Abigail took a deep breath, feeling as if her knees would give way. Stepped across the great pool of gore on the threshold, stumbled to the side of . . .

Not Rebecca. The words that had sprung to her mind as a frantic plea to God suddenly rearranged themselves, and she thought, with an odd calm, No, in fact, it isn’t Rebecca.

Or at least, that isn’t Rebecca’s dress.

She dropped to her knees.

Dear God, forgive me for feeling relief. It was certainly some poor woman who had been used this way.

Hands shaking with reaction and guilt, she reached to turn the woman over to see her face, then made herself draw back.

John—her beloved, self-important, irascible John, the hero of her heart, husband of her bosom, and occasional bane of her existence—was forever coming home from the colony courts fuming at the imbecility of police constables who dragged furniture about in burgled houses, who stepped on footprints left by thieves, who casually tossed out broken dishes or torn rags or any of a thousand things by which, he said, any reasonable man could reconstruct who, exactly, had broken into someone’s barn or rifled someone’s strong room. Nincompoops! (This observation was usually made at the top of his lungs and accompanied by hurling his wig against the kitchen wall.) You’d think the lot of them were in the pay of horse thieves themselves!

Abigail took a deep breath, folded her arms on her knees, and bent her body to try to see the woman’s face.

She was obliged to straighten up again and swallow hard. Not only the woman’s backside and thighs had been slashed, but her face, from what Abigail could see of it, had, too. It was difficult to be sure, because of the blood that covered it from her cut throat.

But the dress at least certainly wasn’t Rebecca’s. Her friend had, in truth, owned gowns as fine as that heavy gray silk with its sprigs of pink and green. But she had left them in her husband’s house, when she had walked out of it for good in April of 1770. In the three and a half years since then, the frock Rebecca had worn when she left had gone the way of all flesh, replaced by whatever castoffs her friends, or the parents of the pupils she taught, cared to give her.

The dead woman’s dress, and the layers of blood boltered petticoats obscenely visible piled up on her back, were new.

And her hands were not Rebecca’s hands.