“You had more sense, you mean.” John fetched their coats and cloaks from the pegs beside the door—his own still cold to the touch—while Abigail climbed to the little room Pattie shared with the younger boys and now with Gomer Faulk. She gently woke Pattie, and bid her watch until they returned. Only then, wreathed in scarves and cloaks and hoods and hats, with a lantern bobbing ineffectually from John’s hand, did they step out into the windy night.
“Is Coldstone right?” asked Abigail softly after a time. “Have we become like the hanging judges years ago? Like medieval Inquisitors, who would kill a man to save his soul? Abrogating to ourselves the right to do so, because we felt it was right?”
“The only ones who do that,” replied John after thought, “are those who see the world as they did, with only a single answer, not only to that problem, but to all problems. And the single-minded certainly do not number Sam among their ranks, you know. Nor will he condone murder, just because a man has served the liberties of his country.”
“No,” said Abigail. “No, I know that. Orion—no wonder he didn’t harm Rebecca! And no wonder she went into hiding—”
“If it was Hazlitt who killed Mrs. Pentyre.” John held aloft the lantern as they entered the square before the State House and the Customs house, where the Massacre had taken place. Every shutter in town was barred, and at this hour, most of the windows behind them were dark. The night watchman’s cries drifted to them from another street, barely to be heard beneath the steady tolling of the bells. The wind made the feeble light sway even in John’s hand, and the waning moon, breaking through the clouds, showed Abigail movement stirring in the alleyways. A chip of light flared, where someone closed a slide over a lantern. “ ’Tis all right,” he said softly, when she caught at his sleeve. “Sam’s boys, most like.”
“And was it Sam’s boys,” she asked, vexed, “who’ve followed me, when I’ve been abroad at night?”
“Damn his impertinence,” growled John. “But likely, yes. I’ll have a word to say to him.” They walked on in silence.
“When you say,” said Abigail after a moment, “if it was Orion who killed Perdita Pentyre—You still think there were two criminals, and two crimes?”
“I don’t doubt he committed the others, and that it’s he who has been following that poor slave-girl and sending her poems. But killing Mrs. Pentyre—” He shook his head. “To say nothing of throwing the blame off onto me. There are men whose loyalty I’ve doubted, Abigail, men I think Sam needs to be more careful in his dealings with . . . but not Hazlitt. For God’s sake, why commit the crime in the house of the woman he loves? And why steal her list of contacts?”
“What else would he have done with it?” countered Abigail. “Left it for the Watch? Handed it back to Sam?”
“But in Rebecca’s house—”
“Where else,” asked Abigail softly, “could he be sure of getting Mrs. Pentyre alone? These other women whom he—he fixed upon, to whom he was drawn in some unholy fashion—these women he convinced himself were the Daughters of Eve. They were, as Lieutenant Coldstone said, common women. Women whom any man could come to and find unprotected . . . or in poor Philomela’s case, a woman whose access he could purchase, though thankfully it was beyond his price. Perdita Pentyre wasn’t. Yet to him she was Jezebel the Queen.”
“Jezebel—?”
“Remember Bargest’s sermons that I told you of? About the Nine Daughters of Eve, that lie in wait to destroy a man’s soul? The serpent, the witch—we know Mrs. Fishwire had any number of serpents in her shop, besides her poor cats—the harlot. The succubus—the demon female who torments a righteous man’s dreams. Or would he consider Philomela a nightmare? Poor Mrs. Pentyre, riding at the Colonel’s side to review the troops, with her face painted and her head tir’d like Jezebel—”
They walked on, Abigail’s pattens clinking on the cobbles of Kilby Street and her heavy skirts flapping against her legs. Fort Hill loomed before them, pricked with spots of yellow where the few soldiers left on the mainland manned the guns. At the wharves below, ships stirred and creaked, restless wooden animals in the dark.
“Saying it is Orion,” said John quietly. “And saying that he wouldn’t have killed Rebecca . . . How can you be sure that she’s in hiding?”
“I looked in his attic.”
The lantern-light flashed as John turned his head. “You thought then—?”
“No. It was nowhere in my mind. But I’d just realized she might be being held prisoner somewhere, when I went into his house and he sent me upstairs for laudanum for his mother. I had to look up into the nearest attic, to see how possible it would be. I think at that moment I would have run down the street looking into the attics of every house in turn. It’s only a tiny space up there, you know. One can’t stand up in it, even right under the ridgepole, and there’s no other space in the house, where a woman could be kept.”
Across the open ground, and down the hill to their left, they could see the glow of torches around Griffin’s Wharf, where men still sat up, muskets in hand, around the Dartmouth , and now the Eleanor, as they had mounted guard now for ten days. Out in the harbor the Beaver lay at anchor, where the harbormaster had commanded she remain until the members of the crew had either died of the smallpox that had broken out among them, or were recovered enough to be in no danger of spreading the disease. No word yet, of the Governor sending for troops, from either Britain or Halifax, but surely it was only a matter of time . . .
“Oh, good,” Abigail said, as they emerged from the narrow throat of Gridley Lane to see, a few houses down the street, the weak glow of candles behind the shutters in the downstairs room which Abigail knew to be Sam’s study. “At least we won’t be waking him.”
“You’re tender of Sam’s rest, all of a sudden. I’d have thought you’d delight in shooting him out of bed in order to say, I told you so . . .”
“But what a horrid thing to do to Bess. Besides, after all that’s happened today I’m not sure I could support the sight of Sam in his nightshirt.”
Predictably, Sam was not only awake and dressed, but drinking cider with Dr. Warren and Paul Revere, the latter preparing to take over charge of the guard on Griffin’s Wharf at midnight. With them were two or three others of Sam’s South End cabal that guided the Sons of Liberty, including—a bit disconcertingly—Abednego Sellars. These lesser captains retired to the kitchen while John and Abigail laid before Sam the poem: “ ’Tis Hazlitt’s hand, right enough,” said Abigail, and John nodded agreement. Revere lighted half a dozen more candles and brought them close.
“They’re right.” He read the verse before him, and his dark brow plunged down over his nose in shocked disgust; his dark eyes flicked up to meet Abigail’s. “Good God.”
“Not really,” she murmured in response.
“Do you have the note he sent to Mrs. Pentyre? The one supposed to be from Mrs. Malvern?”
Abigail produced it, and the silversmith held them close together, then produced a glass from his pocket to study them in detail. “The light isn’t good enough,” he said at length. “And the hand is well disguised. Would he have jeopardized one of our own?”
“Would one of Jesus’ disciples have jeopardized Him?” retorted Sam, putting on his greatcoat.