Doubtless there will never be an easy time to confront Quinn, but the question has been so long on the tip of my tongue, it almost has a taste. I plunge ahead. “Will you tell me what Will met up against before he was killed? I want to know it. He was in trouble, wasn’t he?”

“Trouble? He was a hero.” Quinn raises his eye patch for a moment and wipes his forehead with the sleeve of his coat. The eye, though less raw, is thickly ridged with scar tissue. Queasy, I look away. “Don’t we have a telegram from Captain Fleming? Don’t we have a respectable service planned for Will come spring?”

“I deserve better from you, Quinn,” I say. “The truth, for example. I know there’s more to this story.” I don’t dare risk telling him about Nate and the letter. Not now.

A spy’s sixth sense is timing.

In the barbed silence, we stare at each other, faced with the unassailable wall built of what Quinn refuses to confess.

“And after that service,” he says, his voice level, “it might be best for you to leave this house. As I mentioned, there is nothing for you here.”

“Except you,” I murmur, glancing down at my blood-spattered boots.

“Don’t say that, Jennie,” His voice breaks. “Not when you don’t mean it.”

“I’m sorry.” Didn’t I mean it? I’m confused myself and unable to tear my gaze from his.

By now Mrs. Sullivan has come lumbering across the yard. She scoops the lifeless bird to bleed and pluck, oblivious to what, if anything, has just passed between Quinn and me. “Thank you, Mister Quinn,” she says, but he has already turned away.

“Wait! Quinn! I’ll walk with you!” I call after him.

His strides are too long for me to keep up. I stop following. Still in his bloodied apron, Quinn crosses under the trellis that leads from the kitchen garden down to the crab apple orchard.

Dismal by winter afternoon, it appears as a trek of starved gray trees and hard-packed soil. Along its path, Quinn moves steady, casting a long shadow that is wafer-thin and lonely as a reaper against the gray sky.


16.