Perdita Pentyre! The name left Abigail momentarily breathless. She closed her mouth on a gasped demand, Are you sure? Because obviously both John and Lieutenant Coldstone were very sure. Perdita—
“I heard that a body had been found, yes.” Abigail collected her thoughts, her heart sinking. “And that Mrs. Malvern had disappeared.” And still has not come forth . . .
“From whom did you hear this,” asked Coldstone, “and where?”
“In Fish Street, at about ten this morning when I was doing the marketing.” And thank goodness that, like King Solomon, this impeccably uniformed young man knew nothing about housekeeping and would be unlikely to ask why a woman whose home was as neat as Abigail’s would leave her marketing until so advanced an hour.
“Fish Street doesn’t lie between here and the market,” pointed out Coldstone.
Not so ignorant, after all. “Mrs. Malvern is a close friend. Situated as she is—obliged to teach a dame school, and without a servant—I went there to ask if there were anything I could obtain for her. Thank you, Pattie—”
The girl came in, laid the tray with its three tall beakers of cider on the parlor table, cast a glance at Coldstone as if she expected him to arrest her as well, and ducked from the room.
Coldstone ignored the cider. “Did Mrs. Malvern ever speak of Mrs. Pentyre? To your knowledge, were they acquainted?”
“They may have known one another by sight,” responded Abigail, still trying to take it in, that the young and lovely wife of one of the richest merchants in Boston had known Rebecca well enough to have her throat cut in her kitchen. She stammered a little: “Mrs. Malvern had left her husband by the time Mrs. Pentyre—Miss Parke, as she was then—married Richard Pentyre. Coming as she did from Baltimore, and Mrs. Pentyre from New York, I doubt Mrs. Malvern would have known Mrs. Pentyre as a girl.”
Perdita Pentyre!
The silk dress. The diamond earrings. It made sense. Richard Pentyre, every inch the picture of an English gentleman, was bosom-crony to Governor Hutchinson and recipient of every favor and perquisite available to a loyal friend of the King.
And why not? His young and lovely wife was mistress to Colonel Leslie, commander of the garrison on Castle Island.
Her hand did not move, but she could almost feel through the fabric of her pocket and petticoats the note she had taken from the woman’s dishonored body. The Linnet in the Oak Tree. Cloetia.
One of ours, Dr. Warren had said.
Perdita Pentyre, an agent of the Sons of Liberty.
Who would have thought it?
“I beg your pardon.” She was aware that Lieutenant Coldstone had said, Mrs. Adams? with a note of interrogation in his voice. “My mind was otherwhere. Mrs. Malvern is, as I said, a close friend to our family. She lived with us, when first she was obliged to leave her husband’s house—”
“So she is close to both your husband and yourself.”
His eyes were on John as he spoke, and Abigail, with a warning ringing oddly in her mind, like the smell of smoke in the night, glanced swiftly at John’s face. He wore an expression of wariness, such as she’d seen on him when he played chess with an unfamiliar opponent. Only grimmer.
She answered, “Yes.”
John added, quietly, “As I’ve told you.”
“And she is not an intimate friend to Mrs. Pentyre, so far as you know?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“Does she share your husband’s political opinions?”
Abigail’s glance went to John again, and this time the tension in him was unmistakable. Not a chess game. A fencing-match, she thought, like the one in Hamlet: the rapiers unbuttoned, and one blade poisoned. “We met at church,” she said. “Like both of us, and many others, Mrs. Malvern believes that the colonies have the right to a voice in their own government, though what that has to do with such a crime being committed beneath her roof I am at a loss to imagine.”
“Are you, m’am? At what time did your husband come in last night?”
“He did not,” replied Abigail. “He has been pleading a case in Essex County since Monday. He was to have returned last night, but I presume was delayed until after the time that the gates are shut and the ferry closed down for the night. When I left for the market this morning he had not yet come in.”
“As I told you also,” added John, whose cheeks had developed red blotches of anger. “I expect my children will say the same, if you care to interrogate them.”
“John,” said Abigail sharply, “what does—?”
Coldstone held up a staying hand. “What time was that?”
Queenie saw me outside Rebecca’s door. “Nearly half past seven. Daylight.”
“And you have only just returned from your marketing?”
“I went first to Mrs. Malvern’s house to see if there was anything I might get for her, and found a slate by her door, saying, No School. I thought she might have been ill, and walked on to return a book I had borrowed from a friend in the North End; I returned by way of Fish Street again, to see if she was awake and in need of anything. ’Twas then I heard that a woman had been found in her house, dead, and no one could say what had happened to Mrs. Malvern or where she might be. I have been seeking word of her.”
“In preference to a reunion with your husband?”
“My dear Lieutenant,” said John, with a half grin that did not reach his eyes, “Mrs. Adams is the original Eve for curiosity. She knew where she would be able to locate me, when she needed me.”
Past the Lieutenant’s shoulder, Abigail saw a man cross the window on the outside, a distorted shape in the uneven diamonds of glass. The fourth or fifth to do so, she thought, in five minutes—unusual for Queen Street at this time of a weekday morning.
“As I have told you already,” John went on, “I spent last night at Purley’s Tavern in Salem, my horse having strained a fetlock a number of miles from the ferry—”
“You could tell me you spent last night in Constantin ople, and be away from Boston by the time I’d sent Sergeant Muldoon there to check your story.”
“You can certainly send Sergeant Muldoon to check with the ferryman as to the time I crossed this morning.”
“As a lawyer, Mr. Adams—and the cousin of the man who heads up the Sons of Liberty—you know quite well that there are other ways into this city than the Winnisimmet Ferry or the gate at the Neck . . . and other ways that a man might have to do with a woman’s death, than wielding the knife himself. I—and Colonel Leslie—would prefer to have you where we know we can lay our hands on you.”
With a shock Abigail realized that Johnny had not been exaggerating. The Provost Marshal’s man was, indeed, here to arrest John—for the murder.
Cold panic flooded her, then hot rage. Seditious the Crown might well call him—as it called all its enemies. But that anyone would even consider for an instant that he had had or could have had anything to do with a crime of that nature left her breathless. She glanced at the window again, and though the flawed glass made it difficult to make out details, she saw that there definitely were at least five men, loitering in the street in front of the house.
She said, “Surely, Lieutenant,” in her most reasonable voice, “if your commander simply wishes Mr. Adams to be available for further questioning, would not a bond serve as well?” She tucked her hands beneath her apron, mostly to keep the officer from seeing them ball into unwomanly fists. “We are simple folk, and not so wealthy that my husband can afford to flee and leave thirty pounds in your hands—I believe thirty pounds is the usual bond for good conduct? Unless you would rather take our firstborn son, but I really wouldn’t want to do that to whoever would have to look after him.”