“What is it, Rachel?” Revere called out, coming down the stairs in his nightshirt.
Swift quickly explained the reason for awakening them. “There are barrels of gunpowder attached to the bottom of Blake’s wagon. They could blow up the entire house.”
Revere’s face was grim. “I’ll get dressed immediately.”
With an oil lamp on the ground a safe distance away, Revere examined the four barrels and carefully freed them from their bindings. Swift helped him carry them a safe distance from the house. “That should do it,” he said with relief.
“We’ll remove it in the morning. I thank you for your warning, Alexander.”
“Someone jumped me while I was searching the wagon. I believe it was one of the youths who were here yesterday. Mrs. Patrick said she’d chased some away the previous night.”
“The markings on these barrels are French,” Revere observed. “They were smuggled in from Quebec.”
“But why? Certainly there is no shortage of gunpowder here.”
“I fear it was meant for a bomb. It is nearly two centuries since the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament, but British loyalists may have been planning something similar here. Boston is our state’s capital and the cradle of revolution.”
“Do you think those Canadians planned this?”
“I doubt if the minister or Mrs. Southworth was involved. About Mr. Blake I cannot say. He was an admitted loyalist who fled to Canada when the Revolution began.”
“We must question Reverend Hayes and Mrs. Southworth about this.”
“Of course,” Revere agreed.
“Meantime, I’ll try to locate the youth who assaulted me.”
At sunrise he walked down to the fish market, carrying the club he’d retrieved from his assailant. The previous day’s catches were being sorted and priced while early shoppers began to drift in. One man holding a three-foot-long cod seemed familiar and Swift remembered him from the Pig and Whistle.
“Smitty, isn’t it?”
The blond-haired youth recognized him at once. “Looking for that driver, are you?”
“No, looking for a kid named Gerber. Younger than you, tall, maybe seventeen or eighteen.”
“I know who you mean. Hasty Gerber. Don’t hire him to drive your wagon. He’s a knacker.”
“What’s that?”
“He kills stray animals and sells their carcasses to rendering works. It’s a loathsome occupation.”
“Does he use a club like this?” Swift held up the weapon.
Smitty nodded. “Looks like one he carried.”
“Where do I find him?”
“Down by the docks if he’s not still asleep. Sometimes he helps unload boats at Hitchbourn Wharf.”
Following directions, Swift walked south to Fish Street and then west for several blocks to the wharf. He suspected Gerber’s height would make him easy to spot, and he was right. The youth was standing with some others as Swift approached. He saw him coming, saw the club dangling from his right hand, and took off down the pier. It was a dead end for him, but he didn’t seem to realize it till Swift had him cornered.
“I just wanted to return your club,” he told the youth. “You might need it to kill a stray dog or two.”
Hasty Gerber looked frightened. “I wasn’t trying to kill you last night.”
“I know. You came there for the gunpowder. Now you’re going to tell me who you’re working for, or I’ll do a little knacking myself.”
Some of the others on the pier had gathered around, but no one came to Gerber’s aid. “All right!” he pleaded, pushing out with his open palms. “Don’t hit me!”
Swift gripped him by the shoulder as he had on their first meeting. “Did you kill Rollo Blake?”
“What? You’re crazy! I never did it. I was just after those barrels of gunpowder.”
“Come along. You’re going to tell us all about that.”
In the presence of Paul Revere and a law-enforcement officer, Hasty Gerber told how he and another youth had been hired by Rollo Blake to sneak into Revere’s garden after dark and remove the four barrels from under the wagon. A neighbor had heard them the first time and frightened them off. After that, the other lad had wanted no part of it. Gerber had returned alone last night and encountered Swift. The law officer listened to it all and promised to pursue the investigation.
“It was all Blake’s doing, of course,” Swift remarked when he was alone with Revere. “He suggested the church purchase a bell from you so he’d have an excuse to cross the border with his wagon. The border guards had no reason to search it carefully with a minister and two parishioners on board.”
“All right,” Revere agreed, “but why did this Gerber youth try to steal the gunpowder last night, after he knew Blake was dead?”
“Just to have it for himself,” Swift answered.
“Do you think he killed Blake for that purpose?”
“I don’t know. When I grabbed him on the street just after the shooting he had no pistol with him.”
But he wasn’t satisfied. At ten o’clock, when Reverend Hayes and Mrs. Southworth arrived to begin their journey back to Quebec, he still wasn’t satisfied. He stood in Revere’s yard, near where Blake had fallen, and imagined where the killer might have stood. The sun had come out, bathing the city in the first real warmth of spring.
Betsy Patrick came out on her back porch and called to him. “I’ve made some lemonade if you’d like a glass.”
“That would taste good about now.” He went up the steps and she handed him a glass. He pulled up a chair to join her.
“I see John Rossiter has arrived,” she said, filling his glass from her pitcher.
“He’s volunteered to drive the wagon back to Quebec. Reverend Hayes was uncertain he could manage it with that heavy bell on board.”
“Will you be leaving today as planned, Mr. Swift?”
Swift nodded. “I only came here at the behest of President Washington.”
“He was concerned about Rollo Blake?”
“I believe so, yes. Now that Blake is dead and the bell is on its way to Canada, my work here is finished.”
“What about Blake’s killing?”
“That may have to go unsolved, at least by me. That is, unless you feel the need to confess.”
Her eyes shot up, suddenly full of fear. “What do you mean?”
“You killed him, Betsy. You shot him from your bedroom window with your husband’s musket.”
“How could you know that?” she demanded. “Did you see me do it?”
“No, but the angle of the bullet, entering high on his back and exiting lower down at the front, indicated he was shot from above. This would explain why none of us saw a weapon. You’d told me your bedroom window overlooked Revere’s yard when you yelled at the intruders two nights ago. You also told me you played the spinet to drown out the sound of the bells, but there was no spinet to be heard yesterday morning because you were at the upstairs window.”
“Why would I shoot Rollo Blake?”
“You know the true motive better than I do. You told me that Revere’s ringing of each new bell annoyed your husband, but Revere didn’t cast his first bell until seventeen ninety-two. Your husband died in seventeen ninety. Who was this person annoyed by the ringing of the bells, someone you equated in your mind with your husband? I contend it was Rollo Blake, a frequent visitor to Boston and to the Pig and Whistle pub just down the street. His face was even familiar to Rachel Revere. Visiting your house was how he learned of Revere’s bells and how he devised his plan for smuggling gunpowder into the city. He even told you about that, didn’t he?”
She’d put down her glass of lemonade and was staring across the yard at the wagon as the horses were hitched up. “Sometimes, after he’d been drinking, he got crazy. He talked about blowing up our State House. I wrote President Washington an anonymous letter warning about it, but he did nothing.”