alleyway when they scattered before his horse, so that he only seemed to disappear?”
“That sounds much more plausible to me than the idea of some ghost.” said Hewitt. “In which case, bravo to that man! Let us drink a toast to him!”
“Hear, hear!” said a few people in the crowd.
“Yes, by all means, let us applaud that man, whoever he may be.” Drakov concurred. “But, gentlemen, before we drink our toast, let us consider that we might well profit from that unknown man’s example.
“Indeed?” said Brown. “How so?”
“Consider the Sons of Liberty, gentlemen,” said Drakov. “Who are they? What are they? Men much like ourselves, no more, no less. And yet, day by day, it appears that more and more, the city falls under their grip. And why, I ask you? Because they arc better men than we?”
“No, by God!” said Brown.
“Indeed, no, they are not,” said Drakov. “And yet what makes them so different from ourselves that they seem to have such power? What. precisely, is their power, gentlemen? That, with the exception of a very few, their members are not known.”
“But we all know who they are,” protested Brown.
“Do we?” Drakov asked. “How many of them can you name? Six? Eight? Ten, perhaps? Fifteen or twenty. at best? Yet when they stage their demonstrations, how many of them are there? Forty, fifty, sixty or more? When they come to threaten people in the night, are not many of them masked, or their faces blackened with burnt cork?”
“Yes, that’s true enough.” one of the tax commissioners said. “I can readily attest to that.”
“Their power. Then,” said Drakov. “seems to lie in the fact that they accomplish much of what they do by stealth. By being unknown, by heaving stones through windows in the night and such. And now, it seems, a loyal subject of King George has given them a taste of their own medicine, paid them back in their own coin.” He raised his eyebrows and looked around at them. “Can we not learn from his example, gentlemen?”
John Hewitt smiled. “A wise man can always profit by the good example of another.” he said. “I wonder who our ‘headless horseman’ is. And I wonder if he will ride again soon?”
“I should not be in the least surprised.” said Moffat.
“In the meantime,” Drakov said, “perhaps his fellow loyal subjects of King George should discuss how best to give the horseman our support?”
“What do you propose, Nicholas?” said Brown.
“Gentlemen,” said Drakov, picking up his glass of wine, “the Sons of Liberty are bent upon visiting their deviltry upon us. They give us deviltry, 1 say we rebel against it and pay them back with hellfire!”
“Hear, hear!”
“Well said! Well said!”
“Gentlemen,” said Drakov, rising to his feet with upraised glass. “I give you the headless horseman! And all those with the courage to ride along beside him!”
“I’ll drink to that!”
“And so will I. by God!”
“Me, too!”
“Your glasses, gentlemen! Raise up your glasses!”
“To the headless horseman!” Moffat said. “Hellfire to the Sons of Liberty!”
They all joined in the toast and drank.
“To the headless horseman! Hellfire to the Sons of Liberty!”
“I wonder.” Moffat said, as if musing to himself, “does anyone among us stable a black stallion?”
They all started glancing at one another.
“John, don’t you have a black stallion in your stable?” Moffat asked.
“What, me? The headless horseman?” Hewitt said, with a snort. “Not I. It’s true. I have a black horse in my stable, but it is an old mare. A walking country horse. Hardly the sort of mount for clattering about the streets of Boston in the middle of the night!”
“Stoddard has a black horse!” someone cried. “And it’s a stallion, too!”
“No, no, my stallion is a bay!” Stoddard protested.
“Perhaps it was a bay they saw that night!”
“No. it was black, they said, like jet.”
“Gentlemen. gentlemen!’” said Drakov. raising his arms to get their attention. He waited till they’d settled down. “What does it profit us to speculate upon who this man might he?”
“Do you happen to own a black stallion. Mr. Dark?” said someone in the crowd.
“As it happens. I do not own any horses whatsoever,” Drakov said. “And these gentlemen can tell you. I had not yet arrived in Boston when the headless horseman first made his appearance. so I think that we can all safely assume I am not he.”
“Yes, that’s quite true,” said Hewitt. “Nicholas has only just arrived in the colonies. He does not even have a place to call his own yet.”
“Quite so, gentlemen,” said Drakov. “But my point is simply this. Our mysterious horseman may be among us even now, for all we know, or he might be dining at this very moment in some other part of town, altogether unaware of our interest in him. In either event, what difference does it make? He serves all our interests best by being unknown. Remember that if we cannot discern his true identity, then neither can the Sons of Liberty.
“Your point is well taken. Dark.” said Brown. “But then how may we let him know that there are those among us ready and willing to lend him our support?”
“Well, our horseman is clearly a Tory, that much we know,” said Drakov. “And we all know who our fellow Tories are, do we not? I say we spread the word among all of our friends. That way, whoever he may be, the word must surely reach him. Let it be known that there are those among us who stand ready to oppose the lawlessness of Samuel Adams and his mob. And if the horseman wants our help, then surely a man of his resources must find a way to tell us.”
“You think he will respond?” said Hewitt.
“We can only wait and sec.” said Drakov. “But if our headless horseman is the man of action he appears to be. then I think we may be hearing from him soon.”
Benjamin Hallowell was not the sort of man who was easily intimidated and he had very little sympathy for the grievances of Boston’s radicals, especially after the Sons of Liberty attacked his home. He did not care for Boston. He much preferred the civility of London, but the new regulations had required him to personally assume his post as a collector of customs duties in the colonies.
In the past, it had been the practice for men appointed to his office to remain in England and appoint people in the colonies to act in their place, as their deputies, but the ministry had put a stop to that. The colonists were all too often sympathetic to the smugglers and the colonial deputies had often looked the other way, accepting bribes from merchants and their captains to ignore the smuggled goods. Hallowell was an ambitious man and he did not intend to settle down in Massachusetts. He meant to impress his superiors in England with the efficient way that he performed his duties and to use his post in Boston as a step up the ladder to further his career in government service.
For a long time, he had been waiting for the opportunity to make an example of one man in particular, a man who was notorious for his flagrant disregard of the Acts of Trade and Navigation, and now, thanks to the recent arrival in port of the Romney and the Lawrence, it seemed the moment had arrived to teach the haughty John Hancock a lesson that was a long time overdue. Hallowell listened grim-faced as his chief collector, Joseph Harrison, made his report.
“From the moment that I saw the Liberty pull into the wharf,” said Harrison, “I suspected that her holds were loaded full of smuggled goods. She rode low in the water, far too low to account for what was on her manifest.” Harrison snorted. “When I boarded her for my inspection, the captain claimed that the ship’s entire cargo consisted of twenty-live pipes of Madeira. And yet any fool could see the ship was loaded to capacity!”
“So you insisted on making a personal inspection, of course,” said Hallowell.
“Yes, and no sooner had I done so than they offered me a bribe!” said Harrison. He drew himself up stiffly. “I refused, of course.”
“Of course,” said Hallowell. “What happened then?”
