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 cook slept in the west attic of the big L-shaped house, Abigail recalled. Would I have stood there, pounding the door and shouting, with the man who perpetrated this horror still in my house?
Even the thought of doing so tightened her chest with panic.
Where, then? And—
She came through the door at the foot of the enclosed stairwell, saw—with the greater light in the parlor from the window unshuttered—a half dozen sheets of paper, littered on the floor. Abigail bent to pick them up, reflecting that John’s admonitions notwithstanding, the sarcastic political broadsides that Rebecca wrote under names like Cloetia and Mrs. Country Goodheart, at least, should not be left here for the Watch to find.
Before I leave I’d best have a look around, to make sure I have them all. The last thing I need is for Rebecca to escape the madman who did murder in her house, only to be sought by the Crown Provost Marshal for fomenting sedition—
She looked at the paper as she moved to put it into the pocket of her skirt.
It wasn’t a poem.
Her glance picked out John’s name, close to the top of the list, and after it Novanglus, Mohawk, Patriot . . . the various pseudonyms under which he, like Rebecca, penned criticisms of Britain’s rule of the Massachusetts Commonwealth. Other names on the list had similar pseudonyms appended, but many did not. She noted John Hancock’s name, one of the wealthiest merchants in Boston and known throughout the colony as the man to go to if you wanted good quality tea without the added expense of the British excise tax. Below it was the name of her friend Paul Revere the silversmith, and young Dr. Warren—with his various noms de plume—and Rob Newman, sexton of the Old North Church. Billy Dawes the cobbler, Ben Edes the printer (with the names of all the various seditious pamphlets for which he was responsible, good Heavens!), even poor mad splendid Jamie Otis—
She knew the handwriting, too. It was the unmistakable, strong scrawl of John’s wily cousin Sam: Sam who was the head of the secret society dedicated to organizing all who wished for the overthrow of the King’s government in the colony. The Sons of Liberty.
Every name she recognized on the list—and there were a good many that she did not—was a man she knew as belonging to the Sons.
All of whom, if the list fell into the hands of the Governor, would certainly be jailed, and would quite possibly be hanged.
Two
Sam Adams lived in Purchase Street, in what was now called the South End: that portion of Boston which had been open fields and grazing land not very long ago. It was twenty minutes’ walk along the waterfront—crowded and busy, even now on the threshold of the winter’s storms—and twenty minutes back.
Too far.
From the brick steeples of Faneuil Hall, Old North Church, Old South, King’s Chapel, all the bells were tolling eight.
Paul Revere would be at his shop by now, and it was only a few hundred yards to the head of Hancock’s Wharf.
Hurriedly, Abigail looked around the parlor for more papers: two of Rebecca’s mocking jingles and half a dozen sheets of the volume of sermons she was editing as yet another means of making enough to keep a roof over her head. With John’s voice ringing in her mind, Don’t touch a thing, woman! she gathered the broadsides, left the sermons where they were—
What else?
Skirts held gingerly high, she stepped into the kitchen again. She saw now that what had first appeared to be a battlefield of blood was in fact blood mixed with water. A costly brown cloak lay sodden with last night’s rain between the body and the door. The water it had released had mingled with the single thick ribbon of blood that emerged from beneath the corpse.
The woman’s dark hair was neatly coiffed: not even death had disarrayed it. What had to be diamonds glimmered in her earlobes. A love-bite a few days old darkened the waxy flesh of her bare shoulder, and there was another beside it, white and savage yet curiously bloodless-looking. Her legs lay spread obscenely. I’m sorry, Abigail whispered, fighting the urge to straighten the body, pull down the petticoats, cover her from the stares of the Watch that she knew would come. To leave you thus will speed vengeance, on him who did this to you.
What else?
Another of Rebecca’s songs lay near the hearth, the punned names and descriptions of Boston merchants who claimed to be patriots while selling provisions to the British troops unmistakable. I have my sources, Rebecca would say to her, with her grin that made her round face look like a wicked kitten’s. I’ll make them squirm.