“I’ll be all right now, Shim,” said Abigail softly, but the boy insisted on escorting her across the street and down the carriageway to the yard. Scipio must have come straight from the front step to the kitchen’s door to meet her, his candle glinting on the brass of his livery buttons.

The fire had already been banked in the kitchen, but the room still pulsed with warmth, exquisite after the night’s brutal cold. The glow of the oil-lamp on its chain dimly outlined cauldrons and skimmers, trammels and oil-jars in the shadows, and the brick floor still smelt of the after-dinner wash up. The butler had kept coffee from dinner for her in the pot on the hob, and served her in one of the family cups: blue English porcelain rather than servants’ pottery.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come up with the direction of Miss Catherine’s brother any sooner than this, m’am,” Scipio explained, when Abigail had gestured him to sit. Since it was the house he lived in, she felt strange and awkward inviting him to do so, slave or not, even as she stopped herself from inviting him to share with her the coffee he’d made. What is the proper behavior between slave and free in this situation? she asked herself irritably, and concluded that there wasn’t any. A truly proper servant wouldn’t have admitted a stranger to his master’s house in the first place, nor discussed the family’s affairs with an outsider. “She wrote to me, and to Ulee in the stables, once or twice over the last year. But we had to look through the letters to find mention of the nearest town to her brother’s farm. It’s Townsend, but where that might be I don’t know. Wenham is another place she speaks of, but she writes as if it’s some ways off from her, it sounds like.”

“Wenham is some ways off from any spot on the civilized earth,” muttered Abigail. “Always supposing Mrs. Malvern could get across the river or through the town gate.”

“I understand—” Scipio cleared his throat delicately. “I understand that Miss Rebecca had friends who might have skiffs or whaleboats that could get her across the harbor, even on a falling tide and a rainy night—”

“If she had such,” replied Abigail, with equal tact—since no one in Boston, not even the slaves, admitted to knowing anyone either engaged in smuggling or involved with the Sons of Liberty, “and of course I don’t for a moment imagine she would know such people—I think they would undertake inquiries amongst themselves, and quickly learn if that had in fact been the case. It does not seem to have been.”

“Ah.” Scipio nodded. “I didn’t think you would be asking after Miss Catherine, if it had. Mr. Adams—”