still she sensed that this kind of random violence did their cause no good, particularly with men such as Joseph Ryland.
“Surely students—” she began.
“It wouldn’t have to be a student,” said Ryland. “Laundresses, scullions, the cooks who work in the Hall . . . everyone knows everything in Cambridge. I daresay the Sons of Liberty know which staircase George lived on, and when he came and went.” Bitterness tightened his voice like alum, and it occurred to Abigail to wonder what challenges and indignities this young man had encountered, both as a freshman and later, in a college population three-quarters or more given to the cause of the colonists. Every man in Harvard, practically, had been reading the broadsides John and Sam and Josiah Quincy had written denouncing his patron’s venality and pigheadedness: who was it who had said that old Professor Seckar had abused him more for being Hutchinson’s protege than for his own—admittedly variant—views on a mere man’s ability to alter by any human deed the abiding judgment of the Lord?
“Surely you don’t think it was the Sons of Liberty who killed him?”
“Can you doubt it?”
“I’ve never heard that they sink to murder—”
“Have you ever seen a man who has been tarred and feathered, m’am?” The young man’s voice dropped and his glance touched Nabby—engaged in a shy conversation about her schooling with a stout and fatherly merchant— then passed to his patron’s shut office door. “Have you ever been there the next day, when his family and his doctor are trying to pull cold tar off his skin? Or the day after that, when the raw flesh suppurates? The mob covers their victim in feathers to make him look ridiculous, so that the onlookers don’t fully realize what is being done in the name of this ‘liberty’ they’re proclaiming . . . So those who hear about it think the object is to make a man look foolish, rather than to kill him in great agony and to terrorize the onlookers into acquiescence.”
Abigail was silent, knowing what he said to be true. Then after a time she replied, “But the actions of the mob in no way alter the question of whether Englishmen here deserve the same rights that Englishmen deserve of Parliament and King.”
“Perhaps they do not,” replied Ryland. “Yet ’tis said,
Behind him, the study door opened and Messrs Heywood and Apthorp emerged, joking and waving behind them to Governor Hutchinson. Mr. Oliver said, “Mr. Brattle—” and the stout merchant who had been talking with Nabby bade her a courteous farewell and went in. Abigail rose, tucked the collection of love-letters back into her satchel, and found a silver bit in her pocket to tip the footman who had taken charge of her lantern—congratulating herself on her forethought as to how long she might have to wait for an interview—and Ryland stood also, to shake her hand.
“Mrs. Adams, please forgive me if I’ve spoken too vehemently—”
“You have said nothing untrue,” she responded. Certainly the men who’d gutted and looted the Governor’s house nine years ago—destroying much of his precious collection of manuscripts—had acted far beyond Sam’s intention. “And no fault lies in vehemence of sentiment. ’Tis our actions by which we are judged.” She added, “Good luck, in the matter of the Volunteers.”
He managed a wooden grin. “Thank you for your good wishes, m’am. I expect I shall continue as company sergeant—the position I held under Captain Fairfield—and I can do a great deal there in making sure that the Volunteers are fit to fight. Because you were quite right in your observation to Mr. Heywood: the infusion of armed men into a situation that has already turned violent will beget still more violence. And it is our duty, as subjects of the King, to keep matters from degenerating to such a pass that the French or the Spanish think themselves safe to come in and take over these colonies for themselves in the chaos that will follow.”
The butler entered again and in the hallway handed Abigail her lantern, the candle lighted already and shedding a wan glow barely stronger than that of a couple of fireflies. Abigail was glad that the way home led through familiar streets and wasn’t a long one. As the servant showed mother and daughter from the room, Abigail looked back over her shoulder to see Mr. Ryland patiently waiting, while Mr. Brattle emerged from the Governor’s study and another wealthy merchant in a bottle green coat was shown in, in his stead.
Eight
What did you make of the books, Sam?” inquired Abigail, when Surry—the slave-woman who was the sole remnant, along with the ramshackle old house itself, of the modest fortune old Deacon Adams had passed along to his son Sam—showed her into Sam’s book-room the following morning.
Sam Adams looked as if he might have protested that he would never have been so impertinent as to pry into volumes left in his charge by his cousin’s wife, then grinned, held Abigail’s chair for her, and went to the secret panel to get the books. Upon her arrival in Boston from Cambridge late on Wednesday afternoon, Abigail had taken the seven volumes straight to Sam’s old yellow house on Purchase Street. Though John’s clerk—Horace’s and Abigail’s cousin—Thaxter had been for some months now living under the Adams roof, Abigail still felt sufficiently uneasy about George Fairfield’s murder to want to get the volumes out of her own hands as quickly as possible.
Ryland might say what he chose about the Sons of Liberty—and might indeed, she reflected uneasily, be right—but the coincidence of there being
Besides, Sam was the only person she knew positively had secret panels in his house. Cellar to attic, there was probably enough treasonable material cached here and there—books, pamphlets, correspondence with the Crown’s opponents in other colonies, and the true names of a hundred authors of sedition—to blow the roof off the Houses of Parliament. She guessed the hidden compartment beside the mantel in his book-room was one of a dozen.
“Not a solitary thing.” Sam set the books carefully on the desk between them: a folio edition, four quarto- sized volumes, and two octavos, their leather bindings cracked, agedark, and bearing signs of having been gnawed by mice. “Three of the Arabic volumes bear the imprint of the Medici Press in Rome. I had no idea typefaces existed in Arabic—I assume for the benefit of Christians in the Turkish Empire. We would have to have Dr. Warren”—he named a mutual friend and fellow member of the Sons of Liberty—“pass judgment on the chemistry and astronomy texts, but they must be shockingly outdated.”
He passed his big, square hand gently over the cover of the folio, and Abigail remembered that in his youth, Sam Adams had also been a student at Harvard and had acquired there—along with a taste for fiery politics and the Rights of Man—the fascination with books shared by so many questing minds.
“Where did you come by them?”
“My nephew Horace purchased the Arabic texts from a woman named Narcissa Seckar,” began Abigail.
“Good lord, not old Malachi Seckar’s wife? I can’t imagine the old boy letting his wife sell so much as the kitchen drippings without his permission—”
“He didn’t.” Abigail gingerly opened one of the quartos, studied the curious loops and squiggles that surrounded a woodcut of a horse’s backside, elaborately detailed. Presumably not the legend of Alexander. “She sold these upon his death—I understand, in order to get money to live on, her husband having bequeathed everything else he owned to the College.”
“That sounds like the old—er—gentleman. Everything?” Sam’s square, friendly face clouded. “She should have sued. John would have pried a living out of the College for her—”
“Indeed he would have. Just as well he knew nothing of it, for we’d probably have had to send Johnny to Princeton rather than Harvard as a result. In any case, these were hers—or rather, her grandfather’s—”
“Wasn’t he a pirate or something?”
