A Marked Man

“What, disguised as a boy?” His chuckle was affectionate, admiring, but a chuckle nonetheless. “A young doctor of Rome; his name is Balthazar,” he quoted Shakespeare’s description of Portia’s alter ego from The Merchant of Venice. “I never knew so young a body with so old a head . . .”

“And Balthazar won her case,” pointed out Abigail.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Not serious?” Abigail drew herself up in burlesque indignation. “Not serious about visiting my poor, wretched cousin in that horrible jail and taking him a few paltry comforts? After Mr. Thaxter’s kindliness in offering to escort me?”

“The Provost Marshal is never going to believe that my wife or any person named Adams is making a call on a man suspected of seditious activities solely for the purpose of giving him clean stockings.”

“I’m surprised at you, John Adams, making assumptions about what another man might be persuaded to believe.” She spooned butter from the little crock that had been brought up from the cellar—nearly rock-hard in the cold despite the fact that she’d set it near the door into the kitchen—and collected the milk-jug from the warmest corner of the pantry. The thin skin of ice would melt off it after only minutes in the kitchen’s warmth.

“The most they can do is forbid me to see him and make me sit on a bench for an hour in the cold while Thaxter asks his questions. They’re certainly not going to clap me in a dungeon and send you a note demanding you come alone and unarmed to some deserted spot, you know.”

“I suppose not.” John grinned, and followed her back into the kitchen, platter of pork in his hands. “I should dearly love to see them try, though. If they forbid you to visit Mr. Knox, dearest Portia, I daresay you might improve the idle hour by paying a call on your friend Lieutenant Coldstone.”

Abigail’s smile widened in return. “My thought precisely, dearest Lysander.”

He set down his prosaic burden and kissed her hand at the old courting nickname. Lieutenant Jeremy Coldstone of the Provost Marshal’s guard was the officer charged, last November, with arresting John for the murder of Colonel Leslie’s mistress, and from that inauspicious beginning, respect and liking had grown up between Abigail and that stiff-backed young servant of the Crown. Sternly, Abigail disciplined her thoughts against a twinge of regret as she poured warmed cider from the hearth-kettle to a pitcher, and John gathered the children to table. It would be the Sabbath until bedtime tonight, so she would be unable to bake fresh bread to carry across to Castle Island as a gift for Coldstone, whom she knew was at the mercy of Army food-contractors: a pity. The goodwill was cheap at the price. And Harry, of course, would appreciate it, too.

She gave herself a mental shake, and turned her thoughts resolutely back to the morning’s sermon and the questions the Reverend Cooper had raised about the Mark of the Beast, and conversation over dinner reverted to Sabbath thoughtfulness. If keeping the Sabbath holy were easy, God would not have needed to enshrine it in Eternal Law. When John sent a note to Cousin Sam, however, requesting that transportation to the island be arranged in the morning with one of the smugglers who worked for fellow-Son John Hancock, Abigail scribbled a quick message for Lucy Fluckner, postponing their own meeting until Tuesday, when at least the delay would result in some information to impart. Officially there was no post in Boston on Sundays, but there was no harm in asking the next-door neighbor’s prentice-boy if he would happen to be walking that way this evening on his return from Meeting.

She, John, and Pattie returned to the meeting-house that afternoon with righteous hearts and proper attitudes.

The short spring evening, however, brought a knock on the front door and a resumption of Abigail’s career as a Sabbath-breaker.

She had at least the comfort of knowing that she wasn’t the only one in the household engaged in violating the Lord’s Commandment—if comfort one could take in such a reflection—because on their return from the afternoon service John had been greeted by a note from wily Cousin Sam, followed closely by the man himself: was John agreeable to conceal two boxes of the pamphlets Harry had been printing last night and several pieces of the frame of the press itself, which Paul Revere, indefatigable Sabbath-bender and bricoleur, was going to dismantle that night?

“So far as anyone can tell, they’ve got no one watching the bookshop,” Sam said, as he guided John out of the kitchen and down the short hall to John’s study at the front of the house. By anyone, Abigail assumed he meant any of the prentice-boys, layabouts, and stevedores out of work who constituted the eyes and ears of the Sons of Liberty in Boston’s narrow streets. And men pride themselves on not being “gossipy” like women! “We’ll have the pamphlets out of there and the press broken down by midnight, and if it does occur to the Provost Marshal to get a man in to search the cellar, he’ll find nothing but Caesar’s Commentaries and quires of stationery for his trouble —”

Presumably, thought Abigail as she returned to the kitchen to pour cider and lay out a plate of yesterday’s gingerbread for the men, Sam has decided to take the Sabbath as ending at sunset . . .

What mark—she could not keep herself from wondering— would this decision about where the boundaries of the Lord’s Day lay leave on Sam’s head and hand and heart, once the goal of political representation for the colonies in Parliament was achieved? Would the Sons of Liberty disband then? Or would they begin to turn on one another, as the ancient Romans did? Or on anyone they perceived as an enemy to whatever the new order was?

And in that case—

“Mrs. Adams?” Pattie, who was standing at the front door even as Abigail stepped out of the study into the hall again, turned, and beyond her Abigail saw a cloaked form on the threshold in the dusk. “A lady here to see you.”

Miss Fluckner? Thank goodness there was a fire in the parlor fireplace this afternoon . . .

“My dear Mrs. Adams!” As Pattie stepped aside, Mrs. Margaret Sandhayes limped into the hallway, paused to prop one of her gold-headed canes against her pannier, and this time—second encounter being obviously ground for a promotion—extended her entire hand instead of the cool two fingers as before. “I am desolated to interrupt you at this hour, but dear Lucy warned me—at the same time that she begged me to bring you this—that you Puritans spend the entire day in Church on Sundays. Is that true? Doing nothing but listening to the minister prose on about God and holiness? How very extraordinary—but very morally uplifting and good for the character, I’m sure.”

She smiled and held out a thick-folded packet of paper, crusted everywhere with blots of sealing wax into which a seal of a flying bird had been hastily squished. An equally impatient hand had scrawled Mrs. Adams across the front.

“Won’t you come in?” Abigail nodded to Pattie and stepped back to open the parlor door.

“Well, just for a moment, thank you so much.” In a vast rustle of petticoats Mrs. Sandhayes shed her cloak into Pattie’s hands and preceded Abigail into the parlor, her panniered skirts—a style worn by only the wives of the wealthiest merchants in the colonies—swaying uneasily with her lurching stride. “Of course I should attend more regularly—Dear Hannah Fluckner tells me that the minister at King’s Chapel is dazzling, and so handsome, too, for a man of his years, and with a beautiful voice. I always think a Man of the Cloth must have a beautiful voice, don’t you? So much more important than all that dusty Bible-quoting! Yet vestries over here never seem to think of that when choosing them, or even offer training in elocution or rhetoric at seminaries, which makes it such a bore for the poor parishioners.”

She settled in the chair beside the fire and propped her canes beside her, her movements suddenly graceful: as she removed her gloves, Abigail noticed the length and pale beauty of her well-cared-for hands. “And God forbid if there’s some perfectly simple word that he habitually mispronounces, like concupiscence, which dear Dr. Ellenbrough at St. Onesimus’s always pronounced con-cuppy-since, and I’m afraid we girls would start giggling and could not stop ourselves—Why, thank you,” she added, as Pattie came into the parlor with a tray: softly steaming teapot, small plates of bread, marmalade, fig-paste, and soft cheese. “How very kind of you, m’am! Such a freezing night as it