And it was true, Abigail knew, that the innkeeper from whom Rebecca had first rented chambers in October of ’70 had been nearly driven out of business by the prices Malvern and his network of merchant cronies had demanded of him for victuals and wood. The same thing had happened to the second room she had rented, early in the summer of ’72. The Adamses had returned to Braintree by then and Abigail had asked her to move into the crowded little farmhouse, but again Rebecca had refused. I can’t live with you and John forever, she’d said, but Abigail had been aware at the time that Charles Malvern’s youngest child, four-year-old Nathan, had been ill. Though Rebecca was estranged from her little stepson’s father, still she would not leave Boston. She had found the little house behind the Tillets’—who loathed Malvern over the politics of their respective congregations—but by what Orion had just told her, Malvern had not ceased his efforts to make his estranged wife’s life as difficult as possible.

And then, thought Abigail, as she turned into the waterfront bustle of Merchants’ Row, there was the matter of Rebecca’s father’s will.

It was the last occasion upon which she—or as far as she knew, Rebecca—had seen Charles Malvern, except to catch a glimpse of him across the sanctuary of the Brattle Street Meeting-House.

Abigail slowed her steps as she passed the Malvern countinghouse, at the head of his wharf. Not a grand wharf, like Hancock’s, or the marvel of the Long Wharf that stretched half a mile out to sea, but big enough to serve either of Malvern’s oceangoing brigs. The Fair Althea stood in port, named for the woman Abigail suspected its owner had never forgiven Rebecca for replacing. Malvern had rebuilt the countinghouse at the wharf’s head, on the site of his grandfather’s original modest structure: two and a half stories of solid Maine timber, with a warehouse behind it for muslins and calicoes, tool-steel and paint.

The tide was out. The sloping shingle below street level was dotted with heaped boxes, rough drays, coils of rope, and wet-dark cargo nets spread to dry. At the nearby Woodman’s Wharf a vessel was loading with kegs of what smelled like potash, stevedores shouting to one another as they worked. Beyond lay the leafless forest of bobbing masts, and the cold air muttered with the creak of ropes, the endless soft knocking of pulley blocks against the mast-wood. The world smelled of seaweed and wet rope. Wind smote her, but it was not colder than Charles Malvern’s wrinkled angry countenance and pale eyes, when last she, and Rebecca, and John had stood before him.