John Thaxter was pacing the bricks fretfully outside the commander’s office, looking in all directions. When he saw Abigail across the parade he strode toward her, followed by the sturdy, towering figure of Sergeant Muldoon. Rather despairingly, Abigail added Thaxter to the list of men she knew who owned caped gray greatcoats. “M’am, I’ve been to the wharf, the men say—”
“We’re going,” promised Abigail, and obediently turned her steps toward the castle gate. Distantly, the tolling of Boston’s church bells carried over the three miles of tumbled gray harbor, dreary and ominous in the failing light. “Is Lieutenant Coldstone—?”
“He’s with Colonel Leslie, m’am.” Muldoon saluted her respectfully as he spoke. “In a rare taking he is, and the Provost Marshal, too, and trying to get shut of a mountain of business before the Colonel’s to take tea with the Royal Commissioners and the wives of all these rich nobs from Boston, beggin’ your pardon, m’am.” He nodded toward a small group of men crossing the parade, the torchlight borne by the soldier who preceded them glittering on the bullion that decked the Colonel’s dress uniform, gleaming on the marble smoothness of powdered hair. Beside the Colonel, resplendent in a caped greatcoat of some dark hue that could have been liver brown or indigo in the darkness, walked Richard Pentyre, gesturing with his quizzing glass and speaking with what appeared to be a ferocious intensity.
No sign of Coldstone. Drat it.
“I hope your talk with Mr. Pentyre went as you hoped it would, m’am?”
Abigail shook her head. “It wasn’t a wasted trip, but Mr. Pentyre was hardly forthcoming.”
“Well, you can scarce blame him, can you?” remarked Thaxter, as the freezing draft dragged at Abigail’s cloak and they entered the lamplit tunnel of the gate. “Between the lawsuit over the Sellars land that’s to be decided next month, and being served notice by the Sons of Liberty to—”
“What lawsuit?”
“Up in Essex County, m’am. If all this isn’t solved, the thing looks to be dragging on into another session. It’s been up in the courts, or some other nuisance suit that he’s brought in aid of it, every time Mr. Adams and I have had a case on the docket there.”
“Not—” She glanced at Muldoon, stopped herself from saying, Abednego Sellars, and to turn the subject said instead, “Not likely to be settled soon, if trouble comes of this tea business. I know he had notice to report to the Liberty Tree and resign his position, but I’d scarcely consider that grounds for having his visitors searched before they’re permitted to see him.”
“Damn it!” They emerged from the gate, into the mucky chaos of the camp around the walls. With a hasty, “Excuse me, m’am!” Thaxter dashed ahead, to intercept two sailors in striped jerseys and tarred pigtails, making their way up the torchlit path. Presumably, guessed Abigail, with deep forboding, the men who were to take her back to Boston. Their obvious reluctance to have anything further to do with the project was understandable: Darkness was closing in, and beyond the range of each smoky little campfire among the close-crowded jumble of tents and wash-lines, virtually nothing could be seen but a sense of movement in the shadows, and the occasional flash of an animal eye. Around Thaxter and the sailors, more civilians were coming up the path from the wharf: not rich merchants, but ordinary citizens of the town. Angry and harried-looking, they bore makeshift bundles and glanced right and left at the chaos with the expression of people who have been cheated of their rights. A small child was crying.
We have all been cheated of our rights, thought Abigail, pitying them yet knowing there was no good answer to their distress. We will all be cheated of our rights, unless we take a stand against the Crown while yet we have a little freedom to do so.
Beside her, Muldoon said, “T’cha! Searchin’—that’s goin’ a bit far, beggin’ your pardon, m’am, note or no note.”
“Note?” Abigail turned her head sharply, her mind still running on poems stuffed through shutters, hidden under floorboards. “What note?”
“The note Mr. Pentyre had, m’am. About how the Sons of Liberty were going to kill him and his wife both.”
She stared at him, aghast, and Thaxter came striding back up the path, coat flapping. “They say they’ll do it, Mrs. Adams, but you must come now.”
“Where did they get it? Who sent it?” She took Thaxter’s arm, her pattens slipping in the mud as they descended another two yards of path, turned a corner around a makeshift tavern, found themselves suddenly at the dock itself.
Muldoon shook his head. “That I don’t know, m’am, I’m sorry.”
“Does Coldstone have it in his possession?”
“Mrs. Adams, you must come—”
“I don’t know, m’am. I’ll ask him—”
“Mrs. Adams—!”
She allowed herself to be helped into the boat, what was called in New England a whaleboat: like a large rowboat with a sail. Scarcely what one wanted to be on the water in, on an overcast winter evening with wind howling down the bay straight from the North Pole . . .
“Who signed the note?” she asked, standing up precariously as the boat moved from the dock. “Whose name was on it?”
Muldoon looked puzzled, fishing in his memory. “Something Latin,” he said. “No-vangelus?”
Novanglus. New Englander.
John’s pseudonym.
And John, of course, was away at a meeting when Thaxter finally walked her up from Rowe’s Wharf to Queen Street again. “Mrs. Adams, you must be froze!” Pattie almost dragged her and Thaxter indoors. The warmth of the kitchen—redolent of soap and wet bricks, for Pattie had Johnny and Charley in the tub before the fire and Nabby was drying her long blonde hair—wrapped her like a shadowy amber blanket. Woozy as she was with residual sea-sickness from the crossing, Abigail was suddenly, crashingly conscious that she had consumed nothing since the bread-and-butter nuncheon just after two.
On that thought came another, of the promise she’d made poor Orion. It was nearly full-dark—the sailors had grumbled about having to spend the night with the little Battery garrison, instead of rowing back to the safety of Castle Island—and Abigail was almost certain that for the pious Hazlitt household, the Sabbath had well and truly begun. Still, she reflected, she could but try.
And she knew she’d better try now, because if she so much as sat down and took off her pattens, she knew she wouldn’t want to stand up again.
“Hercules—” She put her hand on Thaxter’s arm. “Could I trouble you for one more Labor before you turn in for the night?”
Abigail suspected that this particular Labor would be in vain, and so it proved. The little house on Hanover Street was closed up tight, the feeblest glimmer of candlelight leaking through the cracks in the rear shutters visible only by the comparative blackness of the yard when she and Thaxter groped their way to the back door. No one answered her knock, though she thought she heard the droning voice within pause in its reading of Scripture.
When it resumed, she sighed. “No sense adding to the poor man’s trouble by leaving bait out for rats.” She settled the basket more firmly on her arm. “But, I couldn’t sleep tonight, without having tried.”
Wind screamed along Hanover Street as they made their way back, cutting through Abigail’s cloak and jacket as if she wore gauze and lace. This corner of Boston, along the footslopes of Beacon Hill, was but thinly built-upon yet, and the neighborhood along Hanover Street lacked the crowded liveliness of the North End. With all shutters closed, and the moon hidden in cloud-wrack, the darkness was abyssal, swallowing the wan flicker of Thaxter’s lantern and causing Abigail to wonder what people did, who were abroad in such darkness who didn’t know the way. Even thieves, she reflected, would have a hard time—