“By the terms of James Woodruff’s will, I am executor of that property.” Malvern had spoken to John, not to Rebecca, his square brown hands folded ungivingly on his desk. The merchant was even shorter than John, and though now in his midfifties, and wiry in build, gave an impression of tremendous, almost threatening, physical strength. His merchant father had sent him to sea in his youth, and he retained the hardness of a man who has had to impose his will by force on other men in order to survive. “It was made over to me as Rebecca’s husband—”

She heard the pause before her friend’s name, heard in that harsh cracked voice the refusal to call her Mrs. Malvern . Mrs. Malvern was and forever would be the woman he had lost.

“—and she has but to give over her present mode of life, to regain its use. To hand property to a woman who has forsaken her husband to live upon the town would do neither her nor the community any service, and would provide the worst sort of example.”

“To whom, sir?” demanded Abigail hotly. “To other wives who find it not to their taste to have communications with their families forbidden? Who don’t care to be imprisoned like felons for weeks at a time or to have their books burned and rooms searched?”

“Precisely, Madame,” Malvern had replied. “If my wife cannot tolerate my attempts to better her, but would flee the lesson like a fractious child, then shame upon her as well as upon myself. If I keep watch upon her it is because she has lied to me, both about her faith and about the conduct of my first wife’s children, to whom she has shown nothing but dissembled hatred since first she entered my house. I defy the law, or any man of business, to fault me in separating her from her family, after she has robbed me and given the money to them—to purchase the property whose income she now claims as her own.”

“That is not true!” Rebecca rose, stepped to the desk before which John already stood. It had been early December, as bleak as it was today, and with the smell of snow in the air. Abigail recalled, as much as the interview itself, how cramped and stuffy the little office had felt, and how intrusive had been the noise of the wharves and the street outside, after a year and a half of the farm’s slow-paced peace. “That land was my father’s,” Rebecca said. “And his father’s, before that—”