man has any business knowing indeed!
“What makes your Provost Marshal so sure that it could have been my husband?”
He shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to disclose it, m’am. Physically, he could have committed the crime—”
“He could not.” She paused with the coffeepot suspended over a cup, silently wishing she could pour the steaming liquid into her guest’s pristine white lap. “He would not.”
“There is a difference between those two things, Mrs. Adams, as I’m sure, as a lawyer’s wife, you are aware. Your husband is in the thick of organizations whose stated goal is to disrupt the smooth working of His Majesty’s government here in the colony. He is moreover the associate of men involved in large-scale smuggling operations which aid Britain’s enemies. Your husband did indeed spend Wednesday night at the Purley’s Tavern outside of Salem, yet a smuggler-craft could have brought him to Boston in an hour—”
“Not in that weather, it couldn’t.”
“You underrate their skill, m’am. He moreover is good friends with the woman in whose house the body was found: a woman separated from her husband, who has lived under Mr. Adams’s protection and whose legal affairs Mr. Adams has looked after, pro bono. Had he wished to harm Mrs. Pentyre, what safer way to do so, than to mimic the methods of a lunatic who has killed two other women and has gone untaken? He chooses a night on which the Tillets are known to be absent. The renter of the house then flees, and you—Mr. Adams being bonded to remain in Boston and being moreover under suspicion—undertake a two-day journey into the backcountry, where an officer of the Crown would take his life in his hands to go—to warn or inform her—”
“Do you honestly think that’s what happened?” demanded Abigail, appalled.
Coldstone was silent, studying her face, she realized, as she had studied Charles Malvern’s, when she had broken the news to him of Rebecca’s disappearance. She didn’t flee, she wanted to shout at him. She was imprisoned in her room, her blood was on the pillow of her bed, and on the floor beside the door—
And Paul Revere and Dr. Warren had neatly mopped it away. She found herself trembling all over.
“No,” he said after a time. “No, I don’t. All these things—these possibilities—are like objects in a room, like furnishings well arranged. But there is another room, and in that room is the possibility that the same man who killed Mrs. Fishwire and Jenny Barry has started killing again. As all such men invariably will.”
“And that matters to you.”
“Yes. It does.”
Silence again. Abigail handed him the cup of coffee, and looked around for the bell with which Pattie could be summoned to the parlor. Of course it was missing—Charley and Johnny were forever taking it to sound the alarm against imaginary Indian attacks—so she murmured, “Excuse me,” went to the door, and called, “Pattie, dearest? Could you bring us some of my marmalade? Do you like marmalade, Lieutenant? And some of your gingerbread, if it’s ready—” She returned to her chair beside the fire.
“These other women who were killed. When did it happen? I think I would have heard—”
“Jenny Barry was killed in June of 1772. Zulieka Fishwire in September of the same year.”
September of ’72. The month Tommy was born. The same month, she remembered, that word had finally reached Rebecca that her father had died the previous May. They had still been at the farm in Braintree then. None of her Smith or Quincy aunts or cousins would have written to her about the murder of a woman with a name like Zulieka Fishwire; certainly not about the death of a prostitute. Common women—she heard Coldstone’s light, cool voice say the words again. So worthless are women’s deaths held. “And none since?”
“None that have come to the ears of authority.” He stretched his hands to the fire again, his face as inexpressive as stone. “I am certain the owner of the brothel or tavern where the Barry woman met her end hid the circumstances, lest his trade be hurt. There may have been others, between that time and the murder of Mrs. Fishwire.”
“Did they know one another? Or have acquaintance in common?”
“That I don’t know. They lived in the same part of the town, Mrs. Fishwire on Love Lane, and Mrs. Barry somewhere nearby along the waterfront.”
“And Scarlett’s Wharf lies not a quarter mile from the Tillet house,” murmured Abigail.
“Was Mrs. Malvern acquainted with Mrs. Pentyre? Her maid said, not.”
“Her