A Marked Man

by the arm before he could disappear down the hatchway. “You’ve no more beard than my baby daughter and a vessel this size needs a crew of two at least. Did Miller follow Cottrell down from Boothbay?”

“Matt Brown made him!” blurted the boy. “You ain’t magistrates, are you?”

“Don’t be a dunce,” said Revere good-naturedly. “Do we look like magistrates? My name’s Revere. This is Mrs. Adams.”

The boy’s dark eyes got bigger still. “Like Sam Adams?” he whispered.

Abigail nodded, since this was technically true. John and Sam shared a great-grandfather, who had doubtless spent the past decade rolling over in his grave at the thought of Sam’s politics. “We need to speak to Mr. Miller or Mr. Brown,” she said.

“That’s just it, m’am—mister,” said the boy. “I dunno where they be. Come down,” he added belatedly, and gestured down the nearly pitch-black gangway. “There’s a bit of a fire. You’ll be froze up here, stiff as a pig in the shed. I got tea,” he added. “I mean smuggler tea, not Crown tea. And rum.”

“What did your friends want with Cottrell?” asked Revere, once the three of them were crowded knee-to- knee in a cabin barely the size of Abigail’s pantry. “What did he get up to in Maine?”

“He were lookin’ about, sir. Everybody down east said they’d teach him not to fool with Maine men. But he kept cautious. Kept indoors at night and got old Bingham to send a man with him when he went about. Quimby, that owns the public house, said we’s not to harm him, though the boys was all for showin’ them Proprietors here in Boston they can’t pull us about and put us off our land. But it’s hard to put Matt off a plan when he’s got one. Matt took it in his head that if every man the Proprietors send up got his head broke, pretty soon they’d decide not to send any more men, and he says Quimby’s a coward that’s read too many books and newspapers.”

“And is that what Cottrell said he’d do?” asked Abigail. “Turn you off your land?” Someone had clearly been cheated on the tea—about a soupspoon’s worth of crumbles and dust at the bottom of a decades-old box. The brew it yielded was grayish and utterly flavorless, and judging by the cautious way her companion sipped his rum, the contents of his cup was either just as bad or murderously strong or both.

“They been sayin’ it at the public house for months,” said the boy Putnam. “How after we fought the Indians and cleared the land, it wasn’t really that Dunbar feller’s to let in the first place, and Mr. Fluckner or Mr. Bowdoin or Mr. Apthorp or one of them others, they’re going to clear us all off.” He pushed back the hair from his eyes for the tenth time: a thin boy, the skin of his face reddened and darkened from a short lifetime at sea, his fingers—where they showed beyond roughly knitted mitts—calloused and knotted already with work. Some of John’s strangest tales of his legal journeying involved men and women he’d encountered in that cruel and stony land, Scots and Germans clinging to unyielding acres, fighting Indians or trading with them until many of them were very like the savages themselves, barely knowing God’s name and with only the sketchiest notion of His Commandments. The hard work broke men without giving them enough to feed their families; the sea from which they took the bulk of their living was a cold and greedy creditor who demanded from every family a son or a husband or a brother every few years.

It isn’t just about tea, Abigail thought, and it isn’t just about taxes. Looking into the boy’s eyes in the near-dark of the little cabin, she saw again Mrs. Fluckner’s smiling lace-decked portrait on the wall and the liveried footman bringing in a tray of cakes for Mrs. Sandhayes to slip to the lapdog. And suddenly, she understood Sam. It’s about the fact that men who’re friends with the King can do this to men who’re not friends with the King.

“So what did Mr. Brown plan to do?” she asked, and set her teacup aside.

“Only beat the shite out’n him—Only hammer him good,” the boy corrected himself, when Revere kicked him hard on the ankle. “He was for goin’ on the Hetty himself if Hev wouldn’t take him down in the Magpie . . . Hev Miller,” he provided, when Abigail looked puzzled. “That owns the Magpie. He’s my cousin and Matt’s, too, and he only agreed because Matt loses his temper like he does and he thought he’d better be along to keep an eye on him. Only somethin’s gone wrong, and I’m feared they come to harm, and I’ve been here waiting for ’em six days now, and if they’ve killed him, the magistrates’ll come for me, too. But I don’t like to ask, in case there’s somebody askin’ about for me. I’m scared even to steal food. I can’t just leave ’em, but I can’t let myself be took. I’ve got my ma to look after and my sisters, and I don’t know what to do.”

