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our rights? Or, did she ever speak to you of someone who might wish her—Mrs. Malvern—ill herself?”
    He lifted his head and his green eyes flashed sudden fire. “Other than that brute of a husband, you mean? The swine had the temerity to write to Tillet, threatening to bring him to law for ‘harboring a harlot,’ as he called her, and ‘operating a house of ill fame.’ If ever there was a case of God’s hand being needed in mortal affairs—” He broke off, and turned his face away, his breath coming fast and a stain of angry crimson flushing his cheekbone.
    “Without the hand of the Lord, no mortal affair can prosper.” Mrs. Hazlitt raised her head, her fingers tightening around those of her son. “All our deeds are in vain, unless God guide us by his strong hand, and only through the hand of the Lord lies our salvation.”
    “Harlot or no harlot,” said Revere, “I’d give much to be there when the Watch tells old Malvern his wife’s gone missing. And under such circumstances as these.”
    “Good God, man,” cried Warren, “you’re not thinking Malvern had aught to do with—”
    “I’m not thinking anything,” retorted the silversmith lazily. “But after all the spite and venom he’s poured forth to anyone who’ll listen these past three years, I’d be curious to see how he takes it.”
    How indeed? Abigail followed the men back into the shop. Sam was still fretting about the missing “Household Expenses” book, demanding of Orion where Rebecca would have gone, if not to the Tillets or Revere, to the Adams house or the printshop—? Little enough chance I’ll have to even speak to him, once the Watch has given him the news . . .
    Great Heavens, surely they wouldn’t detain him ?
    What is it John said, that of all murders done, the culprit is usually known to the victim? Would the Watch be such fools as to think that—as the missing woman’s estranged husband—Charles Malvern had had anything to do with such a crime? She recalled the little merchant’s anger-crimsoned face, when last she’d seen him, those cold eyes like gray buckshot . . .
    “Are you coming, Mrs. Adams?” Sam opened the shop door for her. “We need you to discover the body, and summon the Watch.”
    Something in Sam’s briskness—or perhaps only his preoccupation with his precious book of contacts—raised the hackles on her neck as it had in Rebecca’s kitchen earlier. She stepped back from him, pulled her scarf more tightly around her throat. “Discover it yourself, Sam,” she said briefly. “I think I need to pay a visit to Rebecca’s husband, and tell him that his wife has vanished—and see if he has aught to say, about where she might have gone.”

Five

    H e hounds me. Rebecca had wiped her eyes as she’d said it, on an evening in summer—the summer before last, one afternoon when Rebecca had crossed the bay to Braintree with some of Abigail’s Smith cousins, and they’d spent the day in the summer tasks of threading leather britches beans to dry, and bottling blackberries from the woods behind the orchard. Abigail had been heavy yet again with child—baby Tommy, old enough now to stagger sturdily about the kitchen. Walking swiftly through the market, thrusting guilt from her heart as she would have brushed falling rain from her face, Abigail earnestly hoped that Pattie—the fourteen-year-old farm-girl who’d lived with the family since their return to Boston a year ago—was keeping an eye on him . . . on Charley, too. There were simply too many things a pair of enterprising little boys could get into, in a kitchen on a freezing day.
    He hounds me. He has always considered me his property, like his horses or the corn in his ships. He questions the servants about everything I do, he opens and reads my letters, he demands accounting of every penny I spend and he has imprisoned me under lock and key as if I were a disobedient child. Yet he has said, he will not let me go.
    And Orion Hazlitt had