of bread. She walked alone into the gap, dignified and small. The vanguard of soldiers cocked and aimed their muskets, and the matron raised the loaf as if it truly were an infant. She approached General Bell without a trace of hesitation—spine erect, chin raised, her own long shadow stretching out before her. She was fifteen paces from the bayonets when the mob, drawing courage, shuffled up behind her.
Molly’s heartbeat stuck. She wrung her brother’s hand.
General Bell raised his gun and fired at the bread.
The shot pierced the loaf and hit the matron in the chest. She staggered to her knees, still offering the loaf. The troops fired next, a forty-gun volley, bright fire like lightning from a thick white cloud. Half the mob charged. The rest began to flee, running every which way until the threat of being trampled vastly outweighed the chance of being shot.
Molly tumbled off the trunk and landed on the grass. Children scrambled over her. A woman kicked her ear. A ragged group of sailors almost stomped her underfoot but Nicholas wrenched her up and said, “The trunk! Take the trunk!”
They zigzagged away, following paths through the crowd that seemed to magically appear, random as the gaps in windblown rain. There were screams and clashing blades, a thudding second volley from another line of soldiers. Molly crashed against a half-bald woman with a boning knife. The blade cut her arm just above the wrist. Molly felt the sting but didn’t stop to look, and it was all that she could do to drag the trunk amid the tumult, watching Nicholas’s coat and fearing she would lose him.
When they finally cleared the square, the mob began to thin. Molly paused for lack of breath before a grand, silent house, wishing she could enter it. The foggy dawn had sharpened to a crisp white morning and the cobblestoned street looked miraculously neat.
“Quickly,” Nicholas said, running back to pull her on.
His nearness jolted her and energized her legs, and they were off again, fleeing with the other panicked rioters. One of them, a brawny man, was bleeding from his neck. A yellow-haired woman sobbed against a hay cart. A very young soldier cowered in a doorway, clinging to his musket. The crackling gunfire faded with the distance from the green and yet persisted, clear and simple in the oddly vacant neighborhood. Footsteps echoed off the elegant façades.
They came at last to the harbor, where news of the massacre had just begun to spread. Many of the laborers, fishmongers, and rope makers had come from Worthington Square and stood about the docks, mortally subdued, but there were sailors hard at work: nothing stopped the tide.
The air was briny cool and spiced with smoke and herring. Molly’s lungs took the wind as fully as the sails. Sun struck brass and sparkled off the waves, a million glints of light that dazzled and dismayed her. Nicholas guided her down a flight of warped stairs, and it wasn’t until they reached the end of a pier before she finally snapped alert and said, “What are we doing? Why are we here?”
A man below her in a skiff, turning when she spoke, balanced calmly with a pipe and winked his wrinkly eye.
“My name is Jacob Smith,” Nicholas said. “You are my wife, Mary Smith. We are going to live with relatives in Floria.”
“Floria!” she said, looking past him to the water, an infinity of silver-blue mystery and depth.
“I have arranged our passage on the Cleaver,” Nicholas said, pointing to a merchant ship anchored offshore. It was long and double-masted with a grimy spread of sails, and the shadows made the hull look badly decomposed. “We have money enough to go. Means enough to live.”
“Father will know you’ve stolen—”
“What does it matter?” Nicholas asked. “Assuming he survives”—Molly wobbled with the trunk—“we will be hours out to sea before he notices our absence. He will first search the city. He will think we fled to Frances. If he inquires here at the harbor, he’ll be spoonfed a tale of newlyweds eloping.”
“He will know,” Molly said.
“We will need to keep our false identities in Floria, assuming he will hire men to follow and retrieve us. On the other hand, he may consider it good riddance,” Nicholas said, “and go about his business, unencumbered by our lives.”
“You cannot mean that!” she said, fearing it was true—fearing that the new world would openly embrace them.
She had dreamed of escape but not of the vastness of the sea, not