a shot. He held down his left arm for the Lieutenant to take hold of, and Coldstone rose, a little shakily, to his feet, and immediately staggered.
“Where’s my horse?” he asked. “She came down on my ankle, it feels like—”
“She was well enough to leave the woods at a gallop,” Abigail said. “Sergeant—?”
Muldoon shook his head, and waved vaguely in the direction his own mount had gone.
“The innkeeper at the Fish-Tail will advertise a reward,” said Abigail. “I think the sooner you two are back in Boston, the better off you’ll be. The ferry’s stopped running by now—” She glanced worriedly at the gray overcast above the leafless trees.
Thaxter made a noise of disgust as he brought his horse around for Coldstone to mount. “The cook at the Fish-Tail’s got to have done for twenty men at least—”
“The ferry will oblige us, in the King’s name.” Coldstone’s face turned wax white when Muldoon boosted him into the saddle, but his expression of arctic calm did not alter. “Thank you, Sergeant.” He took the wig that Muldoon picked up for him, but didn’t put it on; it was covered with mud and leaves. So was his hat, but he did don that. It fit ill, without the wig. “I trust my sergeant and I will be able to command a bed among the men at the battery, if the weather worsens before we can cross back to the Castle. I am much obliged to you, Mrs. Adams. I guessed you to be formidable, but did not realize you were so fearsome in combat.”
Boosted up by her clerk, Abigail settled herself in her saddle. “It does not do to underestimate Americans, Lieutenant. I’m surprised,” she added, as they reined back toward the road, and the dim yellow lights of Winnisimmet beginning to speck the darkness, “that they chose to attack you in daylight, so close to the town. You haven’t been picking out quarrels with the local worthies, I hope?”
“If by ‘picking out quarrels,’ you mean, investigating rumors of treason and sedition,” replied Coldstone, “I fear that I have, m’am. As you should well know. And, I am not surprised in the least, that such men would lie in wait for an officer of the King.”
“He’s right, m’am,” added Sergeant Muldoon diffidently. “Town’s like a nest of hornets, it is.”
Coldstone glanced quellingly down at his henchman, but Abigail heard something in the big Irishman’s voice that made her ask, “Why is it like a nest of hornets, Sergeant? What’s happened? We’ve been away,” she added, turning back to Coldstone.
The officer sniffed. “Have you, indeed? Then you have missed a great deal of excitement. Yesterday the
Fourteen
Movement stirred in every shadow, as Abigail and Lieutenant Coldstone rode down Prince’s Street beneath the high darkening shadow of Copp’s Hill. Though chilly night now covered the city, every alleyway, every courtyard, every intersection jostled with men as if it were noon on market day, and against the dim lights of every tavern door shadows appeared. Voices muttered from within these establishments, grim voices, not the cheery riot of card players and sailors on their sprees, and the murmur of men’s talk grumbled in the night like the fretting of the sea on rocks.
Now and then Abigail glimpsed rough, badly shaven faces, and the coarse textures of hunting shirts and tattered farm coats in the tavern doorways.
Men shouted at the sight of Sergeant Muldoon’s red coat. Someone threw muck from the roadway at them. On every building, it seemed, the rallying-posters for the meeting at Faneuil Hall had been pasted. A dangerous glitter seemed to fill the air, like the smell of lightning before a storm.
John sprang up from the kitchen table when Abigail came in, having detoured a little out of their way to accompany Muldoon and Coldstone to the small stone building that housed the crew of the gun emplacement at the end of Ship Street. When she tied up Balthazar in the yard and crossed to the back door she was almost stumbling with weariness. John caught her in his arms as she crossed the threshold: “What happened? You’re frozen!” He was dressed for the meeting already, in his second-best brown suit, the one he wore to plead in the circuit courts, his best wig on his head. Papers covered the big kitchen table. He drew her to the fire, brought up a small table as Johnny darted to drop a swift kiss on her cheek, then dashed through the back door to look after the horse. Nabby left her schoolbook to throw her arms around Abigail’s neck—“We were looking for you for hours!”—and Pattie hurried into the icy scullery, to come back with butter, cheese, bread. “We’ll have coffee in a trice—”
Abigail cursed the Crown for making it impossible for her to drink tea at this moment.
John chaffed her hands: “Run fetch your mother some warm slippers, Nabby, and her shawl. Was she there?” he asked more quietly, as their daughter dashed away up the tight-shut little box of the stairway. “Did you learn aught?”
“Only that there are as many witch-hunters and religious fanatics in Massachusetts as ever there were in the old days.” She put her hand to his cheek as he gently unlaced and drew off her boots and stockings. “Catherine Moore told me nothing of Rebecca’s past or family that I did not know already, from Rebecca herself, or from Scipio and Mr. Malvern. Nor can I find anyone who might have had reason to harm Mrs. Pentyre. The only thing I learned was just how impossible it would be for Rebecca to take refuge with Catherine’s family, always supposing she could get out of the town at all last Wednesday night. And I suppose Sam has found nothing?”
John shook his head.
“Has he gotten a man into Rebecca’s old house?”
“Impossible. The Tillets are refusing to rent to anyone. To tell the truth, once the
Abigail flinched, sickened at her recollection of the single time she’d seen that form of mutilation done.
“Not being idiots, the stevedores sent to unload the tea didn’t even make the attempt. Sam sent men out to Cambridge, Roxbury, and Dorchester the moment the ship was sighted, and more messengers went out as soon as the time and place for the meeting tonight were set. There’s a man on top of Beacon Hill, watching Castle Island, but Colonel Leslie hasn’t stirred. I pray God he does not,” he added grimly. “The last thing we need is to give the men aboard the
“They wouldn’t!”
“They won’t if they think doing so would cause more damage than rioters. I must go,” he added, as Nabby scampered back into the kitchen with Abigail’s knitted wool slippers and stoutest shawl. “We’re meeting at the Green Dragon at eight: Sam, Revere, Warren, Church, Hancock, and I. The Faneuil meeting later will be a bear- garden. We need to know in advance what measures to propose. Sam at least knows that we have to move carefully, if we’re to keep support in England and not be dismissed as hooligans out for nothing but loot.”
Abigail nodded again. She had been aware for years that despite the cries of Democracy, the heads of the Sons of Liberty took care to plan their strategies closely, and leave as little as possible to the whims of the rank and file. Sam kept a finger on the pulse of the poor men, the laborers, the dispossessed and discontented, but he knew well that they could be swayed by the urgings of other men as easily as by his own. John was his balance wheel, his gauge for what would work and what only sounded well.
