at herself, that she and Thaxter had undoubtedly spent the night only a few dozen feet from where Rebecca—almost certainly—was being kept. “They’ll have gardens, between the houses and the woods, but those will be cleared off now.”

“Aye, but their fences’ll still be up.” The young man led the way from the house, looked down the road toward open ground, blue eyes narrowed. In Boston, Patrick Muldoon’s air of countrified good nature had made him seem naïve, primitive, and rather harmless despite his imposing size and crimson uniform. Faced with the prospect of an escape through woods in overcast darkness—she knew precisely how far her lantern would cast light and she knew it would be next to useless—Abigail felt suddenly grateful that she was with an Irish farmhand used to the ways of bogs and fields, rather than the cleverest of Boston law clerks. “Moon’s on the wane, too, and them clouds don’t look like breakin’. We’ll barely be able to see, goin’ in. Comin’ out, we’ve got to strike a fence and know which way to follow it, if we’re to make it back here with both feet. Thank Christ the road’s good and rutted.”

“And that it’s December and cold as a well digger’s elbow,” murmured Abigail. “They’ll all be indoors.”

As if to mock her words, the crack of a gunshot sounded somewhere in the brown and silver woods, a hunter seeking to make the most of what game there was before the last of the squirrels retired for their winter naps. “Almost all,” she temporized primly, and Muldoon grinned.