housed them in their hundreds and—cheek-by-jowl with them—the chandler ies, slopshops, and harlots that made up their world.
Boston was a wealthy town: Amid the crumbling squalor of dockside poverty, handsome brick mansions reared, where merchant families had held land for generations while the neighborhood decayed around them. Up until eight years ago, Governor Hutchinson had resided here with his family, in a splendid house up the hill from his wharf. Then in ’65—enraged by Britain’s arbitrary decision to tax everything printed, from bills of lading to playing cards—rioters had gutted the building, burned the Governor’s painstakingly collected library of the colony’s oldest documents, and driven his family out into the night. The family lived in Milton now, in the countryside, and the Governor, when in town, had a newer and larger brick mansion on Marlborough Street close to the Commons. The Olivers—relations of the Hutchinsons and the Governor’s appointees to the most lucrative colonial posts—had a house on the North End as well, but as Abigail passed it, she noted that its shutters were up, and the knocker taken from its door.
Boston was a town of passions: for religion, for liberty, for riotous street fighting that broke out every fifth of November—Pope’s Day—in parades, brawls, battles between North-Enders and South-Enders. As she followed Sam’s maid Surry along the cobbled pavement, Abigail could hear voices arguing in taverns, in tenements, in alleyways. In addition to the homes of the rich, the North End held a large concentration of Boston’s poor, and though it outraged Abigail’s Christian soul, she knew that the refuge of the poor (if they have not the spiritual mettle to either resign their souls or to better their condition) was drink, of which plenty was available. The liveliness that elsewhere characterized Boston seemed here to be only a step from violence. On this very cold morning most of the local dwellers were on their way to or from the market in North Square, but gangs and groups of countrymen clustered around the inns and taverns, with rifles on their backs, tomahawks at their belts, and little parcels of clean shirts and spare stockings under their arms.
“Do you remember hearing of the two murders, three summers ago?” she asked her companion, and the slave-woman nodded.
“Was there two? I only heard of the one. Kitta—Mrs. Blaylock’s cook”—Mrs. Blaylock was Sam Adams’s neighbor—“says Mrs. Fishwire was cut up something horrible. A judgment on her, Kitta says, though to my mind that don’t show much of the Christian charity she’s always braggin’ on that she has.” Having been the property of Sam Adams for many years, Surry was easy-tempered and virtually unshockable: a pretty mulatto woman of about Abigail’s own age, to whose speech still clung the lazy accent of Virginia.
“Why a judgment? I thought Mrs. Fishwire was a hairdresser.”
“Oh, Lord, nuthin’ like that.” The maidservant shook her head. “For one thing, Zulieka Fishwire was older than Mr. Adams—not that that’s ever stopped a woman with a good man,” she added with a pixie grin. “But Kitta—and some other folks in this town—thinks that because a woman learned herb-doctorin’ from the Indians, and maybe from the country Negroes that come in from Africa, she’s got to be learnin’ it from the Devil.” She sniffed scornfully. “Some of those white doctors can’t tell the difference between prickly heat and the smallpox . . . Well, Mrs. F. did dress hair, and did it well. But folks knew, if they didn’t want to be bled or purged or dosed with some of those awful things doctors’ll make you swallow, she was the one to come to, to get you well.”
The blocks of the North Street Ward had originally been plotted deep enough to permit gardens behind them, but during the course of time this land had been sold, and divided, and built upon for rentals and barns and work-shops. In much the same way, old Ezra Tillet had built the narrow little house behind his own, that his son Nehemiah had rented to Rebecca Malvern. The result of this rear-yard building was that much of the North End was a maze of yards and cottages, and alleyways that would admit no more than a wheelbarrow. Down one of these, past the Blue Bull tavern and behind Love Lane, Surry led Abigail, to a sort of cobbled courtyard surrounded by three or four ramshackle structures of various sizes, aswarm with grubby children barefoot in the cold.
Washing-lines stretched from house to house, and a bonfire burned