He hounds me. He has always considered me his property, like his horses or the corn in his ships. He questions the servants about everything I do, he opens and reads my letters, he demands accounting of every penny I spend and he has imprisoned me under lock and key as if I were a disobedient child. Yet he has said, he will not let me go.

And Orion Hazlitt had cried: If ever there was a case of God’s hand being needed in mortal affairs—

Abigail shook her head, her heart aching at the desperation in the young man’s voice.

The clock in the brick turret of Faneuil Hall chimed ten thirty. Abigail drew her skirts aside from barrows of country apples, wet from the rain. Pens of sheep blocked her way; crates of fish, drying now and several hours out of the sea: By the time I can do my marketing they’ll be stale, and the best will be gone . . .

But her steps did not pause. If I am to see him at all, I must see him first. Before the Watch.

Her mind chased Rebecca’s voice back along a corridor of memory.

They’re spying on me. I know they’re spying on me. All except Catherine—my maid—and he has the other servants spy on her. I dread he’ll send her away, and get some creature of his own, like that horrid Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela. That had been earlier, before she’d left Charles Malvern’s house: only weeks after she and Abigail had first met. When she’d wept then, the lace border of her handkerchief had been wider than the linen it surrounded.

I used to laugh at Pamela, but I swear I feel like that wretched ninny these days. Rebecca had never had much use for Abigail’s favorite novel, or its saintly heroine. He actually did lock me up, for nearly a week. He’s said he will again, if he hears I’ve come here to see you. “I will not be defied in my own house,” he says. The servants seemed to think nothing of it. And no one will help, because like Pamela’s Mr. B, he can hurt them in their pocketbooks—