frock Rebecca had worn when she left had gone the way of all flesh, replaced by whatever castoffs her friends, or the parents of the pupils she taught, cared to give her.
The dead woman’s dress, and the layers of blood boltered petticoats obscenely visible piled up on her back, were new.
And her hands were not Rebecca’s hands.
Abigail had spent the first six months of Rebecca’s new freedom salving and binding cuts, blisters, burns, and scrapes while Rebecca learned to do her own cooking and her own washing, she who had never wielded anything more harsh than a quill pen in her pampered life. Rebecca’s hands were short-fingered and covered with wrinkles, though she was over half a decade younger than Abigail’s thirty years. These days, Rebecca’s hands were perpetually stained with ink from the poetry and political pamphlets she wrote at night, and with chalk from teaching a dame school to earn enough to buy herself bread. This dead woman’s hands were as Rebecca’s hands once had been: soft and white, each nail pampered like those of a Spanish in fanta.
Abigail sat back, and breathed again. Not Rebecca. Not her friend.
But in that case—?
Sick shock, as her eyes went to the door of the little parlor. No—
She made herself rise, and reached it in two steps. The little house that had been built behind Tillet the linendraper’s shop had begun its life as a storage building, with the kitchen tacked onto one side and a bedroom and an attic added on top; Abigail liked to say that her daughter Nabby’s dolls were more spaciously housed. The parlor was dim, its single window that looked onto the alleyway shuttered tight, but as she stepped into it Abigail’s straining eyes could see nothing out of place, no humped dark shape in any corner.
She opened the casements inward and shot the bolt of the outer shutters, pushed them back in a sharp sprinkling of last night’s raindrops; turned swiftly and saw—
Nothing out of the ordinary. The parlor looked as it always did. The door to the stairway above stood open. As Abigail crossed to it—two steps—she noticed the puddle of rainwater on the floor beneath the window. “Rebecca?”
Dear Heaven, what if he’s still in the house?
He. The one who did that—
She went to the hearth, took up the poker, and noted as she did so the ashes heaped there, untidy, no sign of the fire having been banked for the night. Too much wood burned, she thought. Why would she have sat up so late? Why the parlor, and not the warmer kitchen where she usually worked? Every candle on the mantelpiece was burned short.
No smell of blood in the stairwell. Every tread creaked. If he was here I’d have heard him . . .
Still her hands were cold with fright as she came out into the minuscule upstairs hall. Barely a foyer between stairways, with the door of Rebecca’s chamber to her left, open into shuttered darkness.
The attic trapdoor at the top of its ladder was shut. Abigail strode to the bedroom door, peered inside. “Rebecca?”
Narrow bed neatly made. Nothing—her mind evaded a specific. Nothing untoward on the floor. The attic’s tiny window would be shuttered and there was no bedroom candle on the sewing table by the bed. After a moment’s hesitation, Abigail climbed the attic ladder, opened the trap, and put her head through. “Rebecca!”
Mr. Tillet—or, more truly, Mrs. Tillet, who appeared to use her husband as a sort of hand puppet for the transaction of legal business—rented out this house behind the main premises, but reserved the attic for the storage of Tillet family property: boxes of old account books, crates of chipped and disused dishes, sheets that had been turned too many times to be of any use to anyone yet that Mrs. Tillet would not surrender to the ragbag. A set of carpenter’s tools against which Mr. Tillet had lent one of his sons-in-law money, and had foreclosed upon. Only dark shapes in darkness as Abigail looked around her, yet the smell of dust was thick, and she saw no mark of hand or knee in the thin layer of it around the trap.
The Tillets, she thought as she descended. Yet the Tillet house had been quiet. Even with the Tillets gone—What had Rebecca said yesterday? A family wedding in Medford?—surely Queenie the cook would have summoned the Watch, if Rebecca came beating on her door last night—
In the pouring rain? Would Queenie have heard her? The