A Marked Man

Harbor.

“Nothing yet.” John smiled encouragingly at the girl. “Best we not worry over what we don’t know.”

Pattie bit her underlip and nodded, clearly trying to look as if she hadn’t heard the rumors that had begun to fly around the town in the ten weeks since John’s wily cousin Sam had led the Sons of Liberty in this act of protest, about what the Crown’s reaction would be. Damage was estimated at some $90,000. Given Boston’s history of riots, protests, and stubborn disobedience to every effort of the King to establish royal control over the town and the Colony of Massachusetts, only the most delusional optimists could believe that retribution would not be crushing.

“They wouldn’t send to arrest you, would they, Mr. Adams?”

Abigail paused in the act of taking off her day-cap, tucking up the heavy coil of her sable hair, conscious of the swift glance that passed between her two older children.

“Arrest me?” John widened his eyes at the girl. “For remaining peacefully at home on the night of the ruckus? As any of my good neighbors will attest.”

This made Nabby giggle. Even at the age of eight, she knew perfectly well that no member of the mysterious Sons of Liberty was ever without a dozen witnesses to his spotless conduct, whatever he’d been doing. Johnny, ever the stickler, asked, “Then it’s all right, Father, to lie to the King’s officers?”

Another man—Cousin Sam, for instance, reflected Abigail—would have answered the question with a broad wink that said, Well, what do YOU think, my boy? But John replied soberly, “’Tis never ‘all right’ to lie, Johnny. But men, when they are grown to the age of judgment, are sometimes forced to it by the threat of greater evil that would come upon others should the whole of the truth be told. Only God knows whether this is ‘all right’ or not. And we are now,” he added, scooping his Bible and hat from the sideboard, “well and truly late—”

Johnny picked up his own small hat, pulled his scarf over his fine blond hair, and jammed the hat on top for warmth, as Abigail put on a fresh cap and tied the strings of Nabby’s hood. And now the whole of the congregation will see us troop in during the opening reading . . .

John picked up the little metal fire-box of hot coals and they turned toward the door into the yard—nobody in Boston went in and out their own front doors except on the most formal of occasions—and stopped with a sort of shock at the sight of looming shadows beyond the misted windows. Two men . . . Nabby caught Abigail’s hand, as if all this talk of treason, liberty, and arrest had conjured the redcoat troops from their camp. A sharp knock sounded on the panels and a voice called, “John? Are you there?”

Cousin Sam.

Who should, Abigail reflected, be in church—which is where WE should be—

John opened the door. It was wily Cousin Sam, all right, wrapped up in his gray greatcoat and a dozen scarves, knocking the snow off his boots on the scraper. The muffled shape at his heels was the street-level organizer of the Sons of Liberty’s information network, silversmith Paul Revere.

Revere pulled the door to behind them as they stepped inside, for the morning was like frozen iron.

Sam said, “The British have arrested Harry Knox.”

Harry Knox, aged twenty-four, bookseller, was responsible for printing and distributing any number of seditious broadsides penned by the Sons of Liberty . . . and, under a variety of pseudonyms, by John. One of which, Abigail knew, was to have been printed in the cellar of his Cornhill Street shop last night. “The British—”

John asked, quite calmly, “Did they find his press? Or the pamphlets?”

Sam shook his head. “Not that I’ve heard. They took him on his way to church. He’s being charged with murder.”

Two

Abigail was accustomed to the sensation she periodically experienced of wanting to smite the husband of her bosom over the head with a stick of firewood.

She knew, when John looked at her following Cousin Sam’s announcement, that the next words out of his mouth were going to be the request that she take the children on to church while he and Sam consulted on the matter, leaving her to speculate, through the two and a half hours of the Reverend Cooper’s sermon, upon who young Harry—whose youth had been surprisingly rowdy for a scholarly bookseller—was supposed to have murdered and why it was the British Army authorities who had come for him rather than the Boston constabulary.

And she knew, too, that if she was going to set a good example to the children about refraining from quarrels on the Sabbath, she could not protest.

Feeling blackmailed, she said brightly, “Come now Johnny, Nabby, we are woefully late,” and took each child by the hand. John handed his Bible to Nabby, and Sam—whom Abigail would cheerfully have brained with a skillet —opened the door for them.

As she had anticipated, the entire congregation of the Brattle Street Meeting-House turned in its pews and stared as she led her children—fatherless—down the aisle in the middle of the first reading of the service, to the little whitewashed cubicle of the Adams family pew.

Devoting the whole of her mind and heart to the Reverend Cooper’s argument, “The State of the Soul Laid Bare before the Eyes of God,” was as difficult for her, she realized, as it was for Nabby and Johnny under ordinary circumstances: a reminder to herself, she reflected wryly, to be mindful that her adult concentration was only a matter of practice and degree, and not any special quality of adulthood. Given sufficient distraction—the possibility that the Provost Marshal of the King’s Sixty-Fourth Regiment might be even now on his way to arrest John for sedition, for instance—she was no more capable than her six-year-old son of focusing her thoughts.

“For behold, God did not set his mark upon Cain in the spirit of vengefulness, but in the spirit of forgiveness, that any that slew Cain should be avenged sevenfold; even Cain who had slain his brother and brought murder into the world.”

Murder. Harry Knox?

Five years ago, one might have believed it possible. Today—

Tall, fat, and scholarly, Harry had spent the years of his early teens running with the South End street-gangs and had been acknowledged as the best fistfighter in many a Pope’s Night brawl. He had helped found the Boston Grenadiers, one of the patriot militia companies, and in his position as second-in-command he’d had no trouble trouncing whoever he needed to among the ranks. But with the acquisition of his own bookshop, he had consciously and firmly put his rough-and-tumble youth behind him.

Nabby’s eyes were closed. Abigail nudged her sharply. Johnny, on the far side of the little girl with the fire- box on the floor between their feet, was reading his father’s Bible. As a Christian, Abigail knew she shouldn’t countenance such inattention to the sermon, but at least it would improve his command of the language. Not every six-year-old could manage those archaic phrases.

“When Cain in his sin cried out before God, My punishment is greater than I can bear, God’s punishment of Cain was not death, even though he had murdered his brother, but exile, that he might learn of his punishment what it was like to have no brother forever and to be afraid . . .”

Who would Harry have had the opportunity—or the desire—to harm? He was a loyal friend, but his only family was his younger brother; and these days, Harry was far more likely to talk his way out of trouble than to resort to violence. Besides, if he’d cracked a thief or burglar over the head with a poker, the charge would be manslaughter, and his captors, the local Watch, not the Provost Marshal.

For the British military to be involved, the crime had to be one that touched the Crown. And in these times— given that Harry and his Grenadiers had been among the men who’d stood guard at Griffin’s Wharf in December to keep the British tea-ships from unloading their cargoes—the only crime Abigail could think of that would involve arrest by the Provost Marshal would be treason.

That being the case, was Harry’s arrest only the first, with more to come?

Abigail shivered, and not simply because yesterday’s snow lay thick in Brattle Street outside.

“We bear the stain of our deeds on our foreheads, or on our right hands, as the Book of Revelation teaches