If they had found the brown-backed “Household Expenses” book, they would have gone to Sam, or Revere.

The same could be said if their only ground for suspicion was that Richard Pentyre—that wealthy and fashionable friend of the Crown—was one of the consignees to whom a monopoly of the East India Company tea had been granted. John had always held himself aloof from the darker doings of the Sons of Liberty. Even his pamphlets argued in terms of reason and the Constitutional Rights of Englishmen, not Sam’s flamboyant demagoguery.

Now, in the gray daylight, with the walls of Castle William bobbing ahead of them, Abigail shivered at the thought, What did they find in Mrs. Pentyre’s room?

In addition to the four hundred men of the Sixty-Fourth Foot, and the some sixty female “camp followers” supported on regimental half rations, Castle William—the brick fortress on the island to which the British troops had retired after the Massacre three and a half years ago—housed an assortment of servants, sutlers, animals, munitions, and supplies. These in turn engendered the need for offices and service buildings, so that what had originally been a castle indeed on the round-topped green island now had more the appearance of a grubby village, complete with cattle, chickens, children underfoot, and laundry hanging between the rough wooden dwellings of the men. The office of the Provost Marshal was in the fort itself, but as Abigail had feared, she and John were kept waiting for nearly three hours, on a bench in the chilly brick-paved corridor that circled the parade ground. Through a wide archway they watched the men come and go: clerks, grooms, batmen carrying officers’ bedding to air. A couple of soldiers edged by them with a crate of wine bottles. Another, brisk and military despite a rather unsoldierly smock, bore a brace of ducks toward the kitchen.

Did Perdita Pentyre have her own rooms here at the fortress? Was that a perquisite of the Colonel’s mistress? Abigail wondered who she could decently ask.

Of course, Rebecca will know . . .

And her momentary, reflexive cheer at the answer to her question turned instantly to the haunted pain of dread.

While she’d washed in the icy predawn cold, gone to the stables to milk Semiramis and Cleopatra, she’d strained her ears, listening for footfalls in the yard, for Young Sam or Young Paul: Mrs. Malvern’s at my Pa’s, safe . . .