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