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Chapters (37)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. Twenty-six
  30. Twenty-seven
  31. Twenty-eight
  32. Twenty-nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-one
  35. Thirty-two
  36. Thirty-three
  37. Thirty-four

“Harlot or no harlot,” said Revere, “I’d give much to be there when the Watch tells old Malvern his wife’s gone missing. And under such circumstances as these.”

“Good God, man,” cried Warren, “you’re not thinking Malvern had aught to do with—”

“I’m not thinking anything,” retorted the silversmith lazily. “But after all the spite and venom he’s poured forth to anyone who’ll listen these past three years, I’d be curious to see how he takes it.”

How indeed? Abigail followed the men back into the shop. Sam was still fretting about the missing “Household Expenses” book, demanding of Orion where Rebecca would have gone, if not to the Tillets or Revere, to the Adams house or the printshop—? Little enough chance I’ll have to even speak to him, once the Watch has given him the news . . .

Great Heavens, surely they wouldn’t detain him?

What is it John said, that of all murders done, the culprit is usually known to the victim? Would the Watch be such fools as to think that—as the missing woman’s estranged husband—Charles Malvern had had anything to do with such a crime? She recalled the little merchant’s anger-crimsoned face, when last she’d seen him, those cold eyes like gray buckshot . . .

“Are you coming, Mrs. Adams?” Sam opened the shop door for her. “We need you to discover the body, and summon the Watch.”

Something in Sam’s briskness—or perhaps only his preoccupation with his precious book of contacts—raised the hackles on her neck as it had in Rebecca’s kitchen earlier. She stepped back from him, pulled her scarf more tightly around her throat. “Discover it yourself, Sam,” she said briefly. “I think I need to pay a visit to Rebecca’s husband, and tell him that his wife has vanished—and see if he has aught to say, about where she might have gone.”

Five

Five

006

He hounds me. Rebecca had wiped her eyes as she’d said it, on an evening in summer—the summer before last, one afternoon when Rebecca had crossed the bay to Braintree with some of Abigail’s Smith cousins, and they’d spent the day in the summer tasks of threading leather britches beans to dry, and bottling blackberries from the woods behind the orchard. Abigail had been heavy yet again with child—baby Tommy, old enough now to stagger sturdily about the kitchen. Walking swiftly through the market, thrusting guilt from her heart as she would have brushed falling rain from her face, Abigail earnestly hoped that Pattie—the fourteen-year-old farm-girl who’d lived with the family since their return to Boston a year ago—was keeping an eye on him . . . on Charley, too. There were simply too many things a pair of enterprising little boys could get into, in a kitchen on a freezing day.