I derided a moment ago, I will say that my observation has been that a harlot—and Mrs. Barry was well known about the wharves, apparently—puts herself in danger by the very nature of her work. It is not at all uncommon, for one to be slashed, or even killed.”
“I suppose in London,” said Abigail softly, “one would see a good deal more of that sort of thing, than here.”
“As you say, Mrs. Adams. But why this man, whoever he was, would have attacked a hairdresser, and a woman of some fifty years to boot—”
“I know not whether this lightens or darkens the issue,” said Abigail. “But dressing hair was not all that Mrs. Fishwire did. She was an herbalist, a healer, and an abortionist. Some called her a witch. It was not unusual for her to have visitors at odd hours, well after dark.”
“Was it not?” Coldstone halted, where a broad flight of wooden steps led down past John Rowe’s warehouses to Rowe’s Wharf. On the wharf itself, two redcoats stood guard over a mountain of trunks, crates, and hatboxes, which servants were loading into a launch. In the roadway before Abigail and her escort, a coach had come to a halt, from which a black manservant was handing a massive, red-faced gentleman in a crimson greatcoat. Thomas Fluckner, Abigail identified him. One of the richest merchants in Boston and the proprietor of a million acres of Crown lands in Maine.
“Excuse me, m’am.” Coldstone bowed, and strode to meet Fluckner, who shook a handful of papers at him and harangued him at some length in his sharp, yapping voice. Abigail caught the words transport . . . rights as citizens . . . adequate guard . . . Milk Street (which was where Abigail knew the Fluckner mansion stood) . . . always supported His Majesty . . .
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You would need to speak to Colonel Leslie, sir . . .”
Fluckner went back to his carriage and cursed the foot-men. Coldstone returned to Abigail’s side. “Forgive me, m’am.”
“For doing your duty? Nonsense.”
“Even so.” He bowed again, as if in a drawing room. “And were Mrs. Fishwire’s neighbors any more forthcoming to you than they were to me, about who they may have seen on the night of her murder?”
The name of Abednego Sellars flashed through her mind, only to be thrust aside at once. It was ridiculous, and besides, if he were arrested for murder—particularly one he did not commit—once in the Castle Island gaol, the danger of what he might say about the Sons of Liberty wasn’t even to be thought of. “The court is black as a tomb, once dark falls,” she said, in what she hoped was a completely natural tone. “The honest folk that live there—and they are honest folk, who make up the greater part of the North End—close their doors when things begin to get lively at the tavern at the head of the alley. It surprises me none would have come to a woman’s outcry, but I should imagine there’s a great deal of ruckus most nights . . .”
“And if a man keeps a knife hid up his sleeve or under his coat,” said Coldstone quietly, “all he has to do is wait for a woman to turn her back on him, to seize her. Many times there is no outcry.”
Abigail looked away. It seemed to her that she could smell the blood in Rebecca’s kitchen again. At the head of the wharf a straggly haired youth loitered, a thief, probably, totting up the value of the trunks. A footman helped first Mrs. Fluckner—stout and pretty and fussing angrily at everyone in sight—from the carriage, then Miss Fluckner, heiress of the house, a tall, strapping, black-haired girl of fifteen in a dress of mustard-colored silk.
“He killed her cats,” Abigail said after a moment. “Two of them. Slashed them to pieces, as he did her.” But when she looked back at the Lieutenant’s face, there was no more expression there than he would wear if he were playing cards.
“It seems, then,” he said, “that Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Fishwire were more similar to one another than we had known—that there were those who would consider the latter as reprehensible, in her way, as a woman of the town would have been. And the gap widens between them and Mrs. Pentyre.”
“One could say that,” returned Abigail levelly, “if one did not regard Mrs. Pentyre as a whore herself.” His back stiffened.