He looked from one to the other of them, pleading for guidance. Abigail had guessed his age at fourteen or fifteen, but now she wondered if he were younger than that. Or did he only seem so, because she had grown used to the sharp town prentices of Boston and had forgotten how much at sea these backwoods boys were, when they came to one of the biggest cities in all of America?

“Would you tell Mr. Adams how I’m fixed, m’am?” asked the boy timidly. “Mr. Quimby—that owns the Blue Ox in Boothbay—he’ll read us from what Mr. Sam Adams writes, about Freedom and the King and no taxes, and nobody to throw us off our land. He says, Sam Adams is a friend to us, though he’s never seen us.” His smile, suddenly shy, was like a ray of sunlight; a flash of hope in a life unremittingly bleak. “He says he’s a friend to all those that don’t hold by bein’ pushed about by the King’s rich friends. Would Mr. Adams stand a friend to me?”

Abigail’s glance crossed Revere’s in the murky darkness of the cabin. “To be sure he will,” she said. Sam, I shall strangle you myself if this boy comes to harm. “If nothing else, I’ll send someone over with something for you to eat—what have you been eating all this time?” And she clucked her tongue sharply at the boy’s mumbled recital of barter for the remnants of the cargo. “But you must tell us the truth. Did Mr. Brown and Mr. Miller wait for Cottrell when he came ashore?”

“Oh, yes, m’am. We all three was on Hancock’s Wharf when the Hetty put in, and saw him come off, in that fine gray coat with all the capes to it that he wore and a French cocked hat like Mr. Bingham wears. Hev says, You stand to and be ready to take the Magpie out the second we come on board, and I mean the second. Then Matt tells me to cut along back here, and cut I did. I seen him and Hev follow Mr. Cottrell off round the corner and up the street that leads away from the wharf—Lord, there was so many people about, and carts and things, they didn’t even need to take care not to be seen or anythin’! And that’s the last I saw them.”

“How were they dressed?” asked Revere, and young Putnam’s brow furrowed.

“I dunno. Just regular clothes.”

“Boots or shoes?”

“Moccasins,” said the boy, astonished that his questioner hadn’t known that.

“Is Hev’s coat brown or blue?”

“Green,” said the boy. “Matt’s used to be blue but it’s mostly all faded out sort of gray.” Then, as if it finally dawned on him that neither Revere nor Abigail would have the slightest idea what his friends looked like, he added, “Matt’s got a cocked hat, Hev’s has got a brim on it like a preacher, except he’s got a couple bear claws and some feathers hangin’ off it, ’cause he’ll go sometimes into the woods and trade with the Abenakis. His mother just hates it when he does that. Hev’s tall and thin, Matt’s about your height, sir, or maybe shorter, dark like you, and built like you but fatter. Matt brought his rifle and a pistol,” added the boy, “but Hev took ’em away from him. He left the rifle here”—the boy nodded at it, lying across two pegs driven into the wall—“but he took the pistol with ’em. And Matt had a club.”

Softly, Abigail said, “Did he, indeed?”

“Is Mr. Cottrell killed, m’am?” asked the boy. “Would you know how to find that out?”

“I’m afraid he is dead,” replied Revere quietly. “He was killed—apparently beaten to death—sometime Saturday night.”

If Abigail had Jesuitically neglected to mention which Mr. Adams she was married to, her companion, she noticed, had likewise been less than ingenuous in answering the question of whether they were magistrates or not. In fact, Paul Revere was active in the politics of his ward, and had served as clerk of the North Square Market on a number of occasions, and knew most of the selectmen of the town. “Something the boy didn’t need to know just now,” he remarked, as he steadied Abigail in her unwieldy iron pattens up the slippery planks of the wharf once more. “I’ll call on the Chief Constable in the morning and see if my suspicion is correct about where our two friends have been this past week.”

“I think jail’s the only place they could be, don’t you?” Abigail glanced back at the feeble glimmer of the