Abigail closed her eyes briefly, seeing—as if with the memory of a nightmare—the blood-engorged face, the bitten shoulders and neck. So distorted had the features been by the blood pooling in the tissues it would have been hard to tell the woman’s age. But it was very much a young girl’s trick, to throw herself at the commander of the occupying troops—a man of power, moderately good-looking, and, as Mademoiselle Droux had pointed out, an Earl’s second son. To seduce him with her gay youth, with her beautiful hair: telling herself that her adventure was for her country’s sake, like the heroine of a play. Yes. She had been very young.

“How old was she?”

“Seventeen, Madame, when she married M’sieu Pentyre. She was twenty when she died.”

Abigail drew in a breath, and let it out, thinking about that very young girl. Had it been her husband taking a mistress, that had determined her on revenge? Yesterday morning, rereading Rebecca’s letters, she had found several accounts of trips to Castle Island, in quest of pamphlet-worthy gossip at the camp. Perdita Pentyre would have seen in her first a kindred spirit, then a link with the Sons of Liberty themselves, the organization whose writings she read with such eagerness. M’sieu would laugh, and kiss her, and she would be wild with indignation, and storm away out of the house . . .

She could almost hear her daughter Nabby shouting at her one day in fury, I’ll show you—!

She was from New York, Abigail recalled; without friends or close connections here to distract her from her adventure. And Colonel Leslie, as she had glimpsed him yesterday, was a well-enough-looking man, and younger than one might expect.

As if she discerned the sadness in Abigail’s face, Mademoiselle Droux said, “Eh bien, Madame, it is not as if the Colonel was her only lover.”

Abigail snapped sharply from her reverie. “Was he not?” and at the same moment a flash of disgust went through her. As if her sort stops at one, Queenie had sniffed, and standing there in the market yesterday, Abigail had been ready to snatch the cook’s cap off, and pull her hair. The one she let in through her parlor window . . . This Mrs. Pentyre, if she . . . had someone else she wanted to meet . . .

So it was only a sordid assignation after all.

Oh, Rebecca, no. How could you?

Perdita Pentyre may not have had any connection with the Sons of Liberty at all.

Rebecca had only used their code, as the most convenient one to hand, to help another woman as unhappily wed as she herself had been. No wonder Sam had known nothing about her.

Only it wasn’t Rebecca, who had written that note.