A Marked Man

she informed him. “You shall be a hungry boy by dinnertime.”

He regarded her with enormous blue eyes, clearly without the slightest idea of how long that was going to be and with only the dimmest recollection of his previous experience with this kind of improvident starvation. “I shall eat it, if you won’t,” offered Johnny, not out of greediness, Abigail was certain, but because he knew the suggestion would have its effect: Charley quickly wolfed down his soggy breakfast. Johnny and Nabby—a few months short of her ninth birthday and quiet as a little barn-fairy—cleared away the dishes and folded their own and their brother’s napkins, rinsing the plates but leaving them stacked on the sideboard for a more thorough washing tomorrow. Abigail knew houses in Boston where not even that much work was performed on the Sabbath, but she drew the line at it. A God who spent so many verses of Leviticus discussing the purification of any vessel that has so much as touched mice, moles, tortoises, or chameleons would not consider it an honor to have dishes left unrinsed overnight in His name.

As the children went upstairs to ready themselves for church, John unfolded the Gazette and reconsidered the advertisement by the strengthening gray light of the kitchen’s wide windows.

“I think you may be right, Portia.”

Abigail smiled at her old nickname, which he’d called her during their courtship: Shakespeare’s intrepid lady lawyer. Even ten years ago, they’d both known that were it possible for a girl to obtain the education to do so, Abigail would have made a fine lawyer herself.

He went on, “’Twere another man I’d think, the girl was driven by desperation. But though Fluckner’s an ass, and he’s toad-eaten for the governor so that it’s a wonder he doesn’t have warts from his lips to his hairline . . .” He shook his head. “He has no name for being a cruel master, nor for meddling with the women in his household.”

“But he would sell children left behind. The mother would know this.”

“Curious.” He drank the rest of his cider, which was growing cold. The bells of Boston’s earlier-assembling congregations—the French Meeting-House on School Street and the Anabaptists over by the Mill-Pond—had not yet begun to sound, but Abigail’s ear was cocked for them as she cleared her own plate and John’s. Once the early bells started up, it was time to go upstairs for the children and herd her family toward the door. “Why should anyone do harm to a slave-woman? Unless she’s returned or been found”—he checked the date on the paper—“in the course of this week. Here, let me do that—”

As he sprang up to forestall her putting another log on the kitchen hearth a tremendous thump sounded upstairs, followed by a furious confusion of treble voices. John’s face crimsoned, and he hurled the wood into the fire. “Drat those children, can they not respect the Sabbath?”

“Not when they were born with your temper, dearest,” replied Abigail, fetching the tongs to straighten the log.

As she did so, she made out Nabby shouting, “ ’ Tisn’t true! You’re a liar!”

“So are you!”

And Pattie, the fourteen-year-old hired girl, cried, “Such words on a Sunday—!”

Small feet rattled in the boxed-in spiral of the stairwell, and a small body caromed off its corners. The next moment Nabby flung herself through the kitchen door and skidded to a stop before Abigail. Had she been a year younger, Abigail reflected, her daughter would have grabbed her around her waist.

“Mama, you wouldn’t run away, if you were a slave, and leave us, would you?”

“She would.” Johnny almost fell through the doorway behind her, pale hair tousled and neckcloth pulled awry. He could never bear to have his older sister get to anything before he did.

“Wouldn’t!”

“Would!”

“Liar!”

The boy stepped back as Nabby’s hand jerked, as if she would hit him, but she remembered the holy day and stayed herself. He made sure all was safe before turning to Abigail again. “You’d value freedom more than anything.” Johnny looked up at his mother with those disconcerting light blue eyes. “And anything means us.”

Abigail was spared the answer to this conundrum by Pattie’s voice calling out upstairs, “Charley—!” and the wild clatter of descending feet, followed by the inevitable crash and series of thumps, then, comfortingly, Charley’s wails, which indicated that the boy had not knocked himself senseless. Still, John and Abigail were both across the kitchen and at the door to the hallway when Pattie came down the stairs with eighteen-month-old Tommy in her arms, and knelt beside the stairwell door where Charley sat clutching his head and howling.

“There!” Abigail was on her knees beside the child in the next second, moving aside the round pink hand and the silky light brown hair to ascertain that the damage was, in fact, no more than a bruise above the bridge of his snub nose. “And how did you come by that, sir?”

“Fell down!”

“And were you walking slowly?”

Charley only sobbed and held out his arms; Abigail gathered him in and kissed the brow above the injury.

“A gentleman walks in the house, sir,” she said sternly, and brushed—very gently—the baby-soft quiff of hair aside. “And on the Sabbath! What must the Lord think of you?”

“He’s always running,” pointed out Nabby righteously. “Mama, you wouldn’t leave us, if you were a slave and leaving us was the only way you could be free? Johnny says you would.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” declared Johnny, who already showed signs of wanting to grow up to be an ancient Roman. “I would rejoice that Mother valued liberty above all things.”

“You wouldn’t!” Nabby took Charley’s hand and led the boy back toward the kitchen, throwing a glance over her shoulder at Johnny. “You’d cry.”

“Would not!” He lunged at her and Abigail caught his arm with the deftness of long practice.

Why don’t my children ever argue over normal things? “What I do not value,” stated Abigail, “nor does God either, is children who quarrel on the Lord’s Day. And there’s the meeting-bell,” she added, as John—who had preceded them all back into the kitchen—put into her hand the clean washrag, wrapped around a handful of the snow that still lay inches deep and iron-hard in the yard.

“Nabby started it—”

“Don’t contradict your mother, sir,” said John.

Johnny—who contradicted everybody these days and heard this admonition a great deal—looked instantly abashed. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

At least he no longer protests that he’s only telling the truth.

“I’ll do that, Mrs. Adams.” Pattie had set Tommy down at a safe distance from the hearth—not that anywhere in the kitchen was a safe distance from the hearth, as quickly as the boy moved—and took the washrag from Abigail’s hand. “Though we should by rights have a piece of fresh meat for it—There’s my brave boy,” she added encouragingly, as Charley glanced from her to his mother, clearly wondering if renewed protestations of mortal injury would serve to keep her at his side with the meeting-house bell ringing around the corner on Brattle Street.

He evidently concluded that they would not, and held out his arms for Pattie. The girl—the daughter of neighbors of the family’s farm in Braintree across the bay—had practically grown up in the kitchen of the Adams farm herself and was much more an older sister to the children than a servant. She was friendly and pretty and much taken with the bustle and busyness of Boston. With the first notes of the Anabaptists’ off-key bell, Nabby had gone to gather everyone’s cloaks and scarves from the cupboard by the back door, and Johnny to dump a shovelful of hearth-coals into the fire-box that it was his duty to carry to their pew. Charley, at three, and little Tommy were too young to attend the meeting-house with their parents yet, so it was Pattie who stayed with them during the first service. At eight, almost nine, Abigail deemed Nabby old enough to look after the three boys when she, John, and Pattie returned to church for the afternoon service after dinner.

When John laid the folded Gazette on the sideboard, Pattie glanced at it, asked hesitantly, “Is there word about England yet, Mr. Adams?” and despite the bell that tolled like a nagging conscience, John turned back. “About the King, I mean,” continued Pattie, “and what he means to do about the tea?” She sounded as apprehensive as if she, and not a gang of unknown persons disguised as Indians, had dumped three hundred and forty-two chests of East India Company tea into Boston