Abigail chuckled, recalling her glimpses of Richard Pentyre, in his a la mode coats of French brocade, and his immaculately powdered wigs tinted a stylish lavender. Not for him, she thought, the voyages that had made his rival Charles Malvern hard: his was a pleasant, long-nosed face just losing the freshness of a prolonged youth. Vindictive, Lisette Droux had said, and clever by the sound of it—and by Thaxter’s present accounts of the man’s manipulations of his relationship with the Governor. Would he have had the wits to decipher the admittedly simple code that Rebecca used to set up meetings with his wife?

More disturbingly, would Lieutenant Coldstone?

And what would those Crown officials, those voters in Parliament, make of this world, she wondered, as they mounted their rested horses, and left the prosperous town of Lynn behind. She was used to thinking of Boston as a great city, with its crooked streets and thronged wharves. Even as a lawyer’s wife, she was able to purchase dress goods as fine as any lawyer’s wife in London if she had a mind, and paint her rooms in bright fashionable hues like Naples yellow and Dutch pink. The education John had obtained at Harvard was equal to any on offer at Oxford or Cambridge, and in the city’s bookstores she could find novels by Fielding and Richardson, plays by Voltaire and Shakespeare, the poetry of Pope and the philosophical writings of Locke.

Yet outside of Boston, the veneer of England vanished like an early frost. Abigail’s girlhood as a minister’s daughter had taught her how primitive were the farms that lay only a few hours’ walk into the countryside, where vessels were still made from the shells of pumpkins or gourds, and families slept all together in lofts above the single “keeping room” downstairs. Where a child might grow to voting age before he ever saw a clock, or a book other than the Bible. Once they reached Salem, and turned westward, this impression deepened, of traversing time as well as distance, as if they had somewhere crossed the line that separated the eighteenth century from the seventeenth. Away from the sea, and the settled lands along the coast, the woods closed in, standing as they had stood since the creation of the continent: gray and black with winter’s coming, fall’s tawny gorgeousness only a fading echo of yellow turning to umber underfoot.