Table of Contents
Not the usual suspects...
Abigail looked at the paper as she moved to put it in the pocket of her skirt.
It wasnt a poem.
It was a list of names. Her eye picked out Johns, close to the top. Above it was that of John Hancock, 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 British excise tax. Her good friendand JohnsPaul Revere the silversmith, and young Dr. Warren, Rob Newman who was sexton of the Old North Church, Billy Dawes the cobbler...
Names Abigail knew.
She knew the handwriting on the list, too, and felt a chill start behind her breastbone, spreading to her hands and feet.
The handwriting was that of Johns wily cousin Sam: Sam who was the head of the secret society dedicated to organizing all who wished for the overthrow of the Kings government in the colonies. The Sons of Liberty.
It was a list of the names of about twenty of the Sons.
All of whom would, if the list fell into the governments hands, beyond the shadow of a doubt be hanged.
For Gene L. with thanks
One
A bigail Adams smelled the blood before she saw the door was open.
In November, Boston didnt reek the way it did in summer, especially down here in Fish Street. The coppery blood-stink cut the more prosaic pong of fish-heads and privies from the moment she stepped through the gate into Tillets Yard, the way the single thread of gore seemed to shriek at her against the gray of the wet morning, trickling down Rebecca Malverns doorstep.
For that first instant, Abigail thought: One of the cats.
Or maybe Nehemiah Tillets cook had been clumsy, gutting a chicken.
Only then did she see the open door.
The British
Her marketing basket slipped from her hands and she gathered her skirts, strode to the place, heart in her throat.
Rebecca
It wasnt the first time blood had been shed in Boston. Before Abigails eyes flashed the red-spattered snow of King Street, three and a half years ago now but alive in her mind as if it were yesterday. For an instant she heard again the shouting of the Kings soldiers and the mob, smelled powder-smoke thick in the air.
Rebeccas broadsides against the King and the Kings troops were absolutely scathing. If someone told them who she was, and where she could be found
Abigail froze in the doorway, hand pressed to her mouth.
Her first impression was that the whole floor of the tiny kitchen had been flooded with blood. It pooled in the hollows of the worn bricks, overspilled the threshold. Yet it wasnt the first thing that slashed her mind, seized her eyes.
A woman lay facedown close to the overturned table. Gray dress, dark hair; skirt and petticoats turned up to her waist. Her bare buttocks and thighs were crisscrossed with knife slits. One shoe of fine green leather had been kicked off, lay on its side like a tiny wrecked boat against the irons of the hearth.
Rebecca
Abigails vision grayed.
The British
Then against her will the words came to her mindor Charles Malvern?
He wouldnt! She groped for the doorframe, thoughts momentarily frozen at even a mental accusation of such a thing. Charles Malvern was a pinchpenny, moneygrubbing Tory, violent of temper and outspoken in his opinion that the Crown had every right to kill traitors where they stood. Yet surely, surely, he would never do this to the woman who had walked out of his bed and house.
Would he?
Someone had.
Not Charles! Not Rebecca!
Abigail took a deep breath, feeling as if her knees would give way. Stepped across the great pool of gore on the threshold, stumbled to the side of...
Not Rebecca. The words that had sprung to her mind as a frantic plea to God suddenly rearranged themselves, and she thought, with an odd calm, No, in fact, it isnt Rebecca.
Or at least, that isnt Rebeccas dress.
She dropped to her knees.
Dear God, forgive me for feeling relief. It was certainly some poor woman who had been used this way.
Hands shaking with reaction and guilt, she reached to turn the woman over to see her face, then made herself draw back.
Johnher beloved, self-important, irascible John, the hero of her heart, husband of her bosom, and occasional bane of her existencewas forever coming home from the colony courts fuming at the imbecility of police constables who dragged furniture about in burgled houses, who stepped on footprints left by thieves, who casually tossed out broken dishes or torn rags or any of a thousand things by which, he said, any reasonable man could reconstruct who, exactly, had broken into someones barn or rifled someones strong room. Nincompoops! (This observation was usually made at the top of his lungs and accompanied by hurling his wig against the kitchen wall.) Youd think the lot of them were in the pay of horse thieves themselves!
Abigail took a deep breath, folded her arms on her knees, and bent her body to try to see the womans face.
She was obliged to straighten up again and swallow hard. Not only the womans backside and thighs had been slashed, but her face, from what Abigail could see of it, had, too. It was difficult to be sure, because of the blood that covered it from her cut throat.
But the dress at least certainly wasnt Rebeccas. Her friend had, in truth, owned gowns as fine as that heavy gray silk with its sprigs of pink and green. But she had left them in her husbands house, when she had walked out of it for good in April of 1770. In the three and a half years since then, the frock Rebecca had worn when she left had gone the way of all flesh, replaced by whatever castoffs her friends, or the parents of the pupils she taught, cared to give her.
The dead womans dress, and the layers of blood boltered petticoats obscenely visible piled up on her back, were new.
And her hands were not Rebeccas hands.
Abigail had spent the first six months of Rebeccas new freedom salving and binding cuts, blisters, burns, and scrapes while Rebecca learned to do her own cooking and her own washing, she who had never wielded anything more harsh than a quill pen in her pampered life. Rebeccas hands were short-fingered and covered with wrinkles, though she was over half a decade younger than Abigails thirty years. These days, Rebeccas hands were perpetually stained with ink from the poetry and political pamphlets she wrote at night, and with chalk from teaching a dame school to earn enough to buy herself bread. This dead womans hands were as Rebeccas hands once had been: soft and white, each nail pampered like those of a Spanish in fanta.
Abigail sat back, and breathed again. Not Rebecca. Not her friend.
But in that case?
Sick shock, as her eyes went to the door of the little parlor. No
She made herself rise, and reached it in two steps. The little house that had been built behind Tillet the linendrapers shop had begun its life as a storage building, with the kitchen tacked onto one side and a bedroom and an attic added on top; Abigail liked to say that her daughter Nabbys dolls were more spaciously housed. The parlor was dim, its single window that looked onto the alleyway shuttered tight, but as she stepped into it Abigails straining eyes could see nothing out of place, no humped dark shape in any corner.
She opened the casements inward and shot the bolt of the outer shutters, pushed them back in a sharp sprinkling of last nights raindrops; turned swiftly and saw
