And frowned. She dried her hands again, took from a drawer in the sideboard a much-scribbled sheet on which Nabby—with many blots and scratches—had been practicing the fiddling art of writing with a goose-quill. This she held up to John, her thumb at the topmost line, where Rebecca had written:

All Things Work Together for the Good of Them that Love the Lord.

“Is that the same handwriting?” she asked.

John fished in his pocket for a magnifying lens, laid the two papers side by side.

“The capitals are the same,” he said, after a long few minutes. “But look how the small o’s and e’s want to pinch, while Mrs. Malvern’s are naturally round. Not just one or two, but all of them. See there, where the in in Linnet blots and widens, where he’s tried to imitate that little swoop you see in the in in Things. The same on the downstrokes of the capital T’s and L’s: that forced change of angle.” He offered her the glass.

“I’ll tell you what caught my attention,” added John, as Abigail verified the wavery changes of line, the odd thicknesses and blots where the writer’s hand had struggled to imitate angles unfamiliar to it. “Look at the two pieces of paper. No, Rebecca wouldn’t use cold-pressed English notepaper for children’s exercises, but would she have had any of it in the house at all? What did she write her broadsides on?”

“Common foolscap, like this. Sam arranges with Isaiah Thomas at the Spy to provide her with as much as she needs.” She glanced up. “You’re saying Mrs. Pentyre was lured there.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“By someone who knows the code used by the Sons.”

“By someone who knew that this code was used between Mrs. Malvern and Mrs. Pentyre.”

“But Rebecca did wait up for her,” pointed out Abigail. “She was still dressed—at least her day dress and her shoes were gone from the house—and the fire hadn’t been banked, nor the candles extinguished. And they had been snuffed and mended during the evening. She waited for someone. And clearly, she let Mrs. Pentyre in at midnight.”

“And the killer as well, apparently,” murmured John. He folded the note and pocketed it. “I’ll get that,” he offered, as Abigail started to lift the heavy Dutch oven, to carry to the hearth. “What time did the rain start here? Ten?” He dumped a couple of shovelfuls of glowing coals onto the iron lid. “If it was coming down as hard as it was in Salem, it would have been easy for someone to follow Mrs. Pentyre’s chaise from her house. As to how he would have gotten them to open the door—”

“He was known to one or the other,” said Abigail. “He must have been. If he forged the note, he knew the code—”