Nothing. Orion Hazlitt will be listening, too, she thought. Waiting as she had waited, in that dark little house as he got his mother up, dressed her for the day, made coffee to go with the bread she’d sent . . . How well I cook, forsooth! Mrs. Hazlitt could barely boil an egg. Rebecca had often shaken her head and laughed at Orion’s tales of his mother’s accounts of her skills as a housewife. The Lord smote her, and with her her handmaid that was privy to all her ways . . .

Abigail frowned as that soft voice snagged in her mind. The handmaid that is heir to her mistress . . .

She watched the servants come and go. The more smartly dressed looked haughtily down their noses at the mere camp cooks and herdsmen, as was the way, Abigail had seen, of upper servants almost everywhere. What had Perdita Pentyre’s handmaid been heir to? To what ways, what secrets, had she been privy?

Her mind turned from the dead woman’s hypothetical servant to the known reality of that plump, giggling, sloe-eyed girl who followed Tamar Malvern into the coach in King Street. She would be after Rebecca’s time. Abigail recalled, over the five years of their acquaintance, how often her friend had spoken or written of Catherine Moore, her own maid.

She would go to her. If for whatever reason she could not flee to me, or Revere, or Orion—because the killer would know us three as her likeliest refuge—she would seek sanctuary with the woman who was her only friend in that household of anger and lies.

“This is ridiculous,” muttered John, face reddening as those who’d arrived after them—town merchants and contractors in victuals, an elegantly clothed Tory judge, and a widow of the town notorious for the gambling-parties held at her house—were admitted to the office almost as soon as they presented their cards to the subaltern who answered their knocks. When that young gentleman finally emerged from the Colonel’s office and said, “Mr. Adams?” Abigail rose as well. “I beg your pardon, m’am.” The young man stepped, if not into her path, at least enough closer to her to make his point. “The Colonel has said, Mr. Adams by himself.”

“Nonsense!” stormed John. “My wife has been kept sitting here, in a cold and drafty hallway, since nine o’clock! I do not propose to leave her alone in the midst of an armed camp, exposed to the comment of every servant and laundress who happens by! You tell your Colonel—”

“I’m quite comfortable, thank you, Mr. Adams.” Abigail laid a quick touch on his elbow. “I have brought a book with me.”

“I will not have you treated—”

Though she was shivering with the cold, she shook her head again, meeting his eyes. “It is of no consequence. We have been delayed long enough already.”