unjust rulers hardly qualified as that. The meetinghouse was packed to the walls, as it had been for the morning service, and as they had for the morning service, John and Abigail shared their pew with half a dozen complete strangers, young farmers from Chelsea and Brookline and one from as far away as Worcester, brought into the town by the tolling of the bells and the word that was circulating the countryside: Your Country is in Danger. The King’s demands must be challenged if we are not to be enslaved. These young men listened to the sermon with deep appreciation, shook hands afterwards with John, and said they’d heard him speak at Old South Thursday: “We’re ready for anything, sir.”
Reflecting on the number of things that could go wrong in the eleven days between now and the deadline for the tea’s unloading, Abigail thought, We had better be.
The Fluckners lived in Milk Street, a new and extremely handsome house, suitable to a man who was not only Royal Commissioner of Massachusetts but proprietor of a million acres in the Maine district to the northeast. Beyond a doubt it was crammed to the rafters with expensive furniture, fine silk clothing, costly silver and china, and similar lootable goods. “Sam claims there will be no looting,” murmured John, surveying the tightly shuttered brick façade. “The Sons of Liberty learned their lesson when Governor Hutchinson’s house was gutted; there are standing orders that anyone who loots the houses or goods of the Tories will be punished. If we lower ourselves to the acts of criminals, we will lose our support among men of good character, both here and in England, and justify the Crown in treating us as such.”
“Which includes murder as well as theft.”
“Precisely.” His mouth tightened. “I dearly wish there were a way you could ask to see this ‘Novanglus’ note of Coldstone’s without displaying in turn the one that was on Mrs. Pentyre’s body. ’Twouldn’t take a clever man long to guess the code, if he knew already that she met her end on a Wednesday night at close to midnight. Nor do we know how close they are to unraveling whatever other papers Mrs. Pentyre may have left—including, you say, all Rebecca’s previous notes.” He shook his head, forestalling her unspoken question. “It can’t be risked.” He led the way across the street.
But the knocker had been taken from the Fluckners’ door. When they walked around the side of the house to the carriageway, they found the gate into the back quarters shut and locked. John glared at the shuttered windows, and returning to the front, pounded on the door with his fist.
“The droppings I saw through the gate of the carriageway were fresh,” provided Abigail. “And there’s smoke in the kitchen chimney.”
“Fluckner’s probably given orders to open to no one they don’t recognize.” John gave the portal an impatient and un-Sabbathlike kick. “And it’s too much to hope, that he’d permit his daughter to come back to town to get his servants to open up the house—even to someone who wasn’t under suspicion of treason and murder. Always supposing,” he added, as he came down the single brick step, “that telling Fluckner of the poem in the first place wouldn’t cause him to sell the poor girl out of hand, to spare himself trouble.”
“For something she couldn’t help?” Abigail stopped in her tracks, half inclined to go back and have another try at the door. “For receiving poems that she didn’t want, from a man who is clearly insane? Knock again, John, they might—”
“And pigs might fly.” He put his hand at her back, started to lead her down the street. “I’ve argued in the Commonwealth courts for thirteen years, my girl, and if I had a shilling for every man who would sell a slave rather than deal with more than an hour’s ‘nonsense,’ as men like to call it, from people that slave might attract to the household . . . Well, I’d have bought you a house as big as that one, and a new lace cap to wear in it.”
They turned the corner onto Cornhill. It was barely four, yet lamplight shone in many windows, where children in their Sabbath best sat politely in parlor chairs while mothers read the Scripture to them, or told them Bible stories as Abigail’s father had told them to her. The taverns and ordinaries were of course closed, yet in every one they passed, Abigail saw lights