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laughingstock of him. Huddlestone grinned over this story but was not convinced; newsmen today would invent any nonsense to fill an inch of paper.
    Two ships from Curaçao had just docked on the East River, he read. Missionary work among the Mohawk might prove a waste of Christian energies. One Scriblerus Despondus wrote to complain that no play had been mounted in two years, the whole thoughts of the boorish freemen of New York being turned upon price and profit. Huddlestone couldn’t see that this constituted a problem. God knew, he hadn’t followed his father into the law for love of Justice. Hewas an eager servant of Mammon, even if he hadn’t yet been rewarded for it, since business was so damnably tight.
    Huddlestone stared out the grimy window at the human traffic, spotting Highlander blow-ins and stern old Dutch, penniless Palatines and English infantrymen. Just about every second face was black. Huddlestone kept only a couple of indentured Irish himself, and he’d lost one of those in the smallpox epidemic. According to the Weekly Journal, the dreaded scarlatina was currently cutting a swath through the colonies of New England. Any reader who found red, itching pustules on his neck, face, or tongue was urged to be patriotic enough to board up self and family at once.
    Having some bills to send out, the attorney drained his coffee to the grit, then crossed the road to his cramped office, yawning.
    An hour later came an unexpected knock. Huddlestone jumped up and clapped his wig back on.
    The sight of the widow’s weeds made him deepen his bow. Her hoops were so wide that she had to execute a sideways maneuver to get through the door; the skirt was excellent black satin, pulled up through pocket-slits to keep it out of the mud. Linen mittens hid her hands, except for the narrow fingertips. Under the hood of her cape, the widow’s face was sharply boned; not an Englishwoman, and no more than twenty-five, Huddlestone reckoned. At the edge of her crisp white cap, the darkness of her hair showed through the blue-gray flour.
    She began to apologize for imposing on a perfect stranger.
    “No imposition, madam, I assure you. A certain clique ofmen keep such a grip on legal business in this city, the rest of us are always eager for new clients,” he admitted disarmingly. “If it’s as a client that you’ve come?”
    She turned sharply toward the wall, as if to examine his diploma from Yale College.
    Damn it, had Huddlestone somehow offended his visitor already? He pressed her to a glass of Madeira, but she shook her head, her face still averted. “Then, if I may ask, how may I be of assistance?”
    When she turned back to him her powdered face was striped with tears.
    “Madam—”
    “My name is Mrs. Gomez,” she said. “My husband was a merchant.” Her throat moved as if she’d swallowed a stone.
    Huddlestone should have guessed it, there was a certain tint under her pallor. Of course he’d heard of the Gomez clan: Sephardics from the West Indies, and among the more substantial fortunes in the little Mill Street congregation who’d recently erected the first purpose-built synagogue in the New World.
    She spoke with difficulty. “He set off to Boston some weeks ago, to meet his trading partners.”
    “By sea?”
    “By land.”
    Huddlestone winced. Country roads—if you could call them that—were only a foot or two wide, and bedeviled with Indians.
    “A martyr to seasickness,” she whispered.
    “Ah.”
    “He—word reached me this week, that he got no farther than Connecticut,” she gasped. After a moment, she brought out the words. “The scarlatina.”
    A nasty death. Huddlestone deepened his voice. “May I offer my deepest sympathies?”
    Mrs. Gomez pressed her lace apron to her face for a moment. “I happened upon your sign,” she said, her eyes lifting to his. “I was walking along. You must understand, I am quite friendless.”
    “Your kinsmen, surely …”
    “They reside